Football was my game.
It's been a while, but regardless, I played every sport offered at the Beulah Ruritan Park in my early teenage years, which amounted to baseball and football. It was getting close to time for us all to move on to the more serious middle and high school level game and this was all of our last year to “enjoy” intramural sports. Some of us were twelve and some were thirteen and all of us smelled due to puberty hitting us all within a few weeks of each other, save for the few guys who had been shaving since the third grade. We were all in a moment of change, all of us with cracking voices, stinky arm-pits and excessive bad breath due to the introduction of testosterone into our soon-to-be not so innocent selves.
It was baseball season and all of my friends and I were playing for the Beulah Cardinals. We endured the same coaches coached every year and we all expected the same tyranny that year as in the years past. Our regular baseball coach had assisted in football and was head coach in baseball, but this year he decided he’d take a break from the action, us all certain it was at the insistence of his wife. We would take bets on who, given the right circumstances, would prevail in a fist fight between our baseball coach and his bride. She looked like a Russian weight lifter and my hard-earned grass cutting money was on her, first round, by a knock out. She was a teacher at the high school we’d all eventually attend and not one of us would dare even look at her in fear of her catching us. She taught English Composition and we all knew we’d get our collective asses kicked by her come grade time. If not for us she speculated, there wouldn’t be a need for a baseball coach and her problems were solved. I guessed that he’d sold us out to her in some strange way unbenounced to my tribe. I prayed I’d never have to have her for a class knowing she could indeed make my life miserable someday. When I’d engage her, I’d always hedge my bets by using my best Eddie Haskell style manners, a staple with the twelve to thirteen year old's I called friends. I was sure she’d a seen through my brand of pubescent BS faster than June Cleaver could latch a set of pearls around her neck one-handed. Unfortunately for me, she overheard me speculate she’d have made a better man, seeing she was shaving her whiskers more often than her husband and our coach. That was a joke told while we were sitting in the dugout at practice, us not knowing she was around. It was my turn to cast a dispersion and as soon as I did, she walked into the dugout as if on cue. I was screwed.
When “tryouts” were complete and our coach had decided who might play where, he sat us all in the bleachers to give us some “bad news” as he put it. That news included him not coaching us our final screw off-year before high school sports made every thing we did serious. We'd soon be using the testosterone pumping through our veins to do numerous things, one of which included impressing girls and exercising as much false bravado as humanity could stand. We were passing through the “I need to really act like I don’t give a rat’s ass” phase, a strange ritual giving adults the right to kill all teenagers in most third world countries and a few states in the USA. We had all been together for a number of years, some for a few years and some since kindergarten, but sports was an integral part of our lives. This would be the year we’d all get the surprise of our lives, coaching wise, when our regular coach introduced us to “Coach Man” and his brother “Coach Dude”.
These guys were former hippies. I assumed they had shown up at the park as a part of some parolee program, a requirement to avoid jail or long-term incarceration implemented by the one and only Sheriff Earl Lee, the baddest sheriff this side of Buford T. Pusser AKA Sheriff “Walking Tall”. He was the baddest mutha in the valley and no one whispered a negative word about him, ever. I would get the opportunity to get to know him better in my last year of High School when my best friend at the time and I made a habit of backfiring our engines around everyone from old ladies to small children. He knew we’d done the deed, but he made sure we knew who was in charge in Douglas County by presenting us with numerous photos of blown up mail boxes and eye witnesses that would say they’d seen our hot rods in the general vicinity of the feloniously disemboweled mail boxes and ensuing explosions that had rendered them such. He said he could get us on seventeen felonies but insisted he didn’t want to ruin the lives of two young men with so much promise over backfiring mufflers. I agreed with his assessment and never exceeded the speed limit from that day forward. He was a great sheriff and had national notoriety due to his need to keep the citizens of our county safe. I will finish by saying if a person wants to make biscuits, he’s gotta get some flour on his hands. Sheriff Lee made great biscuits, but unfortunately he got more than his fair share of flour on his hands, shoes, floor, walls and any other person outside of the boundaries of his hedge of law and justice delivered southern style. I will finish by saying every child molester and wife abuser in our county he got a hold of resisted arrest, as it should be. He was quite unpopular with the left leaning liberal media and the ACLU. I had no argument with him. He could have cast me and my buddy down with the “sodomites” over the mailbox incident, but let us off with a warning knowing we’d not blown up any mailboxes but did indeed need to stop scaring the elderly and small children. It was a great lesson for me. My buddy at the time…not so much.
More Wednesday! I hope you enjoy!
No comments:
Post a Comment