My Athletic Prime

I was in seventh grade, a seventh grade Texan.  I was going to play football.  Of course, I was also less than 5ft tall and might have weighed 80 pounds.  I vividly remember my mom crying both when she signed the permission slip and then again the morning of my first practice.  Confidence instilling stuff!  Adding to my budding ego, there were basically two descriptions given to me: pain in the ass, by my teachers, and cute, by every adult in the world and any girl that could be considered even remotely cute.

I lasted one season.  The highlight of that would be one series on defense (I 'played' corner back) where I played three straight plays.  On the first play, the receiver, who must have been eight inches my superior, shoved straight on to my rear.  Fortunately, the ball went to the other side of the field.  On the final play, the opposing team, Truman Middle School, ran a quarterback option right at me (smart) and I tackled the quarterback right after he made the pitch.  15 years later and I can still vividly remember this.

As an eighth grader, I tried out for the basketball team.  I was, admittedly, terrible.  Somehow, you don't know these things when you are in eighth grade.  All I remember about try-outs was that I had a fast break and shot a fall away jumper from the right wing over Pat Chilton's outstretched hands and made it.  I was sure that this would get me on the team.  I was wrong.

As a freshman in high school, I had sprouted up to 5'1" and was tipping the scales at about 95lbs, soaking wet.  My friends, Seth and Blake, convinced me to join the wrestling team.  I was actually really excited and thought that I could compete.  Then I realized that I was still ten pounds shy of the lowest weight class of 103 pounds...and that I would have to wear a singlet.  Could anything be more frightening to a pre-pubescent freshman boy than wearing a singlet?

I quit.

No worries though, baseball was coming in the spring; baseball was my sport.  This might have been the one sport that I really felt confident playing.  I had played since I was old enough to pick up a bat.  I once let my dad take stitches out of my face because I didn't want to miss a game.  The doctors appointment was the same time as my game and he gave me two options: miss the game and let the doctor do it, or play and he could do it.  This was the biggest decision of my life, and I was only eight years old.

I should have known that I was in trouble when I was not one of the ten freshmen guys in off-season baseball.  Still, I was buddies with most of these guys and they assured me I had a chance.  To this day, I am not sure how they got into baseball before I even had a chance.  With 3000+ students and no freshmen team, the coach apparently didn't see need to keep me.  I think I knew this was going to happen, but I was still devastated.  I played city ball and got ready for next year.

Singing and dancing is a sport right?

Next year, same story, although I was up to about 5'3" and broke the century mark on the scales.  By junior year I was close to 5'6" and I graduated at 6'1", perfect timing for me to join the football team. Ahhhhhhhhhh!

That is the history of my high school athletic experience. A sad tale indeed.

So how did I get from that kid to someone who is nearly unbearably competitive/confident?  I could go into that, but this blog is really too long already.  The short story is that I realized I was relatively athletic while playing in a counselor basketball tournament while working at Sky Ranch Summer Camp.  I was playing with my friend Quinn Vidrine and he kept telling me that I was a lot better than I thought I was.  This was also the last time someone ever told me that.

So now that you have some background, I bring you to my athletic prime.  I play slow pitch softball in a Bangkok softball league and we won the year-end tournament this last weekend in perhaps the greatest softball game every played.

We stormed through the first three rounds undefeated to make it to the title game.  All we had to do was win one out of two games to take home the trophy.  We started off pretty slow and had a disaster 5th inning where we gave up eight runs.  It didn't get much better and we found ourselves down 10 runs in the bottom of the 7th (the final inning).  We were down to three outs and everyone was expecting a second game.  Most of our team was thinking about a second game at this point.

That is when we began our onslaught.  Our worst hitter started things off with a single up the middle.  A few batters later, I came up with a couple of runners on and singled to plate a run.  We were down 13-12 with two outs when my boy Ryan came up to bat and tied things up with a double.  13-13, two outs, the winning run on second base, and our best hitter is up to bat.  The smart thing to do here is walk him.  The only thing to do is walk him.  I actually thought they were going to walk him and our four hitter to get to me.  Instead, they chose to pitch to him.

And that is the story of how the Big Canadian, Bruce, brought home the championship with a walk-off two run homerun!

I was voted all-league left field and was invited to play in an international tournament in Jakarta next month.  So, a mere ten eleven years after graduating high school, I finally made the team!

2011 BISL Champions

Comeback of the century!

Back Row: Tenn, Bob, Isaac, Daved, Dan, Bruce, Tim
Front Row: Phil, Tim, Ryan, Pao, Dave, Eli, Rick