As bad as junior high school was for me, high school was even worse. I entered high school at 13 years old. I was small. I was unathletic. I was a music geek. I was about as far from the cool teenaged boys in the 1960s-era movies as you could get.
If you’ve watched reruns of the Happy Days television show, you might think you know what it was like to be in high school in the early 1960s. You don’t. High school was, for me at least, a kind of cosmic collision of worlds in which the me I so desperately wanted to be kept getting farther and farther from the me I was desperately trying to avoid becoming.
As in junior high school, there was a moment in high school during which it all became clear to me. In fact, it all became way too clear for me. That moment was the first day of swimming instruction as a part of the gym curriculum.
I have no idea why it seemed so important that everyone know how to swim that my high school dedicated two weeks to swim instruction every year. Of course I didn’t understand why I had to learn to use a trampoline or parallel bars either. And wrestling—well, the rationale behind having to put my face next to the sweaty body parts of someone I didn’t know and was pretty sure I didn’t like remains a mystery to this day.
Let me set the scene for my moment of enlightenment. One day we were told by our gym teachers (coaches of various sports who, it seems to me, were all returning war veterans suffering from undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder) that swim instruction would begin the following day. We were also told that we wouldn’t need trunks because we’d be swimming in “whatever God gave ya.”
That’s right. Swim classes for high school boys were taken in the nude. Not in trunks. Not even in tiny Speedos. In the nude. And not just your freshman year but every year.
Remember that because there were no social promotions in those days, we had students in our junior high who were in their late teens. In our high school we had students who had left school for one reason or another and had then come back to finish and get their diplomas.
So, at 13, I found myself standing buck naked at the edge of the pool with other naked boys and men who ranged in age from 13 to 30. The first command was to get into the pool—which seemed like a blessing at the time—to “put your family jewels in the spit tray,” and to kick like you meant it. I didn’t dare turn around, but I can only imagine what the coach’s view was of 200 bare-bottomed boys kicking like they meant it.
Think that was bad? Well, it just went downhill from there. We were taught all of the common strokes, including—you guessed it—the backstroke. There can be nothing more humiliating than having to swim naked, belly up, in a cold pool.
Not only did we have to learn swim techniques—in the nude—but we also had to learn lifesaving skills. That’s right; we had to save a naked drowning victim by putting our arms around him and sidestroking to the edge of the pool. I shudder when I think of it.
If there was any saving grace to this annual humiliation, it was that as we less developed boys moved from freshman to senior, we were likely to find others for whom the magic of puberty was even more removed than it was from us. But that was hardly adequate compensation.
Gym class during the rest of the year was not quite as obviously embarrassing for the less-than-athletic among us, but the separation from the rest of us of those who were faster and stronger and could jump higher got ever more intense and more embedded.
The boys were separated by skill level after being tested. We were put through a variety of physical fitness tests that measured speed and strength, among other things. Based on these test results, we were grouped with boys of similar ability. The lowest level was the White Group—fat kids with glasses, mostly, including me. Boys with modest abilities were in the Red Group. Boys with better-than-average skills were in the Blue Group: the athletes.
At the top of the ladder was the Gold Group. These were the boys who had scored at the Blue Group level on every skill test. They were the anointed ones.
Five days a week, every week, we lined up with our skills cohort: the White Group, the Red Group, the Blue Group, and the Gold Group. Whatever the activity was for that term, the boys in each set interacted only with others in their group. Whether it was baseball or basketball or gymnastics, the kids in the Blue and Gold Groups never had to spend time with the kids in the White Group. We were shunned as nonathletic an hour a day, five days a week.
But it wasn’t only gym class that showed my lack of athletic skills at such an obvious level. I couldn’t seem to resist putting myself in situations in which my abject absence of talent would be on public display.
In the area where I grew up, bowling was a very popular activity. I’m not sure we considered it a sport, exactly, but there were bowling alleys all over the place, and the Wednesday and Friday leagues were filled by the parents of my best friends.
Bowling was also a fairly inexpensive high school date night. Several couples could meet up at a local bowling alley, form teams, and spend hours together for nothing more than the cost of a few games.
This is by way of explaining how I found myself in the backseat of a friend’s car with a girl whom I was desperate to impress, on my way to an evening of bowling. You see, I didn’t know how to bowl. Worse yet, I had never even set foot in a bowling alley. I had seen bowling on television. I grasped the general concept but had absolutely no experience or skills.
My first inkling that I might be in over my head was when my friend pulled out his personalized bowling ball and shoes. His ball was a custom-drilled beauty that fit his hand perfectly. And his bowling shoes were elegant.
I was standing at the counter watching a man spray what I hoped was disinfectant into what appeared to be clown slippers and hand them to me and my date. We then had to find balls to use. This, it turns out, is the first and last skill test for new bowlers. Pick the wrong ball and the rest of the night is lost.
Being a typical high school boy on a date with a girl he was trying to impress, I of course picked up the heaviest ball I could carry. If my memory serves me right, the ball weighed about 80 pounds, give or take. It was solid black, and the finger holes were big enough for King Kong. My date grabbed a smaller, sparkly ball, and we made our way to the lane.
Everything was going great until it was my turn to bowl. As I approached the line, not having asked anyone for even the tiniest bit of instruction, I pulled the ball back as I had seen others do and promptly dropped it behind me. The laughter started immediately.
The laughter didn’t stop when, on my second approach to the line, now with a death grip on the ball, I released it at the top of the swing, and it fell directly at my feet. It was over the line and not moving. I reached down, grabbed it, and threw it down the lane with more or less of a hurling motion. The ball stayed in the wooden lane for almost 3 feet before falling ceremoniously into the gutter. That sight, along with the manager yelling at me that if I dropped the ball like that again and dented his wooden floor, I’d be thrown out, was enough to induce Coke-through-the-nose laughter from my friends and my date.
But I was undeterred. When the ball returned, I squared off with the pins, fully intending to send the ball rocketing toward them. With a Herculean effort, I pulled the ball back and—mindful of the manager’s warning not to drop it—promptly hit the floor with my hand still stuck in the finger holes. I think my score that night was 6. It was also the end of my career as a bowler and the end of any chance of a second date with that girl.
It wasn’t just bowling. Putt-putt golf was a disaster. Going to the batting cages was worse. Even the carnival games seemed beyond my athletic abilities.
Something had to change. I knew what I had to do.
That dream of being an athlete still burned strongly in my soul. I didn’t care what it took. I didn’t care how hard I had to work. I was going to get out of the White Group.
I spoke to the coaches and told them my goal. Their condescending smiles didn’t deter me. I asked and asked and asked until they started to believe that I was serious. This small boy who hadn’t even begun to shave was trying to convince them that he was going to be in the Gold Group someday.
It seemed hopeless at first. The standards for each group were printed in giant signs hung around the gym. You had to be able to run fast, leap far, jump high, throw accurately, and demonstrate that you were the consummate athlete. And you had to do it publicly.
By my sophomore year in high school I had worked my way up from White to Red. It might not have seemed like much to anyone else, but I was determined. I lifted weights. I practiced sprinting and jumping. I bothered the coaches all the time for more information.
By my junior year I was solidly in the Red Group. I had become, in fact, a leader in the Red Group. But I wanted more. I knew that the real athletes were still one group above me, and I was determined to be one of them.
As the testing began for my senior year, I was ready. I was in what at the time was the best shape of my life. I had lost weight. I was eating better and exercising more. I was beginning to live like an athlete even if I wasn’t recognized as one.
The first few tests went well. I scored in the Blue on every one of them. The last test was the vertical jump. I don’t remember the height we had to jump, but it seemed impossible to me. I was, after all, still short and small for my class. This final test would determine whether I would spend my senior year in a gold shirt or not.
We were given three tries. On my first attempt I missed, and missed badly. The coach administering the test shrugged as if to say, “Too bad.” It made me mad.
On my second attempt I still missed, but not by as much. The coach was not enthusiastic, but he was at least paying attention. And I was madder still.
The third jump was an all-out, go-for-broke, nothing-to-lose effort. I felt my feet leave the floor. I reached up with my hand and slapped the wall as I felt myself reaching the apex of the jump. When I landed and looked up, I could barely believe it. I had done it. I had passed every test. I was going to get to wear a gold shirt.
Because I was now in the Gold Group, I got to line up with the other athletes. Suddenly I was in the company of the basketball players and the football players. I was playing baseball with the students on the school team.
But, truth be told, despite my having passed all the tests, I still wasn’t really one of them. They were the “real” athletes, and I was not. What I learned, though, was that whatever my limitations were in terms of size or talent, they could at least be mitigated, if not eliminated, by hard work. Maybe the satisfactions that came from working hard would be private satisfactions.
I felt differently about myself after that. I had earned something that I could get only through my own efforts. Years later I would have that same feeling crossing a marathon finish line. But in that moment as a 16-year-old high school student, I was as close to being a real athlete as I had ever been.