Limits

| Dec 12, 2014 |

There is a certain sad theme that tends to play itself out in any sport – the hero athlete who is well past their prime and just can’t walk away from the game they love. They have too much emotional investment in what they do, they can’t give up the adulation, and they are unwilling to recognize that their powers are in decline. They are simply incapable of performing the miraculous feats that came easy when they were in their prime, and they refuse to recognize that fact.

Taking an example, Michael Jordan had a fairy-tale ending to a fairy-tale career. With seconds left in a championship game against the Utah Jazz, he stole the ball from hall of famer Karl Malone and made the basket to win his sixth championship. Nobody could write a better ending to an iconic story-book career. Except……..except……….several years later Jordan attempted to make a comeback and the results were, well, less than story-book.

There are many similarities that sports and music share, some mental and some physical. When one thinks of these different aspects of performing in either arena some of these similarities include the following: relaxation combined with intense focus and concentration, ability built from both long hours of practice and expert instruction, the search for perfect form rather than brute strength, and so forth. And also the fact that there are limits, including age limits.

So, since sports and music have so much in common, we can also expect that our musical stars, our icons, will also reach an age when their talents begin to diminish. In other words, when they reach their limits. And I believe this is true. With this in mind it might even be possible to loosely predict a certain age for a certain sport or instrument or voice when the limit has been reached and the inevitable decline follows.

But here is the interesting thing about these limits. Clearly most of the decline is physical, but I believe that there is also an important mental component. That is, how much is truly determined by our age and how much by our thinking? Think first of Roger Bannister. Until he ran a sub four minute mile in 1954 such a feat was deemed impossible. And so it was for centuries – simply an impossible goal. But then he broke the record and now a sub four minute mile is common place. In fact, Steve Scott holds the current record for the number of sub four minute miles – 136!

In music one has to go no further than the person considered by many to be the greatest orchestral trumpet player who ever lived, Adolph Herseth. When Adolph Herseth retired from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra he was 81. Let me say that again – when Adolph Herseth retired from the Chicago Symphony he was 81. Even though I was in Europe during his final years with the orchestra I heard a lot of complaints about his hanging on instead of leaving the orchestra gracefully. But even back then I remember thinking that I didn’t really hear anybody considering this from a different perspective. Forty or fifty years ago people thought that still playing trumpet in an orchestra until the age of 65 was really pushing things. But 81? In a major orchestra? Get real!

So even though Herseth’s final years in the Chicago Symphony were not nearly as successful as his earlier years, in a way I think he gave us a gift. Which is that our limits constantly seem to be expanding. That seems to be as much a fact of life as reaching that limit. And if any sort of limit seems fixed in this day and age, well, why not just move the calendar twenty or thirty years down the road and set that as a limit?