"I believe managing is like holding a dove in your hand. If you hold it too tightly you kill it, but if you hold it too loosely, you lose it."
That's a quote from Tommy LaSorda, the former Dodger manager who died the other day at 93. I don't know when he said it, or if he had heard .38 Special sing "Hold On Loosely" right before he said it, or if this thought occurred to him spontaneously, but he was right. It's a valuable piece of advice for anyone in any situation with others. Hold onto your relationships, but don't squeeze them too much. It's a knack, to know just how tightly.
By the way, if you've a mind to, while you're at YouTube listening to that Southern Rock classic, check out LaSorda in his moments with the press after games. Now, I have been around people who can curse adroitly. Construction guys, firefighters, dockworkers, people who just dropped an anvil on their right foot, a couple of women I worked with...all would gather and stand enraptured as the epithets flowed from the mouth of LaSorda. Truly a master of the art.
Don't get me wrong. Tommy was not a perfect man. He denied that his late gay son was gay, and kept their relationship in a tightly closed closet, but he's clearly not the only such person.
But there was a tape of a speech he used to deliver to Dodger rookies at spring training that Larry King used to play on the radio, and as LaSorda encouraged his new players to go out and give their all for Dodger blue, he gave this nugget that I have shared often:
Always THINK you're the best ballplayer ever born. Just don't TELL anyone about it!
If I could give a young person a bit of wisdom, it would be that, or possibly this, from Woody Allen: "Exactly what do we mean when we say, man is mortal? Obviously it's not a compliment."
Tommy LaSorda, like the rest of us, was mortal, yet his words, even the profane ones, live on.
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