By: Keith R. Snell Outsider Outbox Administrator
I think if you ask most people, they’ll tell you about a pivotal moment in their childhood or high school sports days of thrilling victory that made them the hero of the team, if only for a day. Whether it was stealing second and eventually scoring the winning run or scoring a late touchdown to snatch a victory in the crisp air of the Friday night lights. I smile to myself listening to my father-in-law recounting his nearly flawless boxing record in the Vietnam era Navy to my stepson, a gifted soccer player who I began teaching the basic skills to at the tender age of 4. He outclassed me at least by the age of 12.
Something the two of them have in common is they both acknowledge themselves to be “one of the best two or three of the guys on the team.” As an avid sports fan of any level, there’s a thrilling aspect to listening to the stories of your loved ones and experiencing the highs and lows of a game when your team isn’t that of one of a professional nature and your pleasure is derived from cheering on your kids and their friends.
“One of the best two or three guys on the team.” This is a boast I wish I could share, but my own athletic prowess was sorely lacking. I was a consistent benchwarmer in Little League. I played 3rd base and could perform adequately enough in practice (even though my pipsqueak are struggled to make it all the way across the diamond to the 1st basemen), but any of the few chances I had to get into an actual game left me with my own heartbeat pounding in my head, palms sweating, mouth dry, hoping to get through the inning without a groundball or pop-up in my vicinity. Not to mention, I’ve always had difficulty tracking flyballs in the outfield. My lone baseball career hit was a triple to right field and I’ll be honest, no one was more surprised it happened than I was.
This isn’t a story about the Boys of Summer, even though for at least 3 years of my late elementary and early middle school life, I believed I was somehow destined to be the next Gary Gaetti or Jim Gantner. Much to my father’s chagrin, I liked the Minnesota Twins, having grown up on the MN/WI border and even though I was as faithful as I could be to Milwaukee, it was Kent Hrbek, Greg Gagne, Kirby Puckett, and the rest who were at my easiest disposal, not to mention 1987 World Series Champions.
I attended junior high at an asbestos-infested dump of aging bricks called Sorenson Middle School. If you’d ever been to Saint Croix Falls in the ’80s-’90s, you’d know that Sorenson Middle School rested below the height of the valley that runs rather steeply into downtown and that all of the grassy fields, track, and baseball diamonds were accessible by going up a steep hill that spilled into the playground at Saint Croix Falls Elementary.
The middle school’s playground consisted of a semi-flat, but wavy and rocky blacktop surface that was about 4 times the size of a football field and had several four-square and hopscotch courts and a couple of kickball diamonds painted onto its massive acned surface. The 8th graders controlled the action on four-square. If you were lucky, you had a friend with an older sibling that would pull you in once in a while, or maybe the Art Teacher, Mr. Stone, would come out on a nice day and play with the younger kids. Jump-roping had some popularity, but was mostly done by girls and they usually made it clear they didn’t want any shenanigans with the boys.
Some of the boys in my 7th grade class started a lunch recess game of two-hand touch football. I had watched the Packers play with my dad a few times, but not many with Minnesota programming and ’80s Packers football the product that it was. One day, one of my more athletic friends asked me if I wanted to play football with them. I followed him out and did my best to pick up on the rules. My first mistake was rushing the passer without counting out the requisite “apples” which the other team demanded they get an automatic first down met with much grumbling from my side.
By the end of recess, I had a pretty fair grasp of what was expected on both sides of the ball and I felt it was a better use of my time than standing around, freezing my ass off for 40 minutes. Everyday, I would go out and get as creative as I could running my routes, trying to wave to the quarterback to get his attention to throw me the ball. Everyday, I would watch as the teams were divvied up by the captains taking, the tallest, the fastest, the best. Everyday, I would be one of the last picked and I knew, I could feel in my chest that the ball would be coming my way today. I think one pass was thrown to me in desperation and it fell sadly to the ground and skittered across the icy blacktop.
That was it. I knew the door for catching a pass had been slammed shut forever. I tried to focus on becoming better at defense, but it became more apparent every day I was only there to keep the teams at an even number and no one was accounting for me on either side of the ball.
Then I got an idea. It was almost Christmas and my “cool” aunt had drawn my name for my family’s gift exchange. I wrote her a letter and mailed it to her in Arizona asking for a football for Christmas. I could hardly wait for Christmas Day that year, knowing if anyone would get me a football and another chance, it would be my aunt Bert. You see, there was a kind of hierarchy within the ranks of the 7th grade football platform, and that was we always struggled to find a ball to use and whoever had a ball automatically became a captain and you were immediately popular for having your own ball.
It worked! My aunt came through and on Christmas morning I had a beautifully bumpy leather football. My brother, cousins, and my first best friend went out and threw it around for awhile in my grandmother’s snowy front yard. I had never wanted Christmas vacation to end so badly in my life and to this day, I swear it was the only time.
All of the 7th grade boys passed around my ball from hands to hands admiring the leather and stitch work, expressing their utmost admiration and jealousy for such a perfect specimen. The joy I felt as the other boys looked expectantly at me as I put my roster together, trying to decide between friends and height and speed and skill. I didn’t get any action that day, but several of my new best friends assured me my time would be coming and could they please pass my ball to each other as we walked back in the school.
The next few days went much the same as it always had done, except that as long as I had my ball, I was a permanent captain. I honestly don’t remember winning or losing any of these games, but I do remember a few halfhearted attempts at getting the ball to me, all of which ended with anticlimactic splats.
I had just about had enough. Every other player I could think of had more than one touchdown and I didn’t have a single catch in the nearly 3 months I had been playing. Finally, one day I just gave up and just began running go routes straight off the line to see how far I could go before the play had ended. I did this over and over, keeping an eye on the quarterback all the time. After the fourth or fifth time of this, I wasn’t even being covered anymore. It’s really kind of comical to me now thinking how much thought I gave into this considering this was a bunch of 7th graders, none of which had any more expertise than me and not much stronger arms.
Then it happened. I ran right past the defense and there was nobody on my heels at all. I flipped my hips and looked back as both teams were engaged in their tactics. I saw my quarterback look my way, then pump, then move to one side. I kept running and threw up one hand, desperately trying to get his attention. I looked again as the rush was on and the quarterback, with no other options, pumped once, hop-stepped, and fired the ball a hundred miles into the air. I spotted the ball going up, up, and then I slipped on the ice! I slid on one foot for a second, flailing both arms in the air and as the ball began to come down, several of the players on defense recognized their folly and tried to cover as much ground as they could.
I regained my footing and had my arm up, ready to pull the ball in and score an easy touchdown. Remember when I said I was pretty lousy at tracking balls in the air? You can add footballs to that list. The tip of the ball crashed into my ear, knocking my glasses askew. By some miracle of prayer and physics, it bounced off my head and into my half-raised arm. I pulled in the ball, the pain from an ice-cold wet thing to the ear just beginning to make itself known. Touchdown.
There were a lot of murmurs at first, which instantly gave way to cheering. All I could really hear was the throb of the pain coming through with pounding of my heart.
I never became a star athlete, but for one frozen moment in 7th grade, I had the greatest catch the school had ever seen or could remember. A few weeks later, spring came and we switched to baseball. The blacktop caused the stitching on my ball to split and I kept it for awhile, but it was never the same with the little black bladder squeezing out of it. Anyway, after that, I was hooked on football for life.
