Christilaw: Push-pull not just for Dolittle

There are creatures that get caught in your imagination and stay with you for a lifetime.

For earlier generations, the simple mention of Old Yeller or Bambi’s mother is enough to spark waterworks.

Lassie and Flicka and Rin-Tin-Tin all had their own following – some even had their own fan club.

I was more taken with the Army mule who talked to Donald O’Connor, sounding a whole lot like Chill Wills. Francis confided to him that he didn’t want the Army to know he could talk because it would send him to officer candidate’s school. Personally, I think he had more of an influence on politics.

No matter what generation you’re from, who hasn’t lost sleep worrying about those flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz?

There is one creature who captured my imagination early on. Not so much because of its movie reality, but just the way the name sparked my imagination. It keeps coming back to me over and over as the standard bearer for my personal theory of competition.

It’s a beast from Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle stories and the movie starring Rex Harrison did not do it justice.

The creature is called the pushmi-pullyu, and in Lofting’s books it’s a cross between a gazelle and a unicorn with a head at each end. The beast itself claims that its great-great grandfather was the last unicorn and it has good manners to only eat from one end so that it can always talk with the other without having the bad manners to have its mouth full.

It’s not a creature that lends itself to central casting, so in the movie it was played by a two-headed llama and it spoke in a dialect of camel language, according to the good doctor.

It’s not the visual that stuck with me, but the name.

Push me/pull you.

It’s what good competition does.

It’s a building block of high school wrestling. When you see a state champion wrestler, take a peek inside the wrestling room in which they were forged. Invariably there are other wrestlers, sometimes state champions themselves, who pushed hard every single day, every single rep in practice.

A wrestling coach once told me that his ultimate goal was to have two wrestlers finish 1-2 at state. Every so often, a coach reaches that goal.

Champions are pushed hard to be champions.

Great leaders return the favor and pull the rest of the team up the hill with them.

You push me; I pull you.

It’s not unique to wrestling, by the way.

Tony Collins credits the success of his University Titans volleyball team to that exact concept.

“When we picked teams at the start of the year, we realized we had multiple people in various positions,” the coach said. “They’ve had to work hard every day in practice and earn their spot. And the ones that have missed out have been very, very supportive of their teammates.”

Baseball follows that principle. You can hone your swing against batting practice pitchers and pitching machines; hitting against a competitor who doesn’t want to strike you out but make you look silly in the process is quite another thing.

When your toughest competition faces you every day in practice, you’re going to be very good. More importantly, you’re going to be prepared for anything an opponent can throw at you.

It’s rare to see an athlete naturally fall into competition and thrive – the ones who do tend to be extraordinarily gifted athletically. Most have to learn how to compete.

Runners like to talk about the difference between running and racing. Running comes naturally, but you have to learn how to race, learn to adapt and strategize for the push and pull of competition.

You’re not going to pull down one of Phil Jackson’s books on leadership and the Zen of basketball and find him describing an imaginary animal from a Doctor Dolittle book. In fact, you won’t find writings by me mentioning the pushmi-pullyu – or any other talking animal for that matter.

That’s not the point.

But if it makes the team dynamic more understandable?

Then let’s thank the good Doctor.