My Day In The Sun

When I was in high school, there was little to recommend me as an athlete. There was more then than there is now, given that I am different only in being that much older. At the very least, I was more earnest in trying to do what the PE teacher asked of us than many of my classmates. Even in their indifference, they tended to outclass me in terms of strength, speed, agility and about any other measure. PE was a subject that I endured more than anything, my affection for sports notwithstanding.

I often thing about something rather interesting that happened one day, when I had the novel experience of being handed a task in my wheelhouse. One of the PE teachers, who was also a coach on the football team, approached me with the request that I think up some codes for audibles that they could call. The simple idea was that each word of a code phrase ought to start with the same letter as its corresponding play name. I was asked to come up with a few.

I don't know why the coach saw me as someone to ask. Smart and clever I may have been, but there was no outlet for those qualities that I can think of him seeing. There was no one in class for me to even talk to, really. It may have been as simple as the fact that I was clearly unathletic and wore glasses. Certainly that doesn't make someone smart, but I didn't question that. I was given a chance to excel at something, and I eagerly did my best.

The pressure of being assumed clever made me wilt a bit. Some of the codes I came up with were overly long, hard to say or depended on a familiarity with rather esoteric references to things. The simple ones were better received. I like to think that I played a very, very small role in the team's success of the time, although the smallness of that role probably cannot be overstated. The good news is that the skill I had transferred better to later life than football did for most of the athletic kids, with the exception of the one guy from our team who made it all the way to the pros and today starts for his hometown Cardinals.