The Asymptomatic Athlete

I played soccer for three years when I was in Elementary School. I played soccer for three years the same way someone could have hepatitis for three years and not know it. I was an asymptomatic athlete. I was only vaguely aware I was playing soccer, never understood the rules or the function of the sport, and spent the majority of the game standing at the 50-yard line completely still waiting for the ball to go out of bounds so I could throw it back in. My position was half-back, and I had no idea what that meant, and legitimately thought I was just supposed to stand in one spot for the entire time. During a soccer game. Standing still.

The next organizational sport I played was football when I was in fourth grade. There were some photos of me in my football outfit, the one it took my mother something like seventeen hours to get me into, but they have thankfully been lost to time. I went to one practice and quit. The bastards wanted me to run! How ridiculous.

And that’s it. The rest of my athletic career consists of pick-up games with friends, where I volunteered to be the kicker, or the goalie, or the equipment manager. Anything that meant I didn’t have to focus all my mental energy on the game. Anything that meant I could play without having to enjoy it.

Part of it might be a certain kind of athletic blindness I have. In the years I worked at a high school, I coached a number of teams, and found that I found myself focusing on one player at a time. It might be a back, or a forward, or a midfielder, or the third baseman, or the outfielder, or the pitcher. But I wasn’t ever able to ever really see the entire field of players at once, at least not in any way that allowed me to effectively understand every aspect of the game while it was happening.

But a bigger, more important part of it is that I’m just not athletic. True, I’m terribly out of shape these days, and there were period of my life when I was younger when I was similarly out of shape, but there have been periods of my life where I have been in relatively good shape and I was just an in-athletic at those points as I am now. I’m just no good at sports.

(Two exceptions: I can play a pretty mean volleyball. It was the only faculty vs. student sporting event I would participate in, and I would play pretty damn well. I even played in flip flops. The other exception is four square. Dear god, if there was professional four square I might have made it my career. I’m really hard to beat once I get into the fourth square.)

When I was in fourth and fifth grade, I played intramural basketball after school. It was just kids from my school, and we’d throw on pinnies and scrimmage in the gym. Our gym teacher, Ms. Ladouceur served as our coach, and at some point during the season, she benched me, which was probably for both our benefits. I didn’t really want to play and she didn’t really want to have to make me. And since it was right after school, my parents rarely if ever were able to attend any of these scrimmages, which probably made it that much easier for Ladouceur to bench me for the majority of the season. So three afternoons a week I spent an hour after school wearing a red pinnie and sitting on the sideline, thinking about what comics I was going to buy or imagine various ways we all might get trapped in our underground gymnasium and the various MacGyver-esque plans I would use to free us all. I’m sure that she must’ve put me in a little bit each game, but my prevailing memory was thankfully not playing any basketball.

My mother would ask me how basketball was going, and I would make up stories to cover for the fact that I wasn’t playing. In these stories, I tried to invent plausible scenarios, and tried to keep them within the parameters of my athletic ability. Soon, though, I decided that I would score a basket in my imaginary game, and my mother seemed impressed by this, and I slowly started scoring more baskets per game. A few times I even was able to score the winning basket. I don’t think I ever liked sports more than I did in the forty-five second recaps I provided my mother each day.

On the final day of basketball for the year, I was sitting on the bench, wearing my red pinnie, thinking about whether or not I liked Hawk and Dove comics (I hadn’t ever read any, but it was something I wondered about) and whether or not Erin Toomey was going to ever marry me. The afternoon was winding down, and Ms. Ladouceur must’ve decided that it was time for me to get into the game, and she told me to take John’s place. The kids on John’s team were pretty upset and groaned, because John was taller than the rest of us and was pretty good at basketball, and I so very clearly wasn’t, and intramural scrimmage or not, nobody wants to lose. Which they most certainly would, now that I was taking the place of their forward.

I couldn’t dribble, couldn’t pass, couldn’t shoot. I hadn’t even brought a change of clothes, and so while all the other kids were playing in shorts and t-shirts, I went out onto the court wearing a sweatshirt and jeans. I’m sure Ms. Ladouceur thought she was helping me out, but in truth she was ruining the afternoon, and probably the whole season for everybody. THAT was how bad I was. Most of the second half of the game in which I played was spent with my team passing the ball around me. I don’t think I even touched it once.

You know how this movie ends. My team was down by one point, the clock was ticking down. Ms. Ladouceur, maybe realizing that she had deprived me of a fun experience, maybe feeling guilty that she had cultivated an atmosphere that made it okay for an intramural basketball team to not pass the ball to one of their own teammates, yelled out, “Somebody pass it to Ryan!” And somebody did.

I didn’t want to actually have the ball, or have to dribble it, or think about who to pass it to, so I sent it up to the basket. It was bounced right off the backboard back into my hands, like it knew that the last thing I ever wanted was to touch it again. So I sent it back up to the hoop, and this time it went in. I’d like to pretend that it was a swish, or that it was one of those balls that circled round the rim a dozen times before dropping in, but it just bounced off the backboard into the basket. And we won. I’d won the game.

I was so excited I couldn’t even believe it. It was a good feeling. It was a great feeling. This must be why people play sports, I thought. So they could feel like this. I couldn’t wait to tell my mom.

Of course, from my mother’s perspective, I had already scored the winning basket. She seemed happy for me, but she wasn’t as excited as I wanted her to be. This was an old story to her, one that I had told her in other afternoons, and because I had already accomplished the feat of the winning basket--because I had lied to her--it robbed the experience of any of its magic for me. I never played an organized sport again.

Fifteen years later, in my first year working as a teacher, I was invited to one of my students’ graduation parties. I spent most of the afternoon sitting with my students, drinking orange soda and eating hot dogs, telling them funny stories about my own high school years, when the girl’s father called over to me. “C’mon, Ryan. Old guys vs. young guys.” He waved me over with a wiffleball bat. That’s when I realized, I’m one of the old guys. In fairness, the “Old Guys” also drafted a 15-year old to their team. So I think I was being put on the old guys team specifically because I was a young guy. They thought I was their ringer, because I was only 24. If only they knew.

I spent a lot of time while the Old Guys were up at bat looking at the slimness of the yellow bat, the smallness of the white ball. I tried to estimate their respective widths relative to the length of my body. Tried to figure what percentage of my body that tiny ball represented. I tried to imagine ways that the explanation “The ball is 5.7% of my entire body” could in anyway sound manly.

But when I got my first at-bat during the second inning, I tried not to look at the small crowd that had gathered and just thought if I stand here and let the pitches go by, I can strike out without swinging. There was something about that that seemed dignified, somehow.

But as I saw the ball approach, in a way that I can’t even imagine now, I felt the bat lift off my shoulder, I felt my biceps and triceps move and stretch themselves, and I hit that wiffleball, first swing. I can still remember the sound it made as it whizzed by my students heads, out into the woods. I heard men my father’s age cheer, whistle, yell out homerun, and as I took my leisurely jog around the makeshift bases, and heard the mothers and fathers and the students that had gathers applaud and cheer and shout “Way to go, Mr. T!” I made a note to take my time and savor the victory. It was, like all victories, fleeting. I’d have two more at bats, and I would strike out one, and foul out another. But as I jogged my way around third after having hit the first homerun in a pick-up game of wiffleball that had no consequence to anybody or anything, I thought, This is it. Hang my number from the rafters.