Americans are sports nuts. Every kid today has to “have a sport,” meaning he or she has to excel at this sport, mainly so that the parents can brag on Facebook and dream of being supported by a kid who makes it in “the big time.”
My parents didn’t see much hope of my supporting them as a pro athlete.
I got off to a bad start in my sports career. In my California elementary school, sports were games like dodge ball and doing flips on the bars. Like the other girls, I wanted to perfect my flip, which was done by hooking one knee around the bar and spinning forward, down and then upright again.
When I hoisted myself up the first time and flung myself upside down on the bar, some fourth grade bumpkin yelled out from the boys’ side of the playground, “I see yur pannies! Har-har-har!!”
Well, if this was a “sport,” it was personally embarrassing and I wanted nothing to do with it.
Besides, I didn’t have enough momentum to flip myself upright again, so Bumpkin got quite a look at the “pannies” while I dangled there, and the bell to end recess forced me to let go so that I dropped to the ground like a dying bug.
Thus, besides finding out that the sporting life was embarrassing, I learned that it was also painful.
My junior high and high school required PE every day, so I learned more about sports than I cared to know.
As I cycled through months of team and individual sports, I began to divide them into the Painful Sports and the Not So Painful Sports.
The Not So Painful ones consisted of volleyball (though you can jam your fingers easily), race walking and—my personal favorite—badminton. A shuttlecock can slam toward you at top speed in a stiff breeze and hardly make a dent in your hairdo, much less a hole in your head.
Swimming didn’t hurt, but I went home every day that term looking like a drowned rat, and drowning was an ever-present possibility.
But I had to list most of these activities in my Painful Sports category.
I learned that basketball was a game in which Really Tall Girls ran over Really Short Girls who were foolish enough to take possession of the ball. As a Really Short Person, comparatively, I quickly saw that the way to survive this sport was to step out of the way and politely hand the ball to Amazonia as she charged me.
“Is this what you’re looking for?” I’d ask as politely as possible, handing the ball over with a smile. Coaches hated me.
In high school, we took gymnastics every year. All the events look graceful, but they require superhuman strength. Which I didn’t have, being a devotee of afterschool TV and sweet snacks. I regularly fell off the sidehorse, which caused me to lose feeling in my body for several hours. Which caused me to add the sidehorse event to my list of Painful Sports.
I took tennis many times. The lessons were fun — nice instructors gently tossing a ball right in front of my racket so I could hit it.
In a real tennis game, my opponent, usually some dropout from the Mike Tyson Anger Management School, didn’t serve the ball to me as much as aim it at me. A little racket flailing in the air isn’t much defense against a fuzzy orange missile hurtling toward your head. And there’s all that running and sweating. Tennis went on the Painful List.
When I got to college, I took archery, which seemed innocent enough. Then I was introduced to string slap. And I took bowling, which brought me too close to a ruptured disk. And modern dance. It looked easy, all that gentle swaying, but the contortions tied knots in my gym shorts that left blisters.
I was forced to take soccer at Ole Miss on Saturday mornings, back when that institution was experimenting with Saturday classes. Being kicked in the shins on a rainy, 30 degree morning when all my friends were snoring away in a warm economics class really dampened my love for the game and the school. I left before they signed me up for Advanced Feral Hog Wrestling on Sundays at 6 a.m.
After a life of physical travail, I did finally find my sport. I am now a Monday Night Football Fanatic. Oh, yes! Watching football is a sport!
A quarterback like Dak Prescott running the option gets my adrenaline up better than a twirl over the bars with my pannies showing! I get plenty of exercise dashing to the kitchen for ice cream during halftime. I can even classify Monday Night Football viewing as one of the Painful Sports! I get cramps in my legs jumping out of my chair so many times yelling at the coaches to run a different play. And all those trips to the kitchen for snacks are murder on your arches!
If I had only found this sport earlier, I could have saved myself years of more serious scrapes, bruises and dents. Not to mention embarrassment. And lots of wear and tear on those pannies.
