"Clear the mechanism"

I recently finished a book called 4th and Redemption by Cincinnati St. Xavier High School football coach and 2013 Don Shula NFL High School Coach of the Year, Steve Specht.  St. Xavier has won four Ohio Division I state titles in football under Coach Specht (2005, 2007, 2016, and 2020), including the mythical National Prep Poll national championship in 2007.  The book is about the 2016 season, in which St. Xavier barely made the play-offs with a 5-5 record and won their final 4 games in "come from behind" fashion, including a 27-20 double overtime win against perennial football powerhouse and rival Cleveland St. Ignatius in the championship game.  Coach Specht writes, "This book is about hope in the midst of struggle – and we all struggle.  But there’s always hope. This team overcame so much adversity. They kept plugging and didn’t give up.”

It's a good read, even if you know or care very little about high school football in Ohio.  As I have reflected so many times in previous posts, the lessons we learned from participation or watching sports can often be applied to life in general.  Sports is a great metaphor for life.

Coach Specht talks about a concept that the team used to get through a number (an almost unbelievable number) of season-ending injuries to key players on the team - "Clear the Mechanism"  - in other words, "No more distractions.  Let's put the past behind us and focus on the task at hand."  The phrase comes from the 1999 movie, "For the Love of the Game" starring Kevin Costner and the late Kelly Preston, which is based on a novel of the same name by the author, Michael Shaara (who won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel, "The Killer Angels" about the Battle of Gettysburg).  Kevin Costner plays Billy Chapel, an aging major league baseball pitcher who pitches a perfect game (no hits, no runs, no walks) against the New York Yankees in his final game.  Chapel whispers the phrase at the start of the game to eliminate all of the distractions - the sights and sounds and raucous fans - and focus on what he is there to do - win the game. 

For Billy Chapel and the 2016 St. Xavier Bomber football team, there were so many distractions that could have prevented them from reaching their goals.  "Clear the mechanism" focused 100% of their effort, energy, and attention on the goal, not on all of the other distractions.  Focus on the things that you can control - if you can't control something, it's not worth worrying about it.  

As the Stoic philosopher Epictetus writes in The Enchiridion, "There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will."  In other words, worry only about what you can control - and what do you have control over?  Again, Epictetus writes, "Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions."  

Clear the mechanism.