Almost impossible wired how to#

Clarkson started untying his own shoes, and Jim followed suit. Clarkson pulled him into the hall and said, 'I figured it out.' When Jim was in third grade, his teacher was Donn Clarkson, a tall, charismatic man who had worked at NASA. Jim Abbott warms up before the start of a Brewers-Cardinals game in 1999. It might seem small, but if Jim's shoe came untied at school, there was nothing he could do but ask for help, just the kind of attention he dreaded and that made him feel like an outsider. 'I remember my parents tying my shoes for me and triple knotting them,' he says.

Almost impossible wired how to#

His dad figured out a way for Jim to shift his baseball glove to catch and throw with the same hand.īut while he could handle a baseball, Jim still faced a daily challenge: He didn’t know how to tie his shoes. 'I had worked really hard on it, and then all of a sudden, it was torn.'įrom a young age, Jim loved to throw a rubber ball against a wall for hours. 'I was in a classroom coloring something, so I was writing with my left hand and trying to hold the paper on the desk with this prosthesis, and it ripped the paper,' Jim remembers. There were many moments of simple frustration.

When he could, Jim hid his right arm by burrowing it into his pocket. Back when he still used a prosthesis, some called him Captain Hook.

He remembers kids at new schools recoiling when they saw him. It was in elementary school that he started to develop a real discomfort with being different. Years before he was a major league pitcher, in the '90s, Jim Abbott was a regular kid in Flint, Michigan, with a birth defect: His right arm ended at his wrist. Jim Abbott, then a Yankee, throws a pitch during his no-hitter against the Cleveland Indians on Sept.