Friday Night Lights

This being autumn, I often see Morton H.S. football players on my way to picking up Michele from the train.  Morton being Morton, I often think of what athletics did for my daughter, or maybe it was what Clare did for athletics.

Either way, my high school experience differed ever so slightly from Clare’s.  St. Laurence was one part POW camp, one part basic training; discipline of one sort or another followed you from class to class.  I can still remember a classmate getting detention for adjusting a window without asking permission.  Vikings don’t feel cold, son.

This went on for 3-1/2 years, until midway through senior year, at which point our teachers made like prison guards fleeing from the advancing Allied armies.  We had five months to act like big men on campus, after which we’d be drafted, punching a timeclock or off to college; the good brothers and lay teachers were all but done with us whatever our fate.  Perhaps I should mention here that in sophomore year I ran afoul of the dean of discipline, an encounter that left me with an invitation to try out for the football team.  I declined.

We had three sports at St. Laurence, a handful of clubs and that was it.  At the risk of sounding really old school, kids today just couldn’t handle that kind of environment, though truth be told, I don’t know how any of us did, especially the non-jocks and non-debaters.  Like I said, it was a grind for 3-1/2 long years.

I may have been recruited because the football team was short of tackling dummies, I can’t say for sure.  But I do know I left high school suspicious of athletes, which is weird in a way, given how much I root for the White Sox and once did for the Bulls.  Anyway, I didn’t expect to raise a jock for a child, but we did.

Now, as I look at those football players walking back to the locker room from practice, I have to admit how happy I am Clare had sports to organize her life around; in comparison, I had nothing but honors-track homework.  My daughter’s straight-ahead approach to life meshed perfectly with organized sports.  In third grade, Clare was good enough a swimmer to earn an invitation to try out for a swim club, and in high school, one of her softball coaches said he wished she could’ve played linebacker for him.  That would explain the former football player for a husband.

I would’ve liked to experience high school the way my daughter did.  Failing that, I’m just happy she didn’t go to a school like I did.  Doing four-count burpies for gym class in the school parking lot can leave a mark, even decades later.