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Larry, what follows is a "Thoughts" piece of my own on your latest "Thoughts." Have room for a guest columnist?

Sport, huh? I guess I can see what Larry is talking about--but my memories are different. Sure when I was pre-adolescent, we played hundreds of hours of four-man baseball and football, and when the streets iced over, we even had a go at hockey now and then. And that was fun, we even made up a peculiar form of urban golf called Sewer Ball (rules available upon request.) But something happened between the time of arguing about whether the shrub with the blue berries in Micah's lawn was the goal line or the boundary and my teens. Gym class.

For me the gym was a place commanded by barely vocalic louts with whistles and clipboards. The names changed as I went from school to school but the mentality didn't. Some were football or basketball coaches, a few also taught Health or Hygiene. All of them, to the last man, made me appreciate the towering intellects of my Air Force drill sergeants a few years later. The gym was a place of raw Darwinism, where the strong preyed on the weak with relentless savagery, blessed by the high priests of "sport" under the guise of "making us men." In the gyms of my youth, God help the boy with glasses, with asthma, who couldn't shoot a basket or catch a ball. For these boys, the gyms weren't temples, they were purgatories. The gym of my remembrance was a place where the wrong kind of man was nurtured, not the Warrior with his code of honor, or the Hunter who fed the tribe; instead, the bully was enshrined. The gym was a place where any of the joy and fun of our pickup games was relentlessly ground out of us as the coaches combed the ranks for cannon-fodder for their arenas.

I come from a football family. My father had played high school ball and only WWII stopped him from playing at college level. His younger brother played in high school and college and went on to become first a high school coach, then assistant coach at the college and professional levels. I was the first man in my family to flatly refuse to play football. My father, thank God, said, "so what, if you don't want to play, don't" and that was that. My uncle, of course, was mortified--a Walker not play football?

I am a big man and come from a family of big men and women. Coaches would see me think "lineman!" and the ground would get slippery with their drool. In 1966, when I was fifteen, we moved to California. For someone who was 6'2" by age 14, it was like moving to Munchkinland. When I walked down the halls in school, all I saw was a sea of heads. In California in them thar days, we had gym EVERY DAY! Oh well, I figured, might as well make the most of it and since we actually played games like football instead of running endless laps or countless drills, it wasn't so bad. Then one crisp October morning (the rain wouldn't start for another month!) we were playing football. The usual testicle grabbing, towel-snapping yahoos were yocking it up between plays. I can't remember what happened exactly, but the quarterback pissed me off. The next play, I let it all out-I blew through the front linemen like tissue paper and tackled (we were playing touch-so I touched him exuberantly) the yin-yang about twenty yards behind the line of scrimmage. Then I turned around and saw the gym teacher, also the football coach, looking at me with what Shakespeare must have meant when he said "Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look." It seems that in my anger I'd knocked their top four varsity lineman flat on their asses and nailed their star quarterback.

From that moment on I knew no peace. The coach hounded me incessantly, especially after he found out that my uncle was a fairly well known high school coach back in Ohio. I was even called into the principal's office repeatedly to be harangued on my lack of school spirit. He actually called me a communist because I wouldn't play for their goddamned team. (Well, to be fair, I was a communist at the time, but he had no way of knowing that. It was just a handy pejorative.) Six weeks later, I transferred schools and in the interim found a friendly doctor who declared me 4-F for the remainder of my high school years. It was sixteen years before I set foot in a gym again, coaxed by a girlfriend who taught me the joys of weightlifting, which I did until arthritis finally stopped me. And, of course, weightlifting is a solitary sport.

Oh, I learned something from the gym, all right. I learned to keep to myself, keep my own counsel, keep a tight lid on my anger, and never, ever, show anyone how strong I really was. It's more dangerous than showing weakness.

I envy Larry's experience. I went to five different high schools from coast to coast and never once found the "home away from home" in the gym that he found. Consider my home life, (read my Father's Day poem in Voice and Visions for a sample) and you'll agree that it wouldn't have taken much to be better.

The sport that Larry extols, and with which I have no quarrel, the "sacred play," derives from the hunt and our days as hunters. It is a joyous thing that I still see in one of the few sports I follow-rowing! I would row myself if my joints would let me. But I appreciate the beauty of the bodies and their movement, the glide of the boat, and perhaps I see the fleeting shade of the Muse of the "sacred play." And I have yet to see a commercial logo on a scull.

I don't know where Larry grew up, but it must have been a late blooming Eden, free from the taint of "winning is the only thing" because I never knew that gym. Larry's paradise of sport was already barred for me, not by an angel with a fiery sword, but by a state-certified bully with a clipboard and a whistle.

(Donald R. Walker, June, 2000)

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