Now that professional sports are back in full swing, I find
that my thoughts have frequently turned to my own athletic career. While it is
true that I never played sports professionally, or collegiately, or high schoolly,
it is also true that for three months in my early 20s, I was the fourth best
player on a four-person bowling team and once rolled an impressive 137. (I’m
pretty sure we still lost that game, despite the fact that my friend’s
grandmother, who was the best bowler on our team, rolled a 190.)
As a young lad I, like many of my peers, had delusions of becoming a
professional athlete, and it certainly wasn’t bowling that I fantasized about.
For me, baseball and football were the objects of my desire, and I played these
sports in the streets and schoolyards of Brooklyn on a regular basis. While it’s
unclear to me now if it was my lack of discipline, size, or coordination that
kept me from going pro, I do have a highlight reel of glorious streetball moments
permanently etched into my consciousness.
The earliest all-star moment that I can recall came when I was a tender tot of about
eight or nine. A bunch of kids on my block were playing stickball and as was
often the case, I was relegated to last in the lineup. I don’t remember if the
game started late or if we were having the inevitable endless arguments about
the rules, but somehow most of the kids had to go inside before I ever got a
turn at bat and eventually the only two people left outside were myself and a
girl of about my age named Jodi. We decided to keep on playing, which was fine
with me, as I had a bit of a crush on Jodi and wanted to dazzle her with my
incredible athletic prowess. After awkwardly swinging and missing on Jodi’s
first two pitches, and silently calculating that my chances with her were
sinking faster than the Titanic, I finally connected on her third pitch. I
watched as the pink Spalding sailed high and fast down the block, past the big
tree near the corner and bounced its way down the next block. Jodi gleefully
yelled “How did you do that?” and chased after the ball, which ended up being
lost, perhaps in a sewer drain. While I lost my ball and the game came to an
abrupt end it was, for me, the proudest moment of my young life.
About three years later, on the very same street, I had an epic football moment.
I have no recollection of who else was on the playing field with me, although I’m
sure Jodi would not have been there at this point, as my previous baseball heroics
did not have the lasting impact on our relationship that I had hoped. All I
know is that there were probably six of us and my team was on offense. I ran
out for a pass racing around in crazy patterns until the quarterback,
determining I was open, threw the ball my way. The only challenge was, I was running
toward a parked car and the ball was thrown high and behind me. It’s difficult
to account for what happened next, other than to say it was all very
spontaneous and I wouldn’t be able to recreate it if I tried. I reached for the
ball behind me with my hands, while at the same time I straightened my legs and
tried to stop short, so as not to overrun the ball. I managed to catch the ball
with my body stiff as a board at a 45-degree angle. I did not, however,
successfully stop short, since there was no traction on the asphalt. As a result,
I managed to fully slide underneath the parked car with the football still firmly
in my hands. I don’t know how this looked to the other kids playing, but I know
that lying on the ground, with just my head and outstretched arms sticking out
from underneath that blue Ford Granada, I felt like I had just made the
greatest play in the history of Shore Parkway street sports.
But it wasn’t until my senior year of high school that I managed to make the
streetball play that, to this day, the people inside my head are still talking
about. A bunch of guys had gotten together to play football on my friend Tom’s
street. We all reeked of teenage male bravado, but none reeked more than Louie,
who was a junior and the cockiest kid in our school. He was a long-haired rebel
that all the girls swooned over and all the guys wanted to give a stiff right
to the jaw. Nobody wanted to be on his team, because he was a ball-hog who would
insist every play go through him; but it wasn’t so great to play against him
either, because of the constant trash talk you would have to endure the entire
game. On this particular day we were on different teams and at one point, late
in the game, I caught a short pass and found myself about five yards from the
end zone with only Louie in my way. He stood a few feet ahead of me and I knew
there would be no way to get past him, so I thought I would throw a lateral
back to the quarterback. But as soon as I pulled my arms backward to pitch the
ball forward, Louie, thinking he would intercept the lateral and take it all
the way back to the opposite end zone for fame and glory, jumped into the theoretical
path of the ball before it left my hands. This allowed me to hold on to the
ball and trot unscathed into the end zone, as though I planned a fake lateral
all along. To this day it’s not so much the cheers of my teammates that I
remember fondly, as it is the joyous razzing that Louie had to endure the rest
of the game for getting completely humiliated on the playing field.
My illustrious sports career is well behind me now, but I often bask in the glory
of these three championship moments as I conveniently forget the several
thousand embarrassing moments in between. Here’s to my Hall of Fame career…and
my selective memory!
