Not My Kind of Sport

Hands and feet, those are my problem.  With bigger hands, I might’ve been able to enjoy playing basketball and football.  The NBA and NFL would go out of business—or subject their balls to a radical downsizing—if all their players had hands like mine.

On second thought, maybe my feet weren’t the problem when it came to learning how to ice skate.  No, it must have been my sense of balance, or lack thereof.  Stand me up, and I’d fall right back down on the ice.  After a half-hour of that, I mastered the pitiable art of ice “walking,” whereby I could walk on my skates across the ice, that is, until I fell down again or I started walking on my ankles.  Painful but true.

No doubt, my scariest time in high school was a gym period freshman year.  For no good reason I can think of, the gym teacher decided to play something called “basketball tag.”  The player with the ball had to dribble with one hand while trying to tag someone else with his other.  There were six to ten guys running around in a tiny square, two feet by three feet, or so it seemed to me.  Believe me, if they’d put a stopwatch on me as I dodged being tagged, I could’ve qualified for the Olympic 100-yard dash, easy.

Now, volleyball I liked, but we hardly ever played it in winter, and, when we did, there was always this stupid punishment attached—throw the ball over the net to the other side and you did pushups.  Some smart aleck or doofus always managed to do precisely that, so we had to stop and drop.  Who knows, maybe this is some kind of safety rule and that’s why you never see anyone throwing the ball over the net in college or the Olympics.

The one indoor sport I was good at was racquetball.  I mean, this is a game where you can score a point by hitting a ball off the ceiling or hitting a dying quail that would’ve landed in the net in tennis but ends up hitting the front wall, just an inch or so above the floor.  I was good at that and returning shots while flat on my stomach.  I also loved the noise of racquet against rubber ball.  Whack!

But I ran out of people to play and never taught my daughter, which is too bad because I hate being relatively inactive every winter.  No bicycle, just an exercycle.  No baseball, just games I never really played as a kid.

How many days until pitchers and catchers report?