photo: jetheriot
The whole football fits pleasurably in the cupped palm of my hand. It’s a tiny football made from foam, smaller and lighter than an actual football, stamped with orientaltrading.com and MADE IN CHINA. It’s elongated and slightly pointed like an uncracked pecan, larger than a pecan but not heavier than one. Four quadrants are defined by two thin gutters ribboning the foam surface of the football lengthwise, perpendicularly oriented ovaloid grooves tracing a pair of smooth paths through the roughness of the grip, independent equators criss-crossing at the two tips of the ball. Grip. That’s what they call it: the pebble-grain texture on the surface of footballs and basketballs and other objects designed to be held by hands. It’s a kind of grit, a bubble-pimple pattern on the basketball or football that enhances its grippability. Gripping is what the hand does to the grip of a ball. Gripping is what the hand does to the grip of a handle.
The lace is its own grip, a second grip on the surface of the ball. Tumbling the football around in my hand, the tips of my three middle fingers find over and over again the railroad pattern of raised foam representing the football’s lace. It provides a different kind of grip, an orienting grip. The lace lines the fingers up against it, measures them out, leading the hand to the midline of the ball, the center of the ball, moreso on an actual football, but also on this tiny one. And the pretend-foam-lace isn’t lacing anything, really – the “quadrants” of the compressible brown foam ball are not being “held together” by it – but my hands are delighted when I touch it. I won’t ever play real football with it, and even if I did, I probably wouldn’t take the time to align my fingers with the fake foam lace before I threw it for a pass, but my fingertips like to find it and line up against it anyway.
I love the way my fingers fall in line naturally around it, arranging themselves with ease into a ready-to-squeeze position, the palm-wide double taper of the ball serving to focus the toy’s weight solidly in the center of my hand. Nestled, that’s the word, the way an egg might nestle up against the underside of a hen. The toy feels good to hold. It feels at home there in my hand.
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The first rule in speaking to an audience is: always start with a door prize. If the purpose of speaking is to convey information, then the first step toward achieving that goal is capturing the attention of the audience. People don’t go to hear a speaker expecting to be given anything, so when I announce that before I begin I’m going to be giving away a door prize, it’s surprising. I’ve captured everyone’s attention. Everyone’s on the edge of their seats. All eyes are on me because suddenly I’m the source of a prize. I announce the prize wordlessly, producing it intriguingly from an inner jacket pocket, rolling it between my thumb and my index finger – a small yellow ball. With a few more spins of the ball, when the face comes into view, the small yellow ball, as it turns out, is actually a small yellow smiley face ball! Now everybody really wants it. Anticipation builds until the winner is announced, and when I throw the ball across the room, I establish a connection not only with the lucky audience member who catches it (or almost catches it) but also the entire audience. Somehow, through the exchange of this simple toy, the audience has come to feel that they’re a lucky audience. They’re alert, attentive, curious, smiling and receptive to what you have to say, which is always a good place to start. People yearn to have something to hold on to, and when you give it to them you make a connection.
If the first rule of speaking is to start with a door prize, the first rule of door prizes is to make sure your door prizes are desirable. People have to want your door prizes. The more seductive a door prize, the more the door prize fosters a speaker-audience connection. Toys, being attention magnets, the successful ones at least, pull hands and eyes into their orbits. Their colors cry out to be touched. They beg to be squeezed. Of course, to be a good toy, a toy must make good on the promises it advertises. The proof is in the playing, in the toying, but before it can be played with a toy must first connect. Allure is very important. Without it, toys stay idle. Toys make good door prizes.
Unstress balls are highly seductive and less than a dollar a piece. They fit anywhere, even in crowded luggage, and weight next to nothing, so they’re easy to always have on hand. I buy them by the dozen. My two favorites are the football unstress ball and the yellow smiley face unstress ball – the football because its shape and grip feel so good sitting in the palm of my hand and because Americans love football, the yellow smiley face unstress ball because when I look at it it’s like I’m looking at a mirror, but a sunnier, happier mirror. They literally make people smile, the yellow ones in particular. The yellow color elevates or at least nudges in that direction. I’m not an unstress ball racist I can assure you. Some colors of unstress balls are just more effective. Yellow is alluring and communicates an emotion in ways other colors don’t. People brighten in the presence of yellow, especially when it’s smiling. When I pass around a bucket of smiley face unstress balls, the yellow ones are the first to go, practically leaping into people’s fingers. Once, a woman hit the woman sitting next to her, playfully of course, but with an undisguisable tint of spite, upon discovering that her neighbor had taken the only remaining yellow ball, leaving pink and orange and green. She settled for orange. She wanted yellow.
Same kind of thing with Silly Putty. Out of all the Silly Puttys I have played with – and I have played with most of them – blue Silly Putty, I feel, is the best. Is blue stretchier or more delightfully impressionable than regular blah peach Silly Putty? No, but blue brings out the most playtime from me. It makes me feel most silly. Isn’t the Silly Putty that makes you feel silliest the best Silly Putty? Blue Silly Putty is the Silly Putty that makes me feel silliest. Something as simple as color can affect how a toy connects or doesn’t connect. Color, like shape and texture, influences whether or not we pick up a toy in the first place, and once we do, how we toy with that toy when we toy with it. It’s no accident that toys are brightly colored. If color didn’t matter, we might as well make only gray or beige toys.
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I decided on the football unstress ball and the yellow smiley face unstress ball (the large version not the mini version) after a somewhat lengthy selection process not unlike the crayon pageants I used to conduct as a child. Scanning the availability of unstress balls – or as the Oriental Trading Company’s website calls them, squeeze balls – I narrowed the contestants down to a top tier of candidates. I decided to take a pass on Snowflake Relaxable Squeeze Ball, Yin-Yang Relaxable Squeeze Ball, Farm-Animal-Shaped Relaxable Ball, Squeezable Apple Keychain and “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” Relaxable Squeeze Ball and invited Relaxable Realistic Football Squeeze Ball, Relaxable Realistic Soccerball Squeeze Ball, Relaxable Realistic Baseball Squeeze Ball, Relaxable Realistic Basketball Squeeze Ball, and Smile Face Relaxable Squeeze Ball (mini and large version), to my home in Houston for round two and the crowning ceremony.
The mini Smile Face Relaxable Squeeze Ball was too small to satisfyingly fill and stimulate my cupped palm. Perhaps for children they’d be ideal. The Relaxable Realistic Baseball Sport Ball was too realistic: almost life size and as smooth and as white as an actual baseball. It reminded me of the baseball that knocked out four of my front teeth thirty years ago when I tried to catch a pop-up with the sun in my eyes. The foam baseball looked hard and unyielding, the opposite of peacefulness. I wanted something softer than that. The Relaxable Realistic Basketball was a cheerful orange, much smaller than an actual basketball, covered with the same pleasure-promising grip, but it wasn’t pecan-shaped, and its roundness felt somewhat clumsy in my hand. My three middle fingers curled naturally around it, but my pinky felt left out, dangling. The basketball didn’t nestle. I had high hopes for the Relaxable Realistic Soccer Ball, but a dent in the black-and-white pentagon tectonics ruined the whole hand experience for me, an eyesore as well as a handsore. Maybe I just got a bum ball, but I couldn’t be sure there wasn’t a flaw in the mold, so I eliminated the Relaxable Realistic Soccer Ball from contention, adding it instead to the list of broken toys I want to write a book about one of these days.