EXCERPT

From Chapter 1: The Chosen People

“Perhaps the moment is uniquely propitious for the left hand . . .”
—Jerome S. Bruner, On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand

I have an obsession with left-handedness. Noticing all things Southpaw is simply part of my programming. It’s not that I’m just a journalist with an overflowing file of lefty-related clippings. My interest in this topic, unlike other curiosities that seem to come and go with each edition of the Sunday paper, has lasted longer than any other I’ve ever had, with the notable exception, presumably, of my right-handed wife.

Why is it that I remember things like driving past the Lefty Golf Shop on Williston Road in Burlington , Vermont , perhaps 10 years ago, yet I can no longer remember the quadratic equation? Why is it that I remember the Leftorium in an old Simpsons episode; the town of Left Hand , West Virginia ; the Left Hand Brewery in Colorado ; and the hand preference of all my friends? This is the mental clutter that has accumulated in my brain. Years ago, an Irish friend told me that ciotóg, pronounced, “ki-toeg,” is Gaelic for “lefty.” I learned a lot of Gaelic words and phrases that summer in Ireland , but the only two I remember to this day are ciotóg and póg mo thoin, or kiss my ass.

One time while in Japan , I was actually stupid enough to say to the barber, perhaps in a desperate attempt to put my beginner Japanese language skills to work: “Hey, you’re a lefty. So am I.” Already flustered by having a gaijin in his shop, this guy must have really been taken for a ride by my comment. Staring at me for a few moments before lifting his scissored hand into the air, he said tersely, “No. It’s the mirror.” Ten bucks says he still tells this story at parties….

If I were forced to declare association with a group of “ists” or a set of believers, I would probably declare myself a humanist, then a journalist, then a Red Sox fan-ist. Technically, my people are the Jews, but religion has never done it for me. The only subset of humanity I have ever really enjoyed identifying with is the legion of left-handers. Maybe that makes me a humanist with lateral bias. I don’t think a Parisian, a Palestinian, or a Presbyterian is any better or worse than I am, has any less or more insight into the human condition than others, or has more plausible explanations for life’s unanswerable mysteries than anyone else. But if that Parisian, Palestinian, or Presbyterian is one of the10–12 percent of the people on Earth who happen to be left-handed, she’s slightly more interesting to me than the other 88—90 percent.

I grew up the only lefty among four siblings. For as long as I can remember, being a Southpaw was a source of pride. My right-handed parents excelled at encouraging the lefties-are-special shtick, perhaps to boost my self-esteem as a middle child. I ate it up. Through the ages, I’ve owned a couple of left-handed mugs, numerous pairs of left-handed scissors, birthday cards that open from the left, and a bumper sticker that reads: “Lefties never miss at toll booths.” I also had a navy blue T-shirt emblazoned with the ultimate Southpaw cliché: “If the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body, then only left-handed people are in their right minds!”

I learned early on that when it comes to sports, Southpaws have noticeable advantages.   Even the very term “Southpaw” apparently derives from baseball, most likely coined in Chicago in the late nineteenth century. Left-handed pitchers on the mound at the old Comiskey Park would face west, so that the arc of their arm and delivery of the ball originated from the south. One source suggests that a Chicago News sportswriter invented the term, although a different source claims that it was used to describe left-handed boxers before it was applied to left-handed pitchers.2 Today, “Southpaw” is frequently used in such sports as boxing and tennis but is by far most pervasive in baseball.

Lefties, so they say, throw a natural curveball, and in my years of little league and into high school, I put this theory to the test, trying to throw a curve that would, by the very nature of my nature, be that much more vicious. Roy Hobbs could do it in The Natural; Bruce Hurst could do it for the ’86 Red Sox; and countless other famous lefty hurlers had the curve to beat any batter. Why should I be denied that fame? Because I couldn’t consistently throw the ball over home plate to save my life. During one little league game, I hit the same opposing batter in three of his four at-bats. My future as a star Southpaw pitcher dimmed quickly.

Tennis had similar potential advantages but served up a familiar outcome for me. Left-handed tennis players confuse opponents because their forehand and backhand are the opposite of what most people are used to facing. Advantage-court serves in particular can, with enough coordination and ferocity, fly impossibly off the side of the court, like those delivered by John McEnroe or Goron Ivanisevic, the giant Croat who, when he finally won Wimbledon in 2001, celebrated a few days later by stripping down to his underwear in front of 150,000 fans in his hometown of Split, Croatia. You have to hand it to lefties—or at least to towering, Croatian, left-handed tennis stars—they’re not boring.

My problem as a kid tennis player was that I double-faulted all the time. Still do. But every now and then I manage to put the ball in the proper service box and capitalize on the lefty factor. It’s usually the result of a miss-hit, yet when the ball bounces with unexpected spin, handcuffing my opponent with confusion, I try my best to act like the shot was hit exactly according to plan. Rare as they are, those shots are hugely rewarding, especially for such a galactically frustrating game as tennis. A successful serve offers one of those moments, not unlike watching Southpaw Rocky Balboa in any of the Rocky movies, when I think: man, is it cool to be left-handed.

Cool if for no other reason than because it means being different. As an upper-middle-class white kid in an uppity Boston suburb, being left-handed helped, in its own minuscule way, fend off the ominous prospects of mediocrity. My grades were B-range, my haircut was like most other kids’, my athletic skills were nothing more than fine, my artistic abilities were average, I couldn’t dance or sing, and my upbringing was comparatively uneventful, lacking ample drama for a future, heart-wrenching memoir. But at least I was a lefty.

Yet how does that really make me different, aside from the obvious smudged writing and supposed natural curveball? This journey, an exploration into the essence of Southpaw, will help to answer that question.


And from Chapter 7: Pitching Chimps

“All the same I think I’d better warn you not to try any monkey business with me . . .”
—Nikolai Leskov, The Left-Handed Craftsman

Look at that!” says Bill Hopkins, nudging my elbow. “Watch how she stands and hits the coconut on the wall.” Staring down from the metal yellow perch above the fenced enclosure, we watch a chimpanzee named Liza open a coconut by whacking it against a concrete wall with her right hand. A technician notes the number of hits: one, then three, then three again. “Isn’t that beautiful?” asks Hopkins .

We’re watching a group of twenty chimpanzees at the field station of the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center at Emory University . A few of them take sticks from the woodchip floor of the compound and chew them into probing tools that they then try, unsuccessfully, to poke through the nubs of the coconuts to access the milk inside. “Borie, it’s not a dipping task,” Hopkins calls down to one of the older females. Sometimes the chimps use their left hand, sometimes their right, and sometimes they hold the stick in their mouths. On this day, Borie, Kathy, Socrates, and Rhett are among the chimps that attempt this method, before wising up to the fact that hitting the nut against concrete will serve them better.

“Socrates is probably the most left-handed of the ones here,” says technician Jamie Russell. “And he’s also the alpha male, so there you go,” she jokes. After a while, Socrates takes the coconut that he’d been coveting and walks over to a cylindrical piece of concrete the size of a trash barrel. He climbs on top and begins banging the coconut, first with his left, then with his right arm. Meanwhile, Hopkins and his team count and note left versus right hands whenever the chimps whack, poke, climb, cradle, feed, or gesture, the latter usually directed up toward us as a plea for more food.

“Watch how Missy moves her right index finger when you’re about to throw her something,” says Hopkins . I see Missy’s pensive face staring back at me, her right arm stretched skyward and her long finger wiggling up and down. A few minutes later, we watch another chimp grooming her thick fur, and Hopkins again directs my attention to the delicate movements, this time of the animal’s right thumb, which looks as if she were scratching away the silvery coating of a lottery ticket.

Although the air is chilly and the sprawling facility smells of woodchips and manure, I could sit on this perch for hours, riveted. Observing a group of chimpanzees, or even just one chimp staring upward and begging for a coconut, is a profound experience. I won’t profess to any Jane Goodall impulse to spend the next few years of my life living among them, mimicking their snorts and chest-pounding. But watching them manipulate tools, throw tantrums, groom one another, and clap their hands stirs a feeling that I’m not just looking at hairy animals that happen to resemble people but actually am seeing straight into the past.

As far as Southpaws are concerned, whether chimpanzees are a link to our past is why I’m here. Prevailing wisdom about the origins of handedness runs into some turbulence, if not an all-out tailspin, as a result of right-hander Bill Hopkins’s psychobiology work with primates. Hopkins ’s findings don’t necessarily make answers easier; if anything, the picture only gets blurrier from here. But they’re too important and too interesting to ignore....