Sadaharu Oh
Half Japanese by birth, all Japanese on the diamond
By Bryan Walsh
Here's a snapshot from the life of Sadaharu Oh. It's 1957 and Oh is pitching in the final game of Japan's all-important Koshien high-school championship. Blood drips from the 17-year-old's hand as he grips the baseball. Blisters have developed from weeks of relentless practice, until Oh can barely hold the ball without pain. He plays anyway and wins—to the wonder not merely of 60,000 spectators, but a whole nation listening on the radio. Later that summer, Oh's team is selected to represent Tokyo in the National Athletic Games. Oh is not allowed to join them. As the son of a Chinese father and a Japanese mother, he is considered not Japanese enough.
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The great irony is that there has never been a more Japanese baseball player. In 22 years with the Yomiuri Giants, Japan's most beloved team, Oh recorded a .301 lifetime batting average and 868 career home runs—the most any baseball player has hit in any league anywhere in the world. But it wasn't the numbers that made Oh an embodiment of the national spirit. It was the way he achieved them. Oh trained like a samurai, learning aikido for balance and practicing sword slices to perfect his swing. When he signed autographs, he added the word doryoku, or effort, the quality that enabled him to lead his team to nine straight titles between 1964 and 1973. Oh's father died during the 1985 season, but the Giant didn't even miss an inning.
When Oh retired and became a manager, that stubborn workhorse quality became counterproductive. Doryoku alone wasn't going to save him from poor strategizing. The great man needed to leaven his tried-and-tested approaches with a dash of the new—and when he learned to do so the magic returned. As manager of the national team, Oh helped Japan achieve its stunning victory in the 2006 inaugural World Baseball Classic. It was a feat that depended in equal parts on Oh's insistence on grit and hard work as on the smooth and elegant style of current major league players like Ichiro Suzuki. The fusion of the two approaches—the traditional and the new—was almost a metaphor for a revived Japan, confident once more of its place in the world. And this time around, there were no doubts as to whether Oh was Japanese enough.
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April 28, 2003 |
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October 11, 2004 |
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October 10, 2005 |
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