Dings in the Green Monster

Familiarity with our everyday reality sometimes blinds us to meaningful and critical nuances. It usually takes an outsider to sense, appreciate and bring to our attention that which may be as obvious as the nose on our face.

What got me thinking about this little truism is the Green Monster, the famous leftfield wall in the Boston Red Sox’s Fenway Park. Or, more precisely, how it once was shown to me.

The New England Sports Network (NESN) broadcasts virtually every Red Sox game, both at home and on the road. The exception is when ESPN or FOX decide a particular game’s import merits a national audience. While I prefer the commentary, humor and observations of the regular NESN announcers – Jerry Remy and Don Orsillo - one ESPN broadcast earlier this year opened my eyes to a wonderful little truth about the uniqueness of 96-year-old Fenway.

The most dominant feature of Fenway, as any baseball fan knows, is the “Green Monster,” the 37-foot wall that shortens leftfield to a mere 310 feet (Fenway’s centerfield “triangle” being 420 feet). It creates a nightmare for visiting leftfielders, unsure how to play a careening line drive that may hit the wall at various angles 10, 20 or 30 feet above their heads.

Never before that particular ESPN broadcast did I really appreciate the Green Monster. During a lull in the action, ESPN focused one of its cameras closely on the wall and suddenly it became apparent, as the announcer noted, that there were dozens upon dozens of dings, dents, and pockmarks in the green sheet metal sheathing – testimony to the years of line drives that produced hits, many of which spelled the difference between victory and loss. It gave me pause, and made me wonder which long-since-retired All Stars created which ding, dent and pockmark. It conveyed a sense of history, like the still visible bullet holes in the exterior walls of the École Militaire that bear witness to the last firefight in Paris as it fell to the German army in June 1940.

It took an outsider to notice that little nuance, something that the local guys never mentioned. Sure, Remy and Orsillo are probably well aware of it. No doubt they can see the pockmarks in the wall every time they watch a line drive rebound fiercely off the wall. But they don't really see them. The dings are a fact of everyday life in Fenway and not worth a second thought, much less an NESN close-up or an exegesis about it.

What does that tell us about how we conduct business, or go about our daily lives?

Coming home from an exotic foreign vacation, we try to hang on to the newness of everything as we return to the banalities of everyday life. We promise ourselves that we’ll look at every familiar facet of our life with new eyes and fresh insight. But we can’t. It’s not human nature to be able to bend reality and pretend that everything old is new again.

We need to learn to listen to that other opinion, the unique insight – even though it may seem off-the-wall. It is that other insight, that unique way of looking at things that can open new vistas to our everyday world, whether it be the world of business or that of our personal lives.

Our own Green Monsters have become something so familiar to us that they cease being monsters at all. They become a toy, like the bobble head “Wally” dolls sold at Fenway, the faux team mascot, a cute, cuddly Sesame Street-like rip-off that neutralizes the otherwise scary concept of a monster. It is a monster that is easy to live with, easy to conceive, easy to ignore in the wallpaper that surrounds our lives.

If we can bring in the outsider’s view, or imbue ourselves with that view, we can see with new eyes the world with which we are so familiar. We can be tourists in our own land and gain new insights into how we operate in that context, better able to be honest with ourselves about our weaknesses and strengths, about the dings in our own Green Monsters.