The Meaning of Ichiro (48 page)

It was
yaky
,
of course, where he really blossomed, participating in competitive playground games with his older brother (who eventually
gave up the sport to join a rock band). A natural right-hander, he was so good at
b
sub
ru
in primary school, even when playing against boys several years his senior, that he was forced to handicap himself by batting
left-handed, which is how he came to be a port-side hitter.

In junior high school, a baseball coach gave young Hideki a copy of Sadaharu Oh’s famous book on hitting,
Daunsuinngu
(“Downswing”), in which the great slugger described how he practiced his batting form with a sword, attempting repeatedly
to slice in precise halves a piece of paper suspended from the ceiling. The only way to accomplish this extremely difficult
feat was to angle the swing down and snap the wrists, which also happened to be extremely useful in developing bat control.
After reading the Oh opus, Matsui adopted the downswing dictum and practiced it with uncommon zeal, often staying up until
three or four in the morning to work on it, according to his father. Hideki spent so much time swinging that his hands were
perpetually covered in blisters and calluses, while his favorite bat was stained with blood at the grip end. Able to hit the
ball harder and farther than any other middle school student in memory, he destroyed so many balls in practice that his team
had to ask for an increase in its baseball budget to purchase more.

As a junior high school standout, Matsui was recruited by Seiryo High School in Kanazawa. Seiryo was a Western Honshu powerhouse,
a regular participant in the national championship tourney at Koshien Stadium and an institution that was known for its Spartan
training.

As one former player said of its rigorous regimen, “You didn’t feel as though you had a real practice until the manager had
slapped you in the face two or three times.”

Matsui moved into the Seiryo dormitory and began year-round practice that included numbing workouts before and after school,
as well as intensive summer and winter camps. On days the ground was covered with a thick blanket of white snow, colored balls
might be brought out for increased visibility in practice or else the manager might simply suspend normal drills and order
everyone to make a lung-bursting run through the snow up and down a small nearby mountain.

It was at Seiryo that Matsui, who pitched and played third base, was first nicknamed “Godzilla”—a moniker which, at the time,
was as much for a severe case of adolescent acne as it was for his tape-measure blasts. Legend has it that the young athlete
once launched a ball in batting practice that cracked the tiles on the roof of the Seiryo manager’s house, nearly 140 meters
(430 feet) away. In Matsui’s three-year career at Seiryo, he hit 60 home runs in total and made four appearances in the hallowed
National High School Baseball Championships. His seven RBIs in the opening game of the 1992 spring invitational tournament
tied a record, as did his tourney total of three home runs. He was the only schoolboy player in Japan with his own tailor-made
long ball sign. In addition to the usual instructions of “bunt” and “take” that were normally flashed from the bench, Matsui’s
manager at Seiryo had devised one which stood for “hit a home run.”

Matsui’s outsized reputation was clinched in the final game of the summer tournament when he was intentionally walked an unheard-of
five times by the opposing team,
Meitoku Gijuku
High School, with a capacity Koshien crowd of 55,000 fans and a nationwide TV audience watching openmouthed. The actions
by Meitoku, which went on to win the tournament, were regarded as unsportsmanlike by many observers and prompted uncharacteristic
catcalls from the stands as well as heavy criticism in the media the next day.

However, Matsui’s stoic, emotionless conduct during those at-bats drew great praise from tournament officials and reporters
alike. Said the manager of Ikeda High School, another Japan powerhouse, “He was wonderful. You wouldn’t know he was a high
school student. That settled, calm attitude. You can’t achieve a state like that without a lot of practice.” Beamed an admiring
sportswriter who had witnessed the game, “He was magnificent. Just like a samurai faithful to the code of bushido.” At the
end of the tournament, a representative of the High School Federation stood up and officially declared, “All students should
learn from Matsui’s attitude.”

Matsui credited his restraint to a severe public slapping he had received from his junior high school manager, the punishment
delivered after Hideki had thrown a bat in anger at an opposing pitcher who had similarly refused to challenge him.

“It was a valuable lesson for me,” he said, recalling the encounter as an adult. “From that day on, I resolved never to lose
control of my emotions in a game again.”

The manager’s behavior, which resulted in his ejection, was triggered in part by the actions that season of Seibu Lions hitting
star Kazuhiro Kiyohara, who had hurled his bat at a pitcher in retaliation for being hit in the side by a fastball in a nationally
televised game. Matsui’s mentor was concerned that his star pupil was emulating what he believed to be highly disgusting behavior.
But equally important, he was alarmed over Matsui’s careless treatment of his bat.

“Players have to show respect for their equipment,” he said, echoing what baseball leaders had been saying in Japan since
the Meiji Era.

Matsui was the most coveted player in the 1992 draft lottery and as luck (or, as some paranoid participants believed, a fixed
draw) would have it, the Yomiuri Giants won the right to negotiate with him. Upon formally signing with the Giants in a nationally
telecast event, Matsui received the first of thousands of unsolicited medicines and letters of advice from Giants fans who
had been shocked to see close-ups of the savage boils on his skin. (It was a problem which, in fact, took several years to
clear up, leaving him with a leathery, pockmarked face.)

Matsui was given uniform number 55, highly symbolic in that it stood for the single-season home run record held by Sadaharu
Oh, a mark that everyone fully expected Matsui to challenge one day. Like Oh, Matsui had not been a naturally gifted hitter.
It had taken Oh three years of hard work and effort after turning pro to emerge from mediocrity and the same would prove true
for Matsui. In his early seasons with the team, he was known to swing the bat as many as 800 times in two-hour batting practice
sessions, working hard to develop even more discipline at the plate. He frequently reported to the home of his manager Shigeo
Nagashima for morning batting instruction sessions in Nagashima’s basement gym.

“Concentrate all your nerve endings on the sound of the bat when you swing it,” Nagashima would say cryptically. A “whish”
was no good. But a “whoosh”
was.

In 1996, after three years of steady, if unspectacular growth as a pro, Matsui had his breakout season. He batted .314 with
38 home runs and 99 RBIs, and won the Central League’s Most Valuable Player award.

Said his admiring batting
sensei
Nagashima, “He got so he could sit on the fastball and still hit the breaking pitch. He could slap the curve to the opposite
field or pull the inside speedball down the line. His bat speed was something.”

Matsui repeated his 1996 performance the following year, swatting 37 homers, batting .298 and driving in 103 runs, as he settled
in for a long run as the Central League’s marquee player. (For those who want the details in black and white, here they are.
He batted .292 in 1998, leading the league in both homers [34] and RBIs [100] for the first time. In 1999, it was .304, 42
and 95; in 2000, it was .316, 42 and 108. In 2001 he won his first batting title with a .333 average, hitting 36 homers and
driving in 104 runs.)

Matsui had also polished his defensive skills, evolving into a Gold Glove center fielder who compensated for his less-than-spectacular
throwing arm and foot speed with all-around baseball sense and an unparalleled work ethic

Matsui’s pregame workouts were a
model of
doryoku.
In addition to sweat-inducing sessions at a batting tee and in the batting cage, they included an exhausting fly-ball-chasing
routine in the outfield—30 balls hit over his head, to his left, to his right—and then 20 wind sprints from foul pole to foul
pole. Visiting San Diego scout Gary Nickel, who witnessed one of these tiring midsummer displays, could only shake his head
in admiration. “Here is the best player in Japan in a pregame situation working his butt off,” he said. “How often do you
see that in our game?”

In 2002, Matsui elevated his game to a higher plane. In that season, with a slightly shortened, line-drive-producing stroke,
he hit 50 home runs and batted .334 with 107 RBIs. It was one of the best all-around performances in memory and he barely
missed a triple crown when Chunichi Dragons Kosuke Fukudome edged him out for the batting title by nine points. Matsui also
led the Giants to the Central League championship and a successful sweep of the Seibu Lions in the Japan Series, marking the
Giants’ third national title and fourth pennant in the Matsui era. By this time, his annual salary had risen to nearly $5
million a year, the highest, for a Japanese player, in NPB—a figure which he doubled with bonuses and endorsement fees, donating
substantial sums to various charitable organizations.

Through it all—the awards, the adulation, a life constantly in the limelight—he remained almost unnervingly low key. He should
have made more money. Some foreign players were making over $8 million. But Matsui humbly continued to accept modest raises
throughout his career. (As he put it, after one particularly unproductive contract negotiation when he failed to get the huge
raise everyone had predicted—finishing up his fourth year in the pros, the one in which he had hit .314 with 38 home runs
and 99 RBIs—“Team officials told me that I’m actually worth more than my salary, but that they had to keep it low in line
with those of other players. It doesn’t bother me.”)

Moreover, he wore no earrings, no rock star sunglasses, no outlandish hip-hop togs of the type favored by contemporaries like
Ichiro Suzuki and other luminaries of the new Japanese consciousness. Flash and youthful irreverence were just not Matsui’s
style, even if the conservative Giants hadn’t frowned on such outré displays. Instructed to stay in the team dormitory and
refrain from dating during the first several years of his career, so as to devote all his concentration to baseball, Matsui
complied, without a whimper, his manner a model of proper deportment.

He liked to tell people of the vow he had made to his father at age 14—occasioned by the bat-throwing, face-slapping incident—never
to say or do a hurtful thing to another living human being ever again. It was a vow he insisted he had kept. And it was a
measure of the respect he commanded in his own country that most people believed him.

Trailed constantly by a scrum of Japanese reporters eager to record any Matsui moment for the devoted and insatiable Japanese
media machine, Matsui invariably wore a smile—unlike the prickly Ichiro. “I asked for this life,” he would say. “Nobody forced
it on me and I have a duty to the people who put me here.” He refused to charge admission at the Hideki Matsui House of Baseball
back home—a practice which stood in marked contrast to the Ichiro Museum in Nagoya, where a ticket costs $8. It just wouldn’t
be fair, he explained.