Athletic Glory
I consider myself to be athletic, although I am uncomfortable saying that I am an athlete. This is probably because my ignominious career in competitive team sports ended in the eighth grade. There is a big difference between someone who remains fit and a true competitor.
Things started off reasonably well. I played Little League baseball, Pee Wee football, and Little Dribblers. I was passable as a pitcher until about thirteen years of age (my last team was the Royals), played quarterback on the Texans (our archrivals were the Roustabouts), and even had my dad as a coach of our basketball team (dunking on an 8 ½ foot rim is hard when you are five feet tall.) When I was ten, I even won a multi-event competition modeled after “The Battle of the Network Stars.”
Starting in the seventh grade, we switched from Little League to school-based sports, and I gave up baseball. I held my own as a second-team, 125-pound starter at quarterback and even played a little in the defensive secondary. After getting knocked unconscious a couple of times, I decided that maybe my football career wasn’t meant to be and dropped that sport the next year. That left basketball as my remaining shot at athletic glory.
My eighth-grade basketball coach was in his mid-twenties and pretty quickly sized me up as a lost cause. He was frequently hungover on our Saturday morning bus rides to away games. I recall him swigging a bottle of Pepto Bismol while driving the bus and taking his frustrations out on us. He let me know that my primary value to the team was that I could commit five fouls before being ejected from a game.
And that is my greatest moment while playing a sport. Pearland Junior High was a primarily white school that played in a district with a majority black student population. Our baseball teams won championships. Our basketball teams, not so much. One of those games was against La Marque whose roster included a future college star. As a “last off the bench” player, my job was to prevent him from scoring easy buckets by fouling him five times.
I did my job so well that one of those fouls was even called flagrant – he made both free throws and then promptly scored again on the inbound. Oh well. I did what I was asked and fouled out by the middle of the third quarter. I watched the rest of the rout from the comfort of the bench, thanking God that I would not have to go back in.
As I started high school, I made the decision to graduate a year early, which meant that my course load precluded any extracurricular activities. My athletic career was over.
There were brief episodes of intramural success in co-ed slow pitch softball and an undefeated two-year stint coaching 8-9-year-old girls' soccer; however, I would never again know the thrill of victory or the agony of defeat quite like I did in junior high.
