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Livin’ Large

Posted by Mark | Filed under Life

This post over on Dooce’s blog, reminded me of some of the crap joy I’ve had to deal with grow­ing up. See, I’m about 6’5″ tall and not the least bit scrawny. So I always got the ques­tions from Aunts & Uncles (e.g. “when are you going to join the basketball/football/whateverball team?”). Unfor­tu­nately for them, I spent my early for­ma­tive years in North Car­olina and what we played down there, back then, was soc­cer. Bas­ket­ball was for older kids and foot­ball was maybe somthing that you could do in your back­yard; if you couldn’t afford a soc­cer ball and some shin guards.

Then I moved form NC to Iowa and up here (back then) there really wasn’t any where to play soc­cer. You basi­cally had your choice of bas­ket­ball or foot­ball; nei­ther of which I give a fig for. My favorite mem­ory of this sort of thing was when I met the coach at my 2nd high school and told him that I had no inter­est in either bas­ket­ball or foot­ball. I could just see the dis­ap­point­ment build in his eyes.

Then again, I prob­a­bly shouldn’t rel­ish that moment because he more than got his revenge on me in the next 3 years of PhysEd classes. *ugh*

But the main thing about dooce’s post that reminded me of my own expe­ri­ences was vol­ley­ball. While hav­ing me on your team was no guar­an­tee of win­ning¹; it cer­tainly helped. What really helped was my “back­handed beeeatch-slap return” (patent-pending); see I’d be stand­ing next to the net wait­ing for the ball to come over. I’d have my hands clasped ready to bump the ball back up, but I’d get bored wait­ing for the it, look up for the ball, see it hang­ing there just over the next and with my back still to the next reach up and smack the ball with the back of my hand. This worked rather like a low-flying spike; except that the other team almost never saw it com­ing because I was fac­ing the wrong way. Ah, those were the days. *grin*

Oh for the record, my other 2 favorite activ­i­ties in PhysEd class were Archery (I read too many fan­tasy nov­els) and floor hockey. Gods, I loved play­ing that game. Sim­ply because I can fondly recall the kids who I truly dis­liked run­ning full-tilt at me with the puck; expect­ing me to either move aside or fall down. Let’s think about this a moment; I’m 6’5″ and I wasn’t a skinny lit­tle kid. Dude, in floor hockey, I was the WALL. I didn’t dodge and I didn’t fall down. That’s what the other kids had to do. Muha­ha­ha­haha! Okay, I really should be doing some work; so that’s enough writ­ing for now.

¹ I’ve absolutely no jump­ing abil­ity what­so­ever, which makes some hits dif­fi­cult to counter and is one of the rea­sons I hated basketball.