April 25, 2008
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The Daily News
1 All right, all right, enough sports already!
2 Every once in a while I decide to goof on sports, maybe in part because in my youth I was your classic knucklehead on the bench in most of my athletic ventures.
3 There ARE reasons, so this isn't REALLY about sports, mind you, but childhood. Let me share a story about why I decided not to become a football player.
4 As a young guy, I remember my dad taking me up to Niner games, at a time when you could walk on the field after a game and slap those huge visagoths on the shoulder pads. There was blood. There was mud. There were seagulls. And I loved all of it.
5 So in football, I loved playing street. I loved running to the Ford pickup and doing a buttonhook.
6 In high school I was too small to play football. Actually, that's just an excuse because the workouts always looked horribly grueling to me, especially during the August heat.
7 But that was my excuse.
8 We had this park in San Bruno named affectionately San Bruno Park, where they would have lights on at night and you could play some great games with friends.
9 In my Freshmen year, I tore it up at those games. I was a sterling running back and hard to bring down because of my tree-trunk legs, and it was a lot of fun.
10 I toyed with the idea of trying out for football the next year, but all that came to a close one fine evening when I ran into this fellow name Ah Jim.
11 Ah Jim was this Senior tackle on the varsity, a huge Samoan fellow who had a reputation for beating people to a pulp if they so much as looked at him sideways.
12 He also had an I.Q. of two, which meant you could still outhink the guy.
13 He used to go down to the park and play in our games just so he could annihilate all of us and make his presence known. His persona is still burned into my mind, to this day. He was an animal on the field. He was savage, and he was huge. In short, Ah Jim was just plain scary.
14 One fine evening when the mud was up, the grass plodded in our ears and eyes, and the lights of the field shining brightly in the evening, we played a hard game and toward the end I had made some sort of stupid play.
15 After the game, Ah Jim and his cronies came up after murdering us on the field, and said, "Good game, man."
16 As he walked off, I just shook my head and said, "Man, I just made a stupid move on that last play." My friends and I began walking off when I saw the silhouette of Ah Jim and the Boyz walking back towards us. He walked right up to me and looked down. He was literally steaming.
17 "You call me stupid man?" he asked, more of a challenge.
18 "I...I didn't call you stupid, Jim. I said I made a stupid play."
19 He looked at his boyz. "He call me stupid."
20 They all looked at me with pitch black eyes. My fear was palpable. I began praying to Saint Peter, Saint Paul, Saint Francis, and finally, Saint Jude, whom I believed to be the patron Saint of Lost Causes. And I always prayed to Saint Christopher, because every Catholic kid on the planet had a Saint Christopher medal around their necks, just for moral support.
21 I needed it. I looked up at Ah Jim and the Boyz. They surrounded me, and my friends looked desperately into one another's eyes.
22 Ah Jim stared down at me, the very essence of the Demon from Fantasia. I saw his very demon eyes shining brighter than the stadium lights shining over the top of his head. For a brief moment I knew I was at the gates of Hades, and Ah Jim was the gatekeeper. I certainly was nowhere near the familiar field where I had run for so much yardage for the past two months. I waited for him to begin talking in tongues, and for the first time in my short life, I felt true fear.
23 But to my astonishment, Ah Jim just stared, looked to his toadies, and with a shrug of his head, told them to leave. They moved off and he turned to me. I thought he was going to say something, but instead he shook me off, turned, and walked off without a word.
24 I stood astonished on the grassy turf, feeling the mud caked on my cheeks. My friends surrounded me, but not much was said for fear of the acute hearing of Ah Jim.
25 Later that night we went to my house for Hostess treats and cheap soda, which my dad had always in abundance. Our garage refrigerator, a model built in the forties, still kept things cold, and we feasted on cold Cupcakes and Suzi-Q's and told tales of what we should have done, of what we should have said, and laughed into the night.
26 Later, when everyone had gone, and I had taken a nice bath and climbed into my very safe twin bed, I looked up at the ceiling and decided that my football days were now behind me.
27 All sorts of thoughts occurred to me that evening. The shadows in my room kept changing with my thoughts, and I finally suspended my thoughts into an almost Zen state.
28 At that brief moment, I made the sign of the cross and felt myself in a state of eternal grace and comfort for the first time all night.
29 And I prayed. I knew from my early Catechism training that once you've made the sign of the cross, you'd better talk. One of my severe nuns had told me that when you make the sign of the cross, you have dialed God's phone number, so you'd better start your message.
30 I prayed, but this time it was a thank you to all God's saints.
31 I thanked Saint Peter, Saint Paul, Saint Francis, and Saint Jude. And most of all I clutched my medal and thanked Saint Christopher, who to many young Catholic boys, was the Superman of the Saints.
32 I slept as I had never slept before, and perhaps better than I've ever slept since.
33 I decided that evening that I was never going to become a football player, and that I was going to hang up my cleats before ever even getting them.
34 I remained an avid Niner fan, and vicariously took on the high-kicking Roger Craig as my fantasy of how I would have run in the NFL, but really, I enjoyed watching other guys going out there and fighting directly with their own versions of Ah Jim and the Boyz.
35 Since that time, I became educated, came to doubt much of my Catholic upbringing, watched as Saint Christopher was given his pink slip by the Church, and tried to figure out all the rule changes.
36 But I never stopped praying at night, whether consciously or subconsciously.
37 And as far as I know, I still have the other saints, my new favorite of whom is Saint Jude.
38 And as far as I know, I'll never stop loving sports, or God, or even Saint Christopher, for that matter.
39 Enjoy your weekend, and stay in good graces with life.
40 See you Monday.
41 Peace.
~H~
http://www.xanga.com/bharrington
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