The Wide World of Sports

My mom was very athletic while she was growing up – she rode horses, played field hockey, swam competitively and did synchronized swimming. At the end of her senior year in high school, she received the “All-Around Girl” award for athletics, academics and leadership.  She still swims laps several times a week and, in recent years, has tried canoeing, catamaran sailing, speed boating, kayaking and probably a dozen other things she doesn't want us to know about.

As a kid, I never came close to following in her footsteps where athletics were concerned although I did learn a few things about survival from high school gym classes and GAA. First, if you serve really fast in volleyball, the element of surprise may give you a slight chance of scoring.  Second, during a basketball

game when you have the ball and can’t dribble because you’re surrounded by about 25 bigger, taller girls, you might have a chance to escape by shouting, “Wait,” but that only works once or twice a game.  Third, no matter how many layers of towel strips and rubber banded plastic bags you wear under your swim cap, you’re going to leave the pool with wet hair.  Finally, you can’t get away with just ironing the collar and the front of a gym suit if your junior high gym teacher did her student teaching in the prison from “Cool Hand Luke.”

Somehow, I did find a semi-athletic place for myself as a cheerleader. Today, cheerleaders are really impressive gymnasts who do flips and get tossed into the air.  Luckily for me, in the 60’s, you mostly had to be decorative and yell loudly; and you never got far off the ground.  The biggest challenge was doing a cartwheel and the splits which were requirements for cheerleading try-outs every spring.  Now, doing a cartwheel would probably put me into physical therapy for six months and I can’t even visualize what the splits look like any more. 

We did have to learn a repertoire of cheers that were complicated and required a lot of practice.   After dark, the picture window in our living room became a huge mirror so I thought it was a great place to practice.  My dad wasn’t as supportive as he might have been.   He cut off my practice time one evening after I executed some particularly good jumps. “Cheese and crackers!” (or something that sounded a lot like that), he yelled. “If you keep that up, you’ll go right through the floor and wind up in the basement.”  I had to move my practice sessions to a department store dressing room. The mirrors were perfect, but I didn’t realize how narrow the space was until I hit the wall doing wide arm circles and almost broke my finger.  Well, one can’t really excel at athletics without overcoming some obstacles.

Anyway, I enjoyed cheerleading all through high school even though, like most everyone I know who grew up in the 60’s, there were no parents watching from the sidelines.  By the time we had kids, the rules for parents had changed.  I still miss certain things about having young children at home – snuggling up on the couch to read, holding little hands, watching them while they sleep.  I don’t exactly miss changing diapers, but I do remember getting a little teary the day I ended my six-year-long, weekly relationship with Vern the diaper delivery man. The one thing I absolutely never miss, however, is watching kid athletic events. 

Tee ball seemed pretty harmless and it was cute to watch five-year-olds hit the ball and try to decide whether to run to first or third – at least they had a 50-50 chance of getting it right.  Cute was replaced by acute boredom which is what happens when you watch 7 and 8 year-olds try to pitch baseballs to each other’s non-existent strike zones – it takes forever to get three outs, much less finish a complete game in a knothole league. 

Soccer didn't start until the boys were in first grade – there were no in utero leagues in the early eighties. As a sport, soccer offered more action and less individual pressure than baseball.  On the other hand, watching tight clusters of kids in colored shirts and shin guards carom all over the field chasing a ball has limited entertainment value.  The appeal is further diminished when the weather is wet, cold, windy or all of the above.  We stayed with the program, however, and survived four practices and at least two games a week during many baseball and soccer seasons. 

As David and John got older, we graduated to wrestling matches (a lot of sweat and grunting), cross country meets (a lot of driving for a few minutes of running), track meets (a lot of waiting for THE event) and tennis matches (actually not too bad.)  It turned out that, even though they tried a lot of different sports, David and John weren’t particularly good at any of them.  I hope they are too old to have their self esteem irreparably damaged by this revelation. 

Actually, watching a few games, meets or matches would have been fun, but there just got to be so many of them in those endless seasons. That was even in the day before Select, Super Select, Ultra Select and Life Sentence Select teams were invented to give kids even more playing opportunities.  Like many other

things in life, our experience with kid sports could have been better but it could have been worse.  If the boys had been swimmers, we would have spent entire weekends pickling our brains in chlorinated, natatorium air.  If they had played ice hockey, we would have been driving them to midnight practices and games all over the state.  If they had been rowers, we would have been tied to a 364 ½ -day-a-year training schedule.  From that perspective, we got off lightly.

Now, on a beautiful Saturday or Sunday, when we drive or bike past soccer fields and baseball diamonds full of uniformed kids with the sidelines full of parents, folding chairs, coolers and sun shades, I feel like a recent parolee looking back at the inmates.  I did my time, with good behavior, and I can now enjoy a glorious sense of freedom.  I am a little worried, though, because many of my friends are back on the kid

athletic circuit with their grandchildren.  I hope I can still be in the running for “Nana of the Year” if I don’t go to all of Willem’s games.