Right may rule, but lefties still fill an impressive lineup
Published 9:00 pm Saturday, October 22, 2005
As Melissa Roth – a southpaw herself – notes in “The Left Stuff: How the Left-Handed Have Survived and Thrived in a Right-Handed World,” it’s a right-handed world and non-righties are left to cope pretty much on their own.
Acts as simple for righties as using scissors or writing in a spiral-bound notebook can be a real trial for left-handers. But there are some consolations.
Roth quotes hockey star Wayne Cashman as noting that the key to a hockey fight is the first punch and “when you’re a lefty and they’re looking right, it helps.”
Baseball, too, has southpaw stars – Ted Williams, Randy Johnson, even the great Babe Ruth.
Indeed, Ruth is a prime example of someone converted to being right-handed in a school that frowned on lefties. Ruth’s teachers forced him to write with his right hand but, happily for baseball, never bothered with his pitching or batting preference, Roth observes.
Ruth was only one of millions of lefties teachers worked to convert over the years, a practice still common in some countries. Roth, for example, recalls a kindergarten teacher who regarded left-handedness as an act of defiance that needed to be scolded and shamed away.
That sort of practice may have led to past reports that left-handers led shorter lives, since the studies found a larger proportion of righties among the elderly than among younger groups. Eventually, it was figured out that many of the older righties had simply been converted by parents or teachers. With the decline of that practice, left-handedness is growing.
Roth explores the physical causes, as far as known, of left-handedness, which includes perhaps 10 percent to 12 percent of Americans.
Her highly readable volume touches on famed lefties from Leonardo da Vinci to Napoleon, Alexander the Great, Michelangelo, Ben Franklin and J.S. Bach.
She even introduces such unusual cases as golfers Arnold Palmer and Ben Hogan, who play right-handed but do most non-golf activities left-handed.
