A professional baseball player
The Venezuelan Military Academy had good baseball coaches. Chávez developed into a skilled left-handed pitcher but he was not good enough to play professionally. The Academy had also installed a new curriculum which encouraged students to learn not only military routines and tactics but also a wide variety of other topics; civilian professors were brought in from other universities to give lectures to the military cadets. He graduated near the bottom of his class but during his studies he also wrote poetry, fiction and drama, and painted, and researched the life and political thought of 19th-century South American revolutionary Simón Bolívar.
