http://youtube.com/watch?v=zZdywEQF7JE
This video comes to us courtesy of Bloomberg Sports reporter Michele Steele’s Twitter account (@michelesteele), and rest assured it is one for the highlight reel.
It comes to us from a baseball game in Taiwan and features a man making a choice that some of us – not many, but some – will be faced with at one point in our lives. Watch in the upper left hand corner. A father is watching the game with his wife and daughters, holding one of them on his lap when lo and behold a foul ball is hit in his direction.
This presents him with a Sophie’s Choice-like decision. Does he hold on to his daughter, thus ensuring family harmony and a non-crying child? Or does he drop his kid and go for the ball, because who knows if another foul ball will ever be hit in his direction ever again?
The choice for most of us would be simple — protect your kid and guard against a possible divorce from your wife which would force you to give up half of your worldly possessions. But this man…he’s not like other men because for him, when choosing between his daughter’s well-being or catching an $8 baseball, he’ll take the baseball every time.
The ball bounces off his hands and down a couple of rows. The man’s daughter goes tumbling face first into the seat in front of her. And at the :31 mark, the man’s wife shoots him a look that suggests he’s going to be sleeping on the couch for the next year and a half.
The lesson as always here fellas — if you’re holding your kid and a foul ball is hit in your direction, protect the kid and let the ball go. Or at least shift the kid to one arm and try to catch the ball with your free hand.
