We’re in the van on the way to the semifinals, and the team is ready. We stormed through the preliminary rounds and made it all the way to the final four. Now we’re going to be on TV. There hasn’t been any reason to practice anymore. Our preparation is complete.
Our eyes are metallic, our expressions as cool as the touch of a gun as we exit the vehicle and stride into the studio, acknowledging the congratulatory greetings of the onlookers with casual hand gestures that will soon be forgotten. The welcome committee members, all rumpled brown suits and wrinkled spring dresses, have sprung from their gray-carpeted cubicles, smiling and joking with one another as they await the imminent showdown.
***
“You’re such a natural, so talented at this. You have so much knowledge crammed into that head of yours. It’s a shame that you can’t put it to use in class.” Gilda Steinman, the matriarch of North End High School’s history department, handed me her usual loaded compliment while pitching her latest attempt to stir me out of the “abyss of apathy,” the “maelstrom of the mundane,” the “underbelly of underachievement” that she witnessed me sinking, flailing about and lurking in over the past two years.
“Do you care about anything?” she’d ask, often, and was asking again.
“Um, let me think about that for a second.”
“I’m waiting.”
“Well, I care what the Yankees did last night. By the way, do you know what the Yankees did last night? I haven’t seen a score.”
“I don’t care about the Yankees. I don’t care about sports. Sports aren’t important. Sports aren’t on the front page of the New York Times.”
“I don’t read the New York Times.”
“I know. That’s part of the problem.”
The conversations would follow a similar path, and the shining city at the end of this cobbled road would be her conclusion that I would have no chance of attending a reputable institution of higher learning if I didn’t snap out of this motivational funk right away.
“You have the ability to go to Harvard,” she’d say, with a glimmer of self-satisfaction lighting up her rosy face, “but your grades will only get you to Hartford.”
She’d tell me I needed “something else” to go along with my 89.763 average and middling SAT score. Something to set me apart. And this week, she couldn’t help but revel in the glory that she’d finally found that something.
“I’m telling you, I think this might be it,” she said, and the bell sounded and we filed into the room and sat at our desks and she spoke of African colonial assimilation and some despotic ruler in Bolivia (or was it Brazil?) and her voice tailed off into the ether as it always did and I thought of nothing but my comforter and pillow as my chin sunk to meet the cold hardness of the wood and drool began slide from my jowls.
Two days later, she cornered me in the hallway, not letting me even begin to dial up the combination on my lock. She ordered me to her office, sat me down without a word, and picked cards out of a box.
“OK. Let’s see how we do here. Ten questions. We’ll start off easy.”
I rolled my eyes — the usual response to anyone’s display of enthusiasm.
“What American singer’s biography was entitled Bound For Glory?”
“Woody Guthrie.”
“Good. What’s the highest mountain in the 48 contiguous United States?”
“Whitney. Come on. Challenge me, at least.”
“No problem. What comedian played God in three movies?”
“George Burns.”
“Good. What animal do Eskimos call nanook?”
“Polar bear. Are we done yet?”
“No. That’s only four. I said ten.”
“I’m not good at math.”
“I know. OK, focus.”
“Focus? I’m four for four!”
“I understand. Now be quiet. Who wrote ‘a thing of beauty is a joy forever’? Ha. Now there’s a tough one.”
“John Keats.”
“Wow. Impressive. OK, who won the gold medal in ice hockey at the 1960 Olympics?”
“U.S.A.,” I said, expressionless, of course, while twirling my index finger slowly, mocking the human emotion known as excitement.
“U … S … A.”
“Wonderful. Just wonderful. OK, what is the site in Utah where land-speed records have been set?”
“The Bonneville Salt Flats. Are we done yet?”
“Not quite. And sorry for the torture.”
“What is the paper anniversary?”
“The first.”
“Excellent. Two more. What letter was the scarlet letter?”
“A.”
“That was easy. OK, last one: What is the dry wind that blows down from the eastern slope of the Rockies?”
“The Chinook.”
She stood up, beaming.
“You see? I told you!”
“You told me what?”
She sighed.
“OK, here … let me speak in a language you can understand very clearly.”
“OK.”
“How would you like to miss a bunch of school days?”
“Doing what?”
“What you just did.”
“Answering useless questions?”
“Precisely.”
“OK.”
She made me the captain. She lavished me with guarantees — we could stop at McDonald’s on the way to the competitions and Baskin-Robbins on the way back. I could take any two of my buddies along to fill out the squad, as long as they were “smart enough,” as she put it. I picked Sam, who ranked third in the class and had already paid for his girlfriend’s abortion with the fruits of his burgeoning high-powered deck-washing business, and Juan, ranked tenth, who had figured out how to grow hydroponic weed in his closet until he was busted with a bong by his parents, who didn’t’ believe his “I did it one time for experimentation purposes” alibi, claiming that they knew it was “advanced paraphernalia.”
We were set, and in the early rounds, in front of a middling crowd in a dingy auditorium a few towns away, Sam likened my singlehanded domination over the opposition to the main character in the movie “Breaking Away,” whose friends tape his feet to the pedals of his bicycle so he and only he can ride the last hundred or so laps of the big race at the end.
“Juan and I are just wallpaper, man,” he said. “We’re just here to occupy these other two seats and sit there while you do all the work.”
The county whittled away in front of our eyes and I informed everyone in the hall that Colorado is the state with the highest overall elevation, that Ted Williams was the last Major Leaguer to hit over .400 in a season, that Jim Garrison was the New Orleans district attorney who said, “My staff and I solved the assassination weeks ago,” that Charles Dickens was the man who left The Mystery of Edwin Drood unfinished when he died, and that Quebec is the largest province in Canada.
I looked at the other team and saw defeat in their eyes – three minutes into the third-round match. I looked at Gilda Steinman and saw, for the first time, pure admiration as she returned my gaze. And for the first time in three miserable years in high school as a tall, skinny loner who hadn’t developed enough physically to play sports and hadn’t developed enough socially to have girlfriends, I was having fun.
To be continued …
Fire up the questions for Tom right here …
Past work on FlipCollective.com.
To follow him on Twitter.
To befriend him on Facebook.
To send him an email.
Who is the all-time all world leader in professional baseball home runs? Bonus point for statistical fact and word-of-mouth legend categories.
Oh-san for statistical, Josh for legend.
I’ll go with Josh.
Sadaharu Oh
Oh, Josh Gibson too?
And Tom, I might give you a run for your money on worthless trivia :)
You got it, Tom: Josh is credited with over 900 HRs. Who knows what the real number is, though. What I do know is that it would have been amazing to watch the guy play.