Let's Get Ready to Rumble

I taught Drama and then Drama and English at the high school level for six years. I began the first day, of English, of every school year with certain statements to try to set a tone.

One of them was that I admired the athletes in the room because they could do things I couldn’t do. This tended to surprise everybody. A teacher admitting a weakness, right out of the gate? I shocked both the “cool” kids, who were often the athletes and sometimes demonized or dismissed by non-coach adults, and the Drama kids, who believed I belonged to them exclusively. (By nature and history, I am not a cool kid. I am an outsider. I belong with my fellow misfits, the artists and the expressives, the Drama kids.) I can admire people who have skills I don’t, I said, and asked that they respect that I have skills they don’t – yet. Me sharing what I’m good at is why were all there together.

Let me tell you a little story about the one time I tried to play a competitive team sport. I was six and it was tee-ball. I have no memory of ever watching a tee-ball game before the first – and only – one I was in. I had never watched a baseball game. Nobody ever told me what the goal was, the plan, or what we were trying to accomplish. I’m sure they tried to teach me to hit the ball with the bat and how to catch a ball, but these skills weren’t connected to any meaningful context. Not for me.

I was put in the far outfield when people were hitting the ball and throwing it around. I didn’t know why I was supposed to be out there; no one explained anything. I just did what I was told because that’s the kid I was. I presume my parents, who did understand baseball in a basic sense, assumed I had been told something in practice. The ball never made it out there with six year-old players and I was bored. During the game I finally sat down in the grass and literally made daisy chains. I was quite happy enough. Then to my surprise the ball appeared.

I was a generous and polite child and I figured the people playing with the ball wanted it back. I couldn’t throw far, I knew that, so I calmly carried the ball back to the infield. I handed it to somebody so they could get on playing with it. They had started out yelling something to me that I couldn’t understand, I later learned they were telling me to throw it (did I mention I needed tubes and had terrible hearing?) but how was I supposed to figure out who to throw it to even it I could? NOBODY EVER FREAKING EXPLAINED THE GAME. When I got there and handed over the ball to someone, every player, coach, and parent was just staring in appalled silence.

I made it through that game. I ran to a base at some point and was “out” because a girl touched me with her mitt that had a ball in it. Again, I had no idea what was going on. I thought she was quite rude for hitting me with her mitt. And that was the end of my team, ball-related, competitive sport playing. I never went back to tee-ball. Why? Everyone was mad at me, mean to me, and it was boring. I was mocked for years over that walking in of the ball by the daughter of the fucking coach who never told me what baseball/softball/tee-ball WAS. You’re not born knowing how a sport works, really, you’re not. If you’re a big baseball fan and are similarly appalled, sorry. Blame the myriad adults who never bothered to explain shit to a six year-old.

Compounding the problem of me and balls, I was, like every kid, made to do horrible things in P.E. Dodgeball? Forget it. TO THIS DAY, if I am in the vicinity of a ball it will hit me in the head. Volleyball was a special hell because I’m terrified of getting hit by the ball – maybe because of DODGEBALL?! – and I would simply run if it came near me. Which people always figured out and thus it always came to me. Tetherball, whiffle ball, soccer, basketball – each a form of torture to me. I was forced to take lessons in tennis and golf and the only positive thing I remember about those hot summer day outdoor activities, other than I got to have a lime sherbet freeze after, was that an instructor asked me if I was a dancer because I moved gracefully. Thank you, yes, I am a dancer.

Despite my dismal relationship with balls, I was a natural athlete. I started swimming at three months, running at six months, dancing at three years, snow-skiing at six. Screw you tee-ball, this I can do. I loved to walk, hike, and do yoga. I could dive and cut the water without a ripple, I danced all my life anywhere and everywhere, I taught myself to parallel ski, I walked miles everyday for fun. Note: none of those things involves a ball. Or a team. Or a competition. I loved to move, not to compete.

One day, back in teaching, I wrote a short essay and allowed the students to grade it. They always love that and immediately crow about failing me, because they can. But eventually we get to look at it and I get to explain my process. Throughout my explanation about why Joel Cairo is my favorite character in The Maltese Falcon, one of the students who sat at the front was staring at me. Which is rather unusual. This particular kid was a favorite of mine (We don’t have favorites? Of course we do. We just can’t play favorites.) and a nice guy. A cool guy. He was an excellent basketball player who’s now an assistant coach at the collegiate level. When we were done I asked him what was up, because he was still staring at me.

He said, “Did you really think all those things? How long did it take you to write that?” It was a small (I’m talking less than 10 sentences) essay. I told him I really did think all those things and it took me about twenty minutes, including typing and proofreading – as I do everything. He was stunned.

So I asked him when was the last time he jammed a finger because he didn’t catch the ball. He didn’t remember. I asked him when was the last time he was trying to dribble and bounced the ball off his toe so it went skittering away. He didn’t remember. I asked him when was the last time he got hit in the head with a ball he didn’t even see coming. He didn’t remember. I said that is me, trying to play with a basketball. I never even tried to play a game of basketball. I asked him to think about how many hours he spent playing, practicing, watching, thinking about, and talking about basketball. That’s how many hours I have spent reading, writing, thinking about, and talking about writing. Plus 20+ years.

He nodded, that made sense. Of course maneuvering a basketball without those things happening to him was easy – it’s what he did. What he cared about. He had spent so much time doing it, those things were in muscle memory and he didn’t have to even think about them. Just as writing a less than ten sentence essay about Joel Cairo came that easily to me. I think it was a new idea to him, that I wasn’t just a mad genius who could magically write an essay with little effort, but someone who cared about it, worked at it for decades, and had practiced it over and over.

It was just a skill, honed over time, and developed with care and thought. Just like basketball was to him. It took the mystique away. It meant it was a thing that could be learned. You’re not born with the knowledge to write and you’re not born with the knowledge to play tee-ball. I have a talent for it, just as he has a talent for basketball. Could either of us ever learn what the other knew? All things being equal, of course we could. If we wanted to. Maybe we would never be quite as good as the other, having been born with particular gifts, but we could get better. Getting into college with an SAT score meant, for the moment at least, he needed to learn a bit of my skill.

Happily I never have to try to master basketball, but at least I know what the damn game IS. I know you’re supposed to try to get the orange ball into the high net. I’m still a little hazy on tee-ball.