My Sporting History
I’ve never been much for sports. Looking back, my sporting experiences have been disappointing. The one exception was Swedish Dodgeball in high school. For some unknown reason, that was the most popular game in the high school I went to.
The point of Swedish Dodgeball was to hit people with the ball. If they were hit, they were out, and then they’d go back behind the other team’s line and join in trying to hit whoever was left. In that game, I was magic. Untouchable. By the end of the game, it always came down to me and whoever was left on the other team.
My secret, of course, was fear of being whacked with the ball. They used a regular volleyball, which wasn’t nearly soft enough for me. Nerf dodgeball I could have handled. The girls shrieked ‘ouch’ and the boys made stoic grunting sounds when they were hit. It was a sadistic sport. I don’t remember ever actually being hit (though I suppose I must have been), but I do remember going to almost supernatural lengths to avoid the ball.
More advanced version of the game involved multiple balls, so in addition to being incredibly coordinated you had to have eyes in the back of your head. I could do that. Fear of pain will spur a body to feats of magic. I’ve always had a low pain threshold; I allowed myself to become pregnant only by dint of conveniently forgetting (until the eighth month) that pain was (gulp) centrally involved, then spending the last month in terror listening to ubiquitous tales from other women relating their own childbearing agonies in salacious, play-by-play detail.
But I am speaking of sports. My only other brief spasm of sports-related activity was as an adult. I played ladies’ rec softball for a single season. I got better fast; in fact, I won the trophy for ‘most improved player’… but that doesn’t mean I got good. It just shows how really, really pathetic I was at the beginning.
Nothing could have induced me to play a second season, though. Way too much pain. I couldn’t handle a game that involved actually trying to make physical contact with the ball; not a big soft squishy ball, either, but a hard round missile that left purpling bruises all over my body. I could never quite catch those bouncing low grounders..
By the end of my first and last season playing softball, my legs weren’t fit to be seen in shorts. I looked like I’d been mugged by a midget. If the point of the game had been to avoid the ball, I could’ve been a star, but as it was, I was middling pathetic, flinching away instead of chasing after the ball, and then getting hit in the legs anyway.
Softball was a masochistic game all around. Everything resulted in pain. Sprinting at top speed from a standing start, whacking a hard ball with a hard wooden bat and screeching to sudden bone-jarring stops all resulted in various agonies in hips, shoulders and other wrenchable joints. And for what? The rewards were never clear to me, while the punishments were obvious. Even the best players hurt after a game. It was a joke.
My other problem with softball, aside from the pain thing, was I could never get the hang of how to throw the ball properly. Naturally, I threw ‘like a girl’. I couldn’t figure that out. Why didn’t boys throw like that? Was there a “Secret Order of Balls (S.O.B.)†in which boys were initiated into proper throwing techniques and warned, on pain of expulsion from the brotherhood, never to reveal the sacred mysteries to a female?
Not being much of a conspiracy theorist, I eventually decided it must be a matter of anatomy. Boys’ arms were jointed differently than girls. The occasional girl or woman who could throw the ball properly must have had some boy genes somewhere. Then there were boys like my brother who also threw like girls. Well, clearly they lacked the ball-throwing boy gene.
Now, I’m told it’s a simple matter of technique: how you ‘cock your elbow’ (hmm…). I’ve been assured that I could easily be taught to throw a ball much farther than I ever dreamed possible. Even if it’s true, frankly, I’m not interested. There’s still the pain problem, and the question ‘why bother?’ has never been adequately answered.