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Missed Freshman basketball roster day - Fate Fairies - book version
This entry was posted on 10/11/2011 2:00 AM and is filed under Fate Fairies:Fate Fairies - book version.
There was this strange little incident in the late fall of 1970. It was related to the sport of basketball - an activity I had took up in junior high while waiting it out to get to high school football. Oh, I made my Freshman football team in the fall of 1970. In fact I had started as fullback as an upstart farm kid. Our school system did not start you in organized football until your Freshman year. Basketball however started in Seventh Grade. I had made the Eighth Grade team and was hoping to make the Freshman squad as well.
Although a smallish kid back then, I learned to love basketball, although football was my favorite game, and for a farm kid with limited access to basketball courts, I wasn't too bad a player. The old three-room school down the road in Lima Center had a wooden backboard with a bent rim, and uncut grass for a court. My busy father took time to put two backboards and rims in the barn haymow. Later, he put a third one up out back of the barn on a slab of cement.
After the football season in the fall of 1970, I joined the tryout practices for the Freshman basketball team. Looking back now, I was probably going to make the team just like in Eighth Grade.
And then, just as the roster was about to be chosen, out of nowhere came pneumonia. In retrospect, I got sick rather often, perhaps it was the precursor to my blood and heart problems later in life. Poor circulation and a genetic clotting disorder, and a temperamental heart, slowly raised its ugly head and would indeed effect the lungs throughout my life. None-the-less, just a day before final tryouts, I was laid up for at least a week.
When I came back to school, the team had already been chosen. In the paradoxical era of long-hair, illegal drugs, hippies, Vietnam, mini-skirts, smoking lounges for kids, and a culture of any thing goes, sports still held on to some idea of "ritualism" and "absolutism." If you did not make the tryout, you could not make the team. No exceptions - not even for pneumonia.
I remembered my Mom called the school and ripped the coach a new butt hole. The neighbor lady who was the wife of the Varsity Football Assistant Coach, even intervened on my behalf. But alas, to no avail. "Rules is rules, son."
I was so bitter, I never tried out for another basketball team. I certainly could have tried out the next year for the Junior Varsity team. But I too was caught up in my own version of ritualism - stubbornness. "Screw them," I remember thinking.
The small consolation was taking the job of statistic taker which allowed me travel with the team to away games. And sometimes I helped run the time clock for home games. For a school that was just 10 years old, their scoreboard clock controls were pathetic. Someone had bolted the button control panel onto an old piece of plywood. The control board looked like something pieced together in a basement fix-it shop - wires hung out, the buttons often did not respond, the timeout buzzer would arbitrarily sound, and there was no instructions. After the quirky machine went berserk during a couple games on a couple instances, I quietly had other obligations for the rest of the season's home games.
I did however, play on the intramural basket teams and did quite well. In my junior and senior years, I remember playing some of the varsity players down at the Armory on weekends in pickup games - and seemed to keep up with them with no problem. In fact, I went out of my way to show them up.
I sometimes wonder how my life would have changed with four years of high school basketball on my resume? Would it have lured me to college right after high school instead of 30 years later? Would I have played in college? Perhaps then I would never have bothered with the Army after high school. Would it have gotten me networked with a culture that may have gotten me a better job later on down the road?
Every time I walk across a hardwood basketball court, I wonder about that one week in late 1970.
What ifs. They're probably just my imagination run amuck.
Although on the other hand, I could have ended up like one of those kids your read about that keels over in a high school basketball game and dies. Later, to be discovered the victim of an undetected heart condition.
Note: This blog "Fate Fairies" - book version Category is a work in progress. The original vignettes are being edited for book form. Go to the Cooldadiomedia Web site and the Fate Fairies Page for an ordered chronology of the book vignettes (chapters).
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