The glory days
Tuesday, Mar 29th, 2011Men often reminisce about their glory days as highschool football stars. I’ve had glory days too, except I didn’t play football but capture the flag. And it was not during highschool but elementary school.
I’ll swallow my humility and be frank: I was the best capture the flag player to have walked the halls of Kinry Road Elementary.
And that was a big deal.
Kids in my neighborhood took capture the flag seriously. The classes would compete. Everyone knew which classes were ahead in the standings at any given time.
For starters, I was exceptionally fast. Not the fastest in the fifth grade, but fast. I knew there was only a handful of kids that could oust me (if only narrowly) in a footrace. I was also a tactician. I would wait until some jock or popular kid made a run for the flag. Then when both teams were distracted by the popular kid’s (often futile) attempt to capture the flag, I made a run for it.
Sometimes I didn’t even run. I inconspicuously walked over to the opposing team’s flag and “captured” it. I didn’t pretend to be a member of the opposing team but I didn’t make an effort to clear up any possible misconceptions either. Granted, if I had the reputation of a jock or if I was popular, people would have noticed me walking casually across the boundary line. But my incompetence at sports at large afforded me the reputation of someone other than a jock. And my social ineptitudes afforded me the reputation of something other than popular.
Humble beginnings
I’ll regurgitate my humility and be frank: I was considered a loser. Everyone in that school hated me like death. In fact, the only reason I developed quick legs was from running away from the bullies playing kill the carrier during recess in the previous grade.
If you’re not familiar, kill the carrier is when one person – the carrier — runs with a ball in-hand while everyone chases him. Everyone uses any means necessary to get the ball, even if that means tackling the carrier. The kids in my class had two creative twists on the game. First, I was always the carrier, even after I had been tackled – repeatedly – over the course of our 45-minute recess break. Second, when they caught me, they literally tried to kill me.
Always running for my life, I was the Forest Gump of Kinry Road Elementary. Except, unlike Forest, my chasers caught me and pummeled me to the ground a few times. And I never had a pretty girl in a pink dress cheering me on to keep running. In fact, as I recall, the pretty girls in pink dresses were cheering on the guys that were about to pummel me. On second thought, I wasn't anything like Forest Gump.
The rise to stardom
Cheer up sympathetic yet hopeful reader. Things got better for me. During the days of kill the carrier, I began mastering what I called the Ain’t No Way in Hell You Gonna’ Catch Me dance. It was the same dance I used to escape my older brother when I pissed him off.
I ran in one direction. Stopped. Ran in another direction. Stopped. Feigned running in another direction. Stopped. Ran backwards—feigned forward—strafe left. Stopped. Strafe right to left. Stopped. Left to right. Repeat.
By the time I reached fifth grade, kill the carrier was out of vogue, capture the flag was in and I had perfected the dance. If I ever happened to get noticed sneaking behind enemy lines, I performed the dance until my chasers got too tired or confused to continue chasing me. In combination with my other tricks, the dance gave me peerless prowess in capture the flag. And that prowess brought me to the pinnacle of my fame. Those were the glory days.
I’ll never forget the day my classmates hoisted me over their shoulders and carried me back to the classroom after scoring the winning point in a grueling match against the sixth graders. It was analogous to the scene that erupted on the Yankees’ infield after they had won the 1996 World Series.
This analogy is perfect.
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A glowy picture of my dog
A glowy picture of my other dog
