I must say that the only sport that I ever really enjoyed playing was golf. I was introduced to golf when I was about ten. Both of my parents golfed, and it was not uncommon for me to accompany one or both to the course on many a summer morning. Any sport that one can drink beer while participating in is all right by me. It was on the course that my parents first found out I knew how to swear. Of course, when they asked me where I had learned such words, as always, the answer was the Malin boys. Tim and Tom were brothers and lived three houses down. My best friend and next door neighbor, Danny Nelson, of course had taught me the words, but I didn't want to get him in trouble. The Malins always seemed like our most rough and tumble neighbors so I thought that was pretty believable, and they didn't seem to mind.

In fact, it was amidst this neighborly dynamic that I discovered where I fit into the sporting realm. I participated in sports for the opportunity to socialize. Other than my predetermination to golf, no other sporting enterprise called to me on a guttural level. This was true of both watching and participating in sports. I watched football on the television because my dad and my brothers did. If you wanted to spend time with them, you were watching football on Sunday. More than likely, you were watching the Chiefs; the unofficial home team of Kansas (even if they were based in K.C., MO). I personally was a Cowboys fan. Not because I liked the Cowboys; because my brother Marty liked the Cowboys. Thus, we a shared interest and had something to talk about.

As far as participating in the playing of sports, some of the first group sporting events I participated in were spirited games of tackle tag and pass and defend with my neighborhood friends. Once again, it was not that I had a burning desire to be gang tackled by a group of my peers or show off speed that was best measured with a calendar; it was a need to spend time with my friends in an activity of shared interest. Once into these activities, it was readily apparent to my friends that my athletic prowess had peaked with the tying of my shoes. This would contribute to the development of my skills with the use of self-deprecating humor. If I couldn't be the most gifted athlete on the playground, I would damn well try to be the funniest.

Of course, there were all the summers of softball and baseball. Apparently when I was very young, I wanted to play baseball pretty badly. Our town had a kid's Olympic type thing called "Little Cardinal Relays". It was after this that the high school boys coaching the teams would make their picks for the softball and baseball teams. When I was about five and too young to play softball, I ventured over to the coaches and informed them of my desire to participate.

"What position would you like to play?" they asked me.

"Batter," I replied.

"Come back when you're a little older," I was told.

I did. And if I desired to play pretty badly, then I got my wish. I played badly, indeed. When a child is less than gifted and cholesterally enhanced, there are usually two places he plays; either right field or catcher. Let's start by saying it is just cruel to make fat kids play catcher. I bet I ripped five pairs of pants each summer squatting and pressing my jeans beyond their load limit. I always knew when it happened, too. I'd experience a pleasant breeze followed by raucous laughter. I'm sure my mother was thinking what all mothers thought at moments like these: "Please, God. Let him have on clean underwear."

There is also the pleasant experience of shopping for a cup. For those not familiar with the tools used for preservation of the family jewels, a cup is a hard plastic thing that looks somewhat like an opaque oxygen mask sans hose, although it should never be worn over the nose. It is placed in a specially designed athletic supporter inside a pouch designed specifically for that purpose. I was probably about ten when I bought my first. It went something like this:

"Can I help you, son?"

"Coach said I need a cup. I play catcher."

"Ah-hah. What size?"

I responded as any self respecting, red-blooded American male would to this question. "Large, I guess." In actuality, with all I had to protect at that point, a walnut shell probably would have sufficed. Happy with the purchase of my first piece of manly accessories, I raced home to try it on. I felt like superman.

"Let's test it out. Where's that souvenir minnie bat I got at the Royals game last year? Here it is. (Whack, whack, whack). Wow! Nothing's getting through this sucker!" I proceeded to proudly sport it about the house, strutting groin first from room to room like some sort of bizarre, obese, dwarf ballet dancer.

"What in the name of all that's holy!"

"Oh, hi dad! Like my cup? It's to keep my wiener from getting hurt when I play baseball!"

"That's great, son, but it goes under your pants."

"Right. Thanks, dad. Good talk."

Fast forward several years to high school football. I was still going out for sports to be with my buds. Freshmen at our school were rarely starters anyway, so I had no illusions of making the staring team. To get to our practice field, we ran about three hundred yards and in the process had to climb a fence to get to it. Considering climbing the fence intimidated me more than getting hit, my chances of ever starting were roughly that of Pamela Anderson being invited to join Mensa. Beings it was a small town school sports program, though, nobody was cut. One way or another, I was in it for the long haul. My folks rule was "we won't make you go out for anything, but if you do, you're darn well not quitting."

I knew I wasn't cut out for football when I went up against my buddy George in a drill where both players started out laying flat on their backs. One, with a ball, was the runner. The other, without, was the tackler. Four blocking dummies were placed parallel to each other creating three distinct slots of about six feet wide. When the whistle blew, the runner was to get up, choose one of the slots, and run. The tackler was to get up and tackle. Although slower than George, the runner, I noticed he had not made his cut by halfway past the second slot. I accelerated as only a 170 pound, five foot three tackle can, and met him just past the opening of the third slot. There was a thunderous crunch of shoulder pads, and we were both on the ground. Amid cheers of "Nice hit" and such, George popped right up and went to the back of the line for the defensive side of the drill. I, however, remained on the ground trying to figure out if I'd ever felt pain like that before and resisting the urge to cry. The freshman's coach was busy writing in his notebook. Decorum prohibits me relaying the exact verbiage here, but the word may also be used as a term of endearment for a young cat. I went out for two more seasons of that before taking a pass.

I wised up much earlier when I tried my hand at wrestling. When one is five feet of 170 pound gelatinous goo, one ends up wrestling those who are six feet of contoured muscle. Needless to say, I never cracked the A-team. To top the humiliation of regularly being bent into sundry pretzel shapes by anatomically gifted uber-athletes, I also had to participate in morning practices. We'd get up in snot-freezing temperatures in the winter, drive down to school at 5 am, and run the halls. Tops on the list of things I don't enjoy are running and sweating. We got to do both. Sometimes, after that, we would box, climb the rope hanging from the top of the gym, or do both. There was also the delightful peg board torture devise on which an aspiring wrestler was supposed to navigate using purely upper body strength. The strongest thing on my upper body was my armpits. All else was silly putty.

We did, however, wrestle junior varsity meets. Here, I was given the opportunity to have naturally gifted athletes from other towns touch me in a familiar way and introduce me to thresholds of pain heretofore untapped. I did however win one match in my illustrious career. It was against a foe of equally gelatinous consistency, and I proved to be the least gelatinous. It was a very "Rocky" moment for me. I think I even cried a little. Had I had an Adrian, she would have gotten a "Yo". Although I did the football thing two more times, this was the first and last go around for wrestling. Subsequent winters were spent playing in the pep band and experimenting with hard liquor during the first and second quarters of the basketball games. We would come back with a healthy buzz and play the halftime selections sounding, I'm quite sure, not as good as we thought we did.

The only sport I played all four years was golf. I had not given up on football though. My last foray into football was as manager of the team my senior year. This basically meant I washed the towels and made sure they were there after practices. I also picked them up after practice and took them to the school laundry. The other areas of responsibility included taking care of practice equipment (balls, tees, and such) and running the cooler filled with ice and water bottles out to the field during timeouts for my thirsty comrades. Insert Bobby Boucher water boy joke here.

During a game in which the team was not playing very well, I was called on during a timeout to run water out to the boys. I sprinted out as quickly as my chubby legs would carry me. After quenching the boys' thirsts with my ice cold wares, I started the long sprint back to the sideline. Halfway there, I tripped, did a flying "Y" over the cooler I'd just dumped, and fell flat on my face. Being me, I did the first thing that naturally came to my mind in a situation of this potentially embarrassing magnitude. In front of the crowd of about three hundred, I got up, dusted myself off, scooped as much ice as I could back into the bucket, and took a deep, theatrical bow. Then to loud applause and laughter, I finished my sheepish sprint back to the sideline. Coach Friend looked a little perturbed, but I think deep down inside, he was chuckling a little. To this day, I still get compliments when I go back to Plainville for how I handled that situation.

I guess the best thing I can say about my youthful sports career is that I had fun. I can't begin to remember any of the scores, but I can for sure remember what we got detention for doing on the bus on the way home from that track meet in the eighth grade. In the long run, it's the memories that really matter. Let the kids enjoy being kids. They grow up too fast the way it is. Winning at all costs is too expensive a way to spend their youth.