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Growing up sports-free in a sportsman's world (Part I)
12/14/05
by Shaw

It seems that there are multiple definitions of the term "sportsman" at work today. In the context of playing organized sports, a sportsman is someone who respects the rules of the game and treats all of the players, including his opponents, with due respect. Outside of organized sports, a sportsman is a man who appreciates, loves, and participates in sport, where sport itself means one of two things: organized sports--playing a game, like baseball and frisbee golf (just kidding that's not really a sport)--or the sport of going after game with some kind of implement used for capturing and/or killing, such as a fish hook, a rifle, or, in the case of baby seals, a wooden club.

I grew up in a world where these things did not exist and were not important. In my home, football, baseball, basketball, fishing, and hunting were never brought up. Not that there were severe repercussions for talking about them, but that you would be talking to an empty room if you did. And certainly the random tossing of a ball across the room would not end up with someone else catching it. Perhaps it is just a late onset of youthful rebellion, but in the past few years I have experienced a renaissance of sport, and in the hopes of making up for lost time, I tried to pack everything in at once, with varying degrees of success. Here are the lowlights of my sporting life, laid bare for you to judge.

Weightlifting:

At some point in college, Clay had a feeling he was getting fat, and immediately shifted his attention from reading 3 papers every day to reading 2 papers and working out. For a time, I was his partner until he outgrew me and moved on to our friend Krishna, at which point our friend Jason and I started working out together instead. Jason and I share what is known as a pigeon chest. This term is not visually accurate, as from all appearances pigeons have pretty big chests, but the comparison to pigeons should really be taken to mean "tiny and weak". As it turns out, "pigeon breast" is a real disorder caused by childhood rickets...

An actual pigeon chest... not what I have... but not far off either.

We worked out our chests for a few months in the room with the Nautilus equipment before finally venturing, unchaperoned, into the freeweight room, to hop on the bench press. Two particular moments of embarrassment pop to mind. I was using the butterfly chest machine in the Nautilus room, huffing and puffing to finish my last set of 10 when I noticed that the person waiting to use the machine after me was Seco Camara, three-point specialist for the GW basketball team and all around physically fit beast. Jason and I gave up the machine and huddled in a corner to watch him push the weight up to his level... but to our surprise, he didn't adjust it. He sat right down, and started hitting the same weight we had been doing. This by itself was not embarrassing, but the fact that I actually celebrated to myself, thinking I had made some real progress to get close in strength to Seco Camara, is embarrassing. After doing a quick set of 25 on our weight, he looked around to see if we were still there, and, satisfied that we were gone, audibly laughed, pushed the weight up to the top, and did a set of 50 with no difficulty at all.

Aside: Though I have never met DJ's brother David (or DJ himself, for that matter) I have no doubt that these men would not have looked around to make sure we were gone before laughing out loud... I am picturing a scenario where I am lifted bodily out of the machine and told to go over to the other side of the room and use the inner thigh machine "with the other girls"...

Of course, the first time we used the real bench press was traumatic in its own way... I was preparing to set up the bench when I saw a pair of my employees, who stopped to say hello. I could see the skepticism in their eyes when I laid down on the bench, but it faded away when they watched me put it up with ease... until they totalled up the weights on the bar. Needless to say they passed my bench press number around the office and I was never respected there again.

Baseball/Softball:

I am 26 years old. I have never played a game of baseball in my entire life. I have never swung at a baseball pitched to me by another human. The only time I have ever gone to a batting cage, I was 15 and with my 11 year old brother, who handily destroyed all ten of the "Babe Ruth" 60mph pitches, knocking them clear across the lot. As I confidently stepped into the "Little League" 40mph cage (intended as a warmup for my turn at the Babe Ruth cage), I was mocked by my brother's friend who predicted I would only hit one of the ten pitches... but I proved him wrong. I didn't hit any.

Later on, as a senior in high school at the band and chorus picnic slow-pitch softball game, I lived through my worst nightmare: I was struck out by a freshman girl who couldn't have been more than 4 ft tall. In my defense she was on the JV softball team... but she wasn't a pitcher.

Football:

For 4 years of college, we played football every Sunday next to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. We played with the same core group of people every week, and I became a reliable wide receiver for my oft-quarterback Clay. However it became clear that I am not as excellent a defender as I am a receiver... I started to notice that during many a huddle, the following was audible: "Shaw's covering me, I'll be open." These words were almost always followed by a touchdown. Unfortunately my skills as a receiver were not often enough tried out in a crowded field. The one time we had enough people to play 8 on 8 (that's 16 people), on about the fourth play of the game, I ran into our other wide receiver about 40 yards downfield trying to grab a lofty pass and had to go to the hospital to drain my knee. We were both completely open. Japes's comment to Clay: "Not only was that pass off-target, it's also a good way to get your receiver decked."

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Coming next week: Part II: Hockey, Golf, Fishing, and Hunting

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