The end of summer in saw the beginning of a new world for me. I became a freshman in high school. Beyond the obvious torments of adolescence such as which after shave to wear after learning to shave, the embarrassment of having to commune with indifferent older women in the hallways of Princeton High School, the self-consciousness of being bullied by upper classmen, the fear of Clearasil not working, the confusion of algebra, the rage at being too young to drive a car I didn’t even have, and the disgust over being short, there loomed the loss of all the things that gave me confidence, that made me enjoy my own place in the world of rural Indiana. My baseball glove was oiled and stored for winter, my swimming trunks folded neatly and tucked away, my bicycle chained inside the storage shed along with my former identity as leader of the pack of tanned and terrible men children who had been allowed free reign over the neighborhood. Of course, our mischief was restricted to breaking an occasional window, scaring cats with cherry bombs, shoplifting bubble gum baseball cards, and irritating girls, and it brought instant, often painful, reprisals from our fathers.
Too young for sex and before the advent of wholesale drugs, with nothing to smoke but grape vines or corn silks and nothing to drink but Kool-Aid, we represented no major threat to the status quo and were not capable of any assault on adult lifestyles. The freedom our parents allowed us because of our harmlessness made me feel like a king. Now, it was gone. I had pimples. I had lost myself in an ocean of angst. No one knew my name, and no one cared. This was high school. Like two hundred other freshmen, I was unremarkable and remained that way until our principal assembled us in the gymnasium to introduce the new football coach, a huge, sloppy-dressed, square-jawed monster descended from a vague, swarthy ancestry. His name was Syd. He drooled when he spoke and spoke with the timbre of a bullfrog in a sort of jock strap patois. Whatever Syd offered, I felt would be necessary to accept as a part of my bildungsroman narrative and offer he did.
“Youse are now becoming men. I know that basketball is king in Indiana, but I’m gonna change that very soon. Football tryouts start tomorrow especially for freshmen. You can join the elite among your brethren, be there or be square. 4PM at Lowell Field.”
Syd was correct about one thing. Basketball garnered the most attention in our small town. People considered it as the one thing that could put a small town on the map, especially after 1954. Milan, Indiana, with a total population of less than 2,000 citizens and a high school that boasted 161 students, defeated the big-city Muncie Bearcats for the state high school basketball championship. This was in an era before politically correct adjustments were adopted in all things competitive. No divisions of teams based on school enrollment existed. No divisions existed to exalt the mediocre and handicap the best. If you wanted to floor a basketball team, you had to be willing to run with the big dogs.
Think of every small Indiana town as an Italian village during the 16th century Renaissance. Italy produced much of the world’s greatest art during that period. Raphael, Michelangelo, Donatello, and Leonardo were artists long before they were ninja turtles, and their works hang in museums all over the world today. How did a country so small give birth to dozens of world-famous painters in that era? Simple. Every male child born got a paint brush and a palette. When he could sit up, his parents propped him in front of a canvas and hired him a coach. The same thing happened in Indiana during the 1950’s only with basketballs. Every father who could manage to buy one put one in his kid’s hands and built a hoop from a bottomless bushel basket in the backyard. What is cultivated in a garden grows there.
Joining our elite basketball brethren, on the other hand, might have been a slightly over-ambitious promise for Syd, or else his English wasn’t good enough to understand the word elite. Sure, we played football here. Princeton High School even fielded some solid, albeit mediocre, gridiron teams through the 1950’s. The coach Syd replaced had been offered and taken a position at a larger school with a much better developed program based, at least partly, on his achievements in Princeton. Of course, his father being a football legend boosted his resume considerable.
Nevertheless, our school board had high hopes for Syd and this being his first head coach position, he was a table rosa full of confidence and swagger. So, out we went in those humid late summer dog days. The football field was in a small rectangle of turf between Lowell Junior High, a new building already cracked from top to bottom after being built over a shifting foundation of loose dirt and a multiple story building of red brick over a hundred years old, currently home to the elementary school. Both buildings and the field stood behind our local movie theater. The theater, owned and operated by a strange man with a toupee that bounced like a live ferret in the wind, faced Broadway Street, the main east-west artery in town. All of this was several blocks from the actual high school, but no one ever questioned the logistics. Looking back on it, I think it was simply a matter of convenience. If you wanted a celluloid comedy, you could go to a movie. If a more visceral form of laughter suited you, you could watch us play football.
Deep within the elementary school bowels, an old locker room languished unused except for three months in the late summer and autumn. The room smelled of must and mold and Pine Sol disinfectant. Wire basket lockers lined the concrete block walls. A few feet from the only doorway and down a dimly lit hall the communal shower room opened as if you had walked out of a cave into a meadow on a cloudy gray day. Other than the shower room, everything had been freshly painted with colors that drifted between green limes and yellow puke. Ironically, the shower room was the only room with windows in this basement. They were at ground level, frosted, and allowed in the slight hint of sunlight during after school practice. All our games were played on Friday nights under powerful floodlights that focused the sparse crowds on every mistake we made, and we would make many my freshman year.
The first day of practice quickly disintegrated into the next and the next and the next, each one a deeper descent in Dante’s pigskin-layered hell, and it soon became clear that Syd worked for Satan. We ran. Oh my god, we ran every day—wind sprints, laps, plays, pass patterns. Sometimes we ran in gym shorts and other times we lumbered like a herd of buffalo in full contact regalia—shoulder pads, helmets, cleats, cups, and thigh pads. The linemen hit the tackling dummy. The rest of us high-stepped through tires and butted shoulder pads. Old Earl, an assistant coach who had been around since my father graduated high school, led calisthenics—jumping jacks, pushups, squat thrusts, sit-ups—to loosen us up before the hard work started. I still remember his bird legs and barrel chest and his grey wavy mane. When he shouted out drills, you could imagine a barnyard banty rooster strutting the perimeter keeping the chickens in tight formation. “Push yourself, McGarrah. You’re going to war. You want to be a warrior or a woman. One more sit-up Truxal and skip the donuts tomorrow. Truxal, get your head out of your ass.” Earl was a Christian and only allowed himself one or two curse words a practice. When you heard one fly, you knew there was a serious breach of manly etiquette on the part of the receiver.
***
It’s almost 100 degrees Fahrenheit in southern Indiana during late August and the humidity makes the air feel as if you’re running through piles of steam-heated wool blankets. Before even beginning full-contact drills and scrimmages, I was raising questions in my own mind as to my sanity.
What drives a boy on the cusp of puberty to exercise such bad judgment as to punish his body the way football practice requires wasn’t one of those questions even though I might be reflecting on it as an arthritic old man now. A person must be self-aware to ask things like that. No. My questions were geared to simpler thoughts at a simpler age. Will this grueling torture I’m going through impress girls? Will my dad be proud of the way I handle pain? At 5 feet and four inches and 130 pounds can I see over the scrimmage line as quarterback? How can being a lean mean fighting machine help me lose the nickname “short stuff” and impress the girls? Yes, I know I mentioned that one before, but the thought of girls returned to me at least a thousand times a day. Those questions motivated a lot of my less-than-brilliant actions through my early twenties, including a tour of duty with the Marine Corps in the jungles of Vietnam.
I have only recently begun thinking in terms of bildungsroman and the Jungian search for the Holy Grail as a living myth. What makes a man a man? At what age do we no longer see our fathers as perfect and take on the struggle of finding our own identity? Are men hard-wired for testosterone-fueled adventure? Are we incapable of monogamy and born as chauvinists? Beyond these internal issues, external pressures that once seemed normal have been exposed recently by demands for equality from the female gender who have suffered since Biblical times from our Judeo-Christian patriarchal nonsense.
In 1950’s and 1960’s American society, white males were required to fit into strict roles of masculinity that generated misogyny, racism, imperialism, violence, homophobia and several other forms of assholery in order to earn the title of men. Yes, I know that I’m no expert anthropologist, psychologist, or sociologist. But I lived in all these roles during this era, and I understand the corruptness inherent in them all. The problem with this awareness is the problem with bread. No matter how thin you slice it there is always two sides. Shakespeare was a white male along with DaVinci, Jonas Salk, Louis Pasteur, Newton, Churchill, Socrates, Joe DiMaggio, Einstein, and many others who had made Western Civilization better by their presence.
The more I consider these complicated issues as I age, the more I am convinced that white males are molded by society into a combination of Hitler and Jesus. Individual choices determine which personality dominates and how extremely. However, the questions that nagged me at the age of fourteen, although less thoughtful, seemed almost uncontrollably urgent at that time. When Syd pulled me into his office at the high school the week before our first game for a pep talk, those were the ones that motivated my dreams.
“McGarrah, you’re almost a midget.”
“Not quite, Coach.” I was too afraid to call him Asshole.
“I know you’re a freshman and you’ll be quarterbacking the freshman team, but I want you to consider yourself second-string varsity quarterback in case Ritchie gets hurt. I’m gonna straighten this program out and we’ll have a great season. I’ll see you get some playing time when we get far enough ahead each game. Experience is important.”
Syd was true to his promise. I got some varsity playing time my freshman year. Our first game on a September Friday night took place at Lowell Field. We suited up to the sounds of pads knocking, laughter, adhesive tape being torn, cleats rat-a-tatting across the cement floor, and a few of the more savage upperclassmen banging their helmeted heads against the walls to fire up the testosterone replacing brain cells. The stench of Absorbine, sweat, anticipation, and anxiety filled the room. Two players puked. Several of us grabbed a handful of salt tablets from the dispenser on the wall and swallowed them. In those days, the common wisdom required salt to replace what we sweated out. In a few years, some genius would discover that salt tablets impacted performance because they were almost impossible to digest. They caused diarrhea, which led to dehydration. Once sports nutritionists learned that they had the opposite effect than the one intended, Gatorade was invented.
As our pre-game excitement built in the locker room, Syd entered with a local pastor. I don’t remember what denomination, only that Jesus was on our side and as good Christian boys we would slaughter the opposing team with his help. We should try not to hurt ourselves, but if the other team ended up in the hospital, we were forgiven. Syd gave a short pep talk when the preacher left.
“This is my first head coaching job and I don’t intend on you animals ruining it. Do your jobs and kill these fuckers.”
As the year went on, Syd developed a new language for addressing us that consisted of a string of epithets alternating between English, French, and Arabic along with an occasional polysyllabic connecting noun or verb. His cursing fits became so legendary that it was rumored a group of worried fathers accosted him one halftime and asked him to “tone it down” a bit.
“Kill,” he screamed.
“Kill,” we replied in unison.
“Kill.”
“Kill”
“Kill.”
“Kill.”
It was the primal call and response of the ancient pagan warrior tribes. We breeched the double doors that led from the basement locker room and thundered down the concrete steps onto the field, a herd of puppy-clumsy adolescents primed for violence. Sweat burned our pimpled faces. The surrealistic lighting from the high flood lights cast a pale blue glow over the field lined with white stripes at ten-yard intervals. An electric hum washed over my ears and I couldn’t tell if it was the lights, the millions of gnats and mosquitoes, or my own adrenaline. A feeling ran through me like a brush fire, something more than I ever felt on a baseball field or a basketball court. This was a battle. Contact would be made. Darwin would be proud.
The team ran between the arch of the goalpost and hustled to the benches on our side of the fifty-yard line. The crowd roared. Okay, I’m getting a little carried away here. Memory is always annoyed by a fractious little child called Imagination throwing tantrums. The small group of parents, a sparse cheering section, and a lackluster pep band applauded a little. The pep band began playing our theme song “Hold That Tiger” and the cheerleaders twirled their red and white pom poms almost enthusiastically. The opposing team engaged in warm-up drills across the field, indifferent to our majestic presence. Their indifference to our presence lasted throughout all four quarters. The score equaled a basketball number on their side and a baseball shutout on ours. I no longer remember except that it was some huge double-figure number to zero.
From that night forward, Syd’s quest for a perfect season was realized. We lost every single game, although we may have scored a touchdown in one or two. I received varsity playing time but only after each game reached a point of hopelessness. The sportswriter for the Princeton Daily Clarion gave me a nice write-up after we were slaughtered, and I was buried in the mud during the fourth quarter of a game against the Mt. Carmel Aces. He said that our team found hope in the form of a freshman signal caller, me. Apparently, the writer was unaware that hope isn’t found. It’s earned, and I was more of a tackling dummy that quarterback. The freshman team, Tiger Cubs, fared a little better. We tied one game and I set a school record, fourteen passes and fourteen completions with a total of lost yardage—a feat that to my knowledge remains unequaled in the annals of Indiana football. You see, it was true. I wasn’t tall enough to see over the line of scrimmage very well and all those passes were made out in the flat behind or right at the line where I could clearly identify the running back. Several of those backs found themselves tackled before making any headway at all.
***
This brings me to my sophomore year of high school in which Syd’s desire for a winning season had been reduced to winning a game. The season ended midway through for me. I tipped the scales at barely 140 pounds. Over the course of my sports career including, baseball, basketball, and finally football, the family doctor had tapped and drained blood from an injured left knee, set a broken finger, slung a cracked elbow, and put a cast on a broken ankle. He warned me at my physical exam that the ten pounds I gained between seasons was not enough to make playing football worthwhile. My mother lived in constant fear of my being irreparably broken. Their concerns were realized during a weekly pre-game scrimmage by one of my own teammates who dislocated my shoulder with a vicious tackle trying to impress Syd. The scrimmage was intended to be at three-quarters speed, not full-out. Oh, did I mention…the linebacker that tackled me was my older brother, Jerry.
The injury sidelined me for the entire rest of the football season and most of basketball season as well. I had to have the joint repaired by an orthopedic surgeon, which effectively ended my football career. I made a half-hearted attempt at a comeback my senior year with our new coach but quit before the first game with a sore shoulder.
In the end, the pain seemed worth it. That sophomore year my brother treated me more like a human. My mother babied me for months. My father thanked me for not embarrassing him as my brother did by playing another entire schedule and not winning a game. The idea that any sports team from our hometown could go two years without so much as a single victory was almost as big a tragedy as the St. Louis Cardinals losing the pennant in 1962 and 1963.
No one could foretell the future, but the Cardinals did win the pennant in 1964 and the Princeton High School football team did win a few football games in the years that followed our perfect record seasons. However, Syd was gone, having been unceremoniously fired and replaced by a less angry, less vulgar-talking coach who convinced the team that sometimes mediocrity is a victory. I guess that brings me to the point of this memory. I recently re-read Kurt Vonnegut’s brilliant fiction story called Harrison Bergeron. Harrison lived in a society where excelling at anything was a crime. The government had determined that equality and mediocrity were synonyms. If you had talents like Harrison in athletics, science, critical thinking, or any ability that demonstrated you were more than ordinary, you were criminalized and hunted down. If you had a thought that questioned the status quo, an electric charge issued by special headgear everyone wore to register the thought zapped through your brain and erased it painfully.
The story was genius-conceived satire and exposed a problem with America’s cultural movement toward mediocrity as the epitome of equality in a democracy. But the older I get the more I notice a slight flaw in applying that extreme satire universally in our current world. I will always be a mediocre tennis player and a mediocre husband. The difference lies in the fact that I always try my hardest when playing tennis and the result often comes up short because I lack the inherent ability to be great. While all men are equipped to be good husbands, my attempts at marriage have often been lackadaisical. I can rightfully claim mediocrity as my best effort on the tennis court. There is no shame in that because it I did my best. As a husband, I often struggle with a restless mind and an emotionally lazy attitude. The difference between those opposite approaches is often the difference between joy and misery, progress and inertia, and yet both may result in mediocre outcomes.
My football memories have taught me this lesson. After the Syd debacle, our football program under new direction began to win some games and that trend has continued for decades. Basketball remains king in Indiana and the Princeton football program will probably continue to be a mediocre example of high school football programs. However, I feel some pride in acknowledging that reality because I believe it’s the best they can do and that’s okay.
If I feel unable to rise above average in anything in my life, I have learned to ask myself why and to be aware of my strengths and weaknesses. If I can honestly say upon examination that I have done my best at whatever I’m doing, then mediocrity is not a flaw in my character. It’s simply where I’ve landed on the spectrum of human behavior and genetics. On the other hand, if my actions in everything I do are all I need to do just get by, then I may have joined a cult that seems to be increasing in membership all the time.
Jim McGarrah, Author 