STICK TO DAY JOB

Wilson latest to appreciate the difficulty of other sports

TAMPA — You could see the wonder in Russell Wilson’s eyes. He’d taken some batting-practice hacks alongside Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton during his week-long internship with the Yankees, and he’d hit a couple of balls hard, hadn’t at all embarrassed himself.

And yet Wilson, whose day job is playing quarterback for the Seattle Seahawks, understood something that was as clear as the sky on another perfect Grapefruit League morning:

“The ball just sounds different off their bats,” he said.

We know, of course, how extraordinary pro athletes are in their chosen sports, but we probably don’t really

know. We assume. We figure if they can make healthy livings playing these games, if someone is willing to fork over millions of dollars for the privilege of having them play, they have to be good.

What’s always telling, though, is listening to the way pro athletes marvel at each other. Wilson is a marvel on the football field, and he was a good enough baseball player to play a couple of summers of minor league ball. He is proficient at running fast enough to not be killed on Sundays, and then, on a dime, firing perfect spirals 50 yards between a pair of numbers whenever necessary.

“That,” Brett Gardner said, “isn’t easy.”

And yet there he was, gawking at his cage partners’ moon shots like just another fan who’d decided to come to the park early. Nobody really appreciates the rarefied level gifted athletes attain than other gifted athletes.

“I was away from the game for a year or two,” Ron Darling was telling me one day at Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia, a few hours before a Mets-Phillies game. “And I walked onto the field with my jacket and tie and started watching, and it was incredible to me just how fast it all was. I mean, it wasn’t long before that when I was out there with them but now it seemed everything was going a hun- dred miles a minute.” He laughed. “And this was BP! This was just guys getting hit grounders by the coach. This wasn’t live game action, for crying out loud, far from it. And it still felt like it was all racing by at double speed.”

No other sport tends to turn pro athletes into cowed acolytes more than golf does, though, probably because so many athletes play it, some of them awfully well, and possibly because the nature of that sport (as opposed to the physical brutality of football or hockey, or the highly skilled and highly specific talents necessary for baseball or basketball).

Athletes tend to be just arrogant enough to believe they’re better at other sports than they really are. Still, good as Cal Ripken was at pickup basketball, it was never likely he was going to sign a 10-day contract with the Bucks.

Golf, though? You can shave your handicap low enough through the basics — strength, hand-eye coordination, fitness — to talk yourself into playing that game at a pretty high level …

… until you see it, up close.

“These guys will make you sick,” Phil Simms said, laughing, a few years ago, after spending some times inside the ropes when one of the majors had come to the area. Simms has played golf for years, he can handle himself awfully well on the course. But as someone who has known what it’s like to be great in one sport, he could also identify how rare the gift is to be great in another.

“The things they can do with a ball,” he said. “It really is incredible to watch. It just sounds different when they hit it.”

Russell Wilson, his fellow QB, would agree: It certainly does.