Chalk one up for the Wimp
I was a scrawny little kid back in high school. No muscles, no particular athletic aptitude, just a tall skinny teenager with a face full of zits who moved around the country a lot, odd kid out. I ended up in a northern Wisconsin high school where the jocks ruled the roost. If we’d had a beach nearby, I’d have eaten a lot of sand. We had P.E. teachers who studied in the Hermann Goebbel School of Sadism, the sort of men who dragged kids out of the pool by their hair if they had hair enough to grab. The kind of Nazis who, on days when snow covered the tennis courts in the spring, would set up a game indoors they called Casketball. It was a hybrid between basketball and rugby. You got the ball, everyone could tackle you. On the hardwood floor of the gym. Then the rest were expected to pile on. Kids got hurt a lot in that game. Naturally, the star athletes could sit the ordeal out, no need to lose a Letterman to the instructors’ gladiatorial instincts. One of my buddies got rammed into a volleyball pole and skewered badly in the face with a bolt protruding out of its attachment hole. The game, of course, went on after one of the coaches took him to the nursing station. The P.E. teachers would bet on their classes to win. At least, I think they bet on us winning….
You might guess I hated P.E. But not as much as I loathed the two Stormtroopers who ran those classes. Every day we’d strip down and put on our little shorts and t-shirts, snug up our jockstrap and head out to some variant of humiliation. One fine spring day we headed out to the baseball field for some intramural competition. Coach Mengele took his place at third base to play with us. Bored, I guess. Coach Mengele was about 6’7” and 250 pounds of raw Aryan meat. He had blonde hair and metallic eyes. If Arnold Schwarznegger had been a star back then, this guy would’ve been his double in Terminator.
I had played some baseball back in Georgia. My old man was a semi-pro pitcher, once got to pitch against Ted Williams. He would take us boys out in the back yard and show us how to hold a bat, field a ball, pitch a curve. We weren’t very good, but he always told us it was more important to get an education than be a star athlete. We wanted to believe that, but how many honor roll kids get to be Prom King? Maybe he just wanted us to be single all our lives, I don’t know. But like I said, I’d played baseball before and when I got on base the first day, I watched the Fuhrer over there on 3rd base waiting like a giant spider for the unlikely possibility I would try to get past him. The kid at the plate slugged one into the corner of the outfield and so I went tearing around 2nd and headed for 3rd. The outfielder had put the ball perfectly in line for a tag-out where Arnold was blocking the basepath, a huge troll who wasn’t asking for a toll, he was going to bounce me back to 2nd or swat me to right field with the baseball in his glove.
I heard the ball hit the leather right after I drove at him in a slide, feet up, all 140 pounds of unmuscled boyhood, and I aimed at his ankle with everything I had. And surprise of surprises, the Jolly Green Giant toppled onto his face as if Jack had lopped off his beanstalk. I slid into 3rd safe and popped right up. And stood looking down at my tormentor. He scrambled around, wiped dirt off the side of his face, and for a moment I thought he would come up swinging. “You okay?” I asked Goliath sweetly.
There are moments you will cherish the rest of your days. There are moments that you will look back on and think that right there was a turning point of some kind, even if you don’t have the vocabulary for it. The stunned look on that man’s face when he recovered himself, well, it was worth the humiliations of countless gym classes. If small victories don’t mean anything to you, okay, I understand. But I can tell you, it changed the way that man thought of me from then until I left that backwash highschool. It didn’t change a thing, though, how I thought of him.
Hits: 59
High school. Where the boys are tormented by their teachers and the girls torment each other. We made it out alive at least.
I recently had a potluck at an organization that takes care of our local parks. I ranger at a little patch down on the South End, mostly mow, do a little storm cleanup, chainsaw and pick up garbage. We had our event at the local Senile Center, big dining hall, maybe 30 or so tables. I went to a couple with my little plate of picnicstuffs and asked if this chair was taken? Oh yeah, those chairs were taken. I finally sat outside with my pathetic platter mulling over my snubs. And it hit me, this was what eating in high school was when you’re the new kid. I took my plate back inside, dumped the mess and grabbed my pot. Adios, I thought, to all you folks who still have your little cliques, who still go to high school reunions, who still think you’re the In-crowd. Some folks never really graduate….
Speaking on behalf of all former high school students under 140 pounds, I’d like to say thank you. Thank you for barreling into third base like the rest of us could only dream.
I graduated high school at 124 pounds.
Sophomore year (at an even lower weight class) my gym teacher was a former Chicago Bears football player. He had played with Dick Butkus. He lead my class like his former coach George “Papa Bear” Halas drilled NFL players in the 1960’s. If any of us had paid attention in social studies we would have wised up and called in a rep from the Geneva Convention.
Perhaps I exaggerate, but only slightly. What I do know is this, the teammate of my gym teacher, Dick Butkus, grew up as a boy with that bullseye of a name on his back, and I guarantee he was teased and tormented less than any high school boy under 140 pounds. The targets may have been small, but arrows were plentiful, and cheap.