11  Sports

I’m grateful to my father for an important decision he apparently made in college. His own father had been a fan of organized, professional sports: baseball, football. But Dad thought that was a complete waste of time. “If you’re going to play,” he said, “Play. But don’t watch others play.”

Thanks to his leadership, we felt free to ignore sports, despite the interest shown by my friends, like Jimbo, who through elementary school was an active participant in little league, and who afterwards followed football and baseball closely as a fan. Even John Svetlik, who like me never pretended to be athletic, lived in a family that watched sports on TV, something we never experienced.

As far as formal sports participation goes, my brother was the most athletic: during his freshman year he joined the school cross country running team. He must have done reasonably well – I vaguely remember some award ribbons lying around the house someplace.

I was even less interested. Nevertheless, our summer visit to the Air Force Academy convinced me that for a successful college application I would need to show some interest in sports. During middle school, I had been on a swim team, but there wasn’t one for high school. Maybe I could join track and field, like my brother, but that seemed like a lot of work for nothing. So which sport would I put on my resume?

The most important sport in a small town school is, of course, football. Blessed with tough farm boys eager to prove themselves, the team was quite competitive. A few years before I entered high school, Neillsville had even won the state championship. The annual football Homecoming Parade was the biggest event of the school year, drawing participation from the entire community. If I really wanted to prove myself, football was the place to be.

Of course, the one detail is that I was woefully unqualified to play football. A scrawny kid who dreamed of someday weighing more than 100 pounds, I was already a target from tough kids who wanted somebody to pick on; you can imagine what would have happened if I found myself on a field opposing a team that really wanted to beat me.

Sometime after my freshman year, I discovered that the football team needed helpers, people to help track and carry the equipment, organize the trips to out-of-town games, and ensure there were other supplies, like snacks and water. The politically incorrect term is “water boy”, but on my college application forms I proudly wrote “manager”, which was the term used by the coach to recruit kids to this often thankless task.

As the water boy, er, manager, I attended every practice and game, home and away. I knew all the players and worked daily with the coaches. I didn’t mind the pejorative aspects of being called the water boy, because for me this was just a necessary line in a resume that would get me into a good college. That was the motivation that drove me.

One bonus was that I was issued a team jersey, like the players, and I was therefore allowed to wear it on game Fridays, when it was a point of pride for the boys on the team. I felt like I belonged!

The job also demanded a certain level of responsibility, something that ordinarily I could be trusted to handle. But I was young, and weak, and eager to please everyone, and this is when I got into trouble.

One of the boys on the team, a kid who was not an especially good player, decided that he liked some of the equipment, especially the team jerseys and he determined to steal some if necessary. Since I was in charge of the supplies, he knew he would have to get through me, so he began to befriend me in a half-threatening, non-transparent way. He mixed the carrot and stick: on the one hand he liked me because I was such a cool guy; but on the other hand, if I disappointed him by not letting him steal the equipment, then it was clear that I wasn’t a good friend and might even deserve to be treated like an enemy.

I ignored his entreaties as best I could, never stating clearly that I wouldn’t help him, while never fully agreeing with his plan either. Eventually this produced what I learned was the worst of both situations: by egging him on, I prolonged his attention, but by not producing results I made him more frustrated. Eventually it came to a head and he cornered me in the locker room to demand that I get him the supplies right then.

I don’t remember exactly what I did or didn’t do. I doubt that I would have simply handed him the equipment, or even that I would have looked the other way while he pillaged the storage room I was supposed to protect. I don’t think I would have been that obvious in my sin. More likely, I simply wasn’t as vigilant as I should have been, and he found an opportunity sometime where he could sneak in without my knowledge. There was a lot of equipment to track and it wouldn’t have been unusual to lose a piece or two. I probably convinced myself that he didn’t really steal it and that it would turn up eventually.

Fortunately the football coach wasn’t so easily fooled. Somehow he knew that this kid was a troublemaker, and when equipment turned up missing he immediately charge the obvious suspect. “If I ever catch you wearing that shirt, I’m going to rip it off you right in front of everyone,” he said. I never heard more about it.

Looking back on the incident, I wish I had been more forceful from the beginning, more straightforwardly obvious that I was not the type who would allow a crime like this to happen. It was a good lesson, though, and I’m glad I learned it in high school rather than suffering through it later in life, when it would have caused more damage.