MARASCO: Luck

I can vividly recall a pitcher on my high school baseball team getting upset at an outfielder in our dugout in between innings. We were winning — that wasn’t the issue. He was angry because he had been pitching a “perfect game” (I put it in quotes because it was only three innings into the game), and this outfielder had mentioned it out loud.

For those of you who haven’t been indoctrinated into the whacky world of sports superstition stupidity, there’s an ancient baseball scripture (perhaps dating back to the Mayans), which claims that it’s bad luck to acknowledge that a pitcher is throwing a perfect game. By doing so you “jinx” the pitcher and all is lost.

Really intellectual stuff. And of course, when our pitcher inevitably gave up a hit later in the game he blamed our teammate for costing him his shot at high school baseball immortality. Did I mention that this was a preseason game?

Luck is an amazing concept to me. People give luck credit when it doesn’t deserve it, and people unjustly convict luck of things it hasn’t done.

I mean, why would anyone believe that talking about the box score of a baseball game would affect it? Wouldn’t you think it has something to do with the pitcher and batters instead?

But I know so many otherwise reasonable people who actually believe that a black cat is a “bad omen,” or that a particular pair of boxers helps them get laid. If you’ve gotten to the point where your boxers are involved, you probably don’t need any luck.

Luck is real. Luck is inherent to our existence. But I wonder if we have a tendency to misrepresent what luck is.

Humans like to think that they’re in control of everything. We convince ourselves that the chips and dip we choose to eat during the Patriots game affects whether or not Tom Brady gets sacked. We think that words we say might hex things. Then we think we can reverse the jinx by knocking on some old plywood. Why doesn’t that seem crazy to everyone?

At its core, doesn’t real luck deal with things we can’t possibly control? The universe existing is a stroke of luck. Your existence is quite fortunate. Your socks didn’t have control over any of that — they weren’t even in your drawer yet. You just got lucky. Embrace it.

We’re pretty lucky that an asteroid hasn’t hit the earth. Or perhaps you could argue we’d be unlucky if one did. Either way, me talking about it has no bearing. The asteroid doesn’t care about me or what I have to say. I can’t control things like that.

But there are a lot of smaller things that we can control, and for some reason we’d rather give credit or fault to the feet of dead rabbits.

“You absolutely will need some sort of series of incredibly lucky events, or you just won’t have a career,” a very well-known actor told myself and peers recently, referring to making it in Hollywood.

I was in awe of the way he had so daringly stared luck in the face and said, “I accept you.”

I find an overwhelming trend amongst successful people. They all readily admit that they were lucky in some way. They embrace luck. Real luck, things they admit were out of their control — not a magic penny from 1936.

I also find that unsuccessful people like to dwell on luck, curse luck and bemoan their misfortune. They won’t embrace luck. They blame the kid who talked about their perfect game instead of thinking about a better pitch they could’ve made. They blame a goat. They blame an onion. Anything to avoid introspection.

A lot of health problems are just poor luck. You could never smoke a cigarette and still get lung cancer. But if you eat well and exercise, you probably won’t have high blood pressure.

There is something to be said for being in the right place at the right time, but if you’re in a lot of places at a lot of times your chances of being in the right one at the right time are better.

By choosing entertainment, I’m choosing a path that has a huge luck component. I’m going to need some luck to succeed. Those are the terms. There’s no way around that. My only choice is to embrace the fact that a lot of things will be completely out of my control.

But there are things I can control. I can work hard. I can keep my head up. I can be pleasant to others. I can take on challenges. I can keep giving myself a chance to find that lucky break. Or I can worship an old pair of boots, and then curse the heavens when things don’t go my way.

Frank Marasco is a first-year graduate student in Los Angeles. He can be reached at fcm820@bu.edu.