The Constant Variety of Sport (part 2)

Posted by Ace on October 17th, 2009 filed in Tales of the Interregnum

[This is part 2 of a three part story;  you can read the first part by clicking HERE.]

“TEAMS!” the coaches yell. “GROUP UP!”

The speeches are going to begin.

Community-based events of this size (or any size) always begin with speeches.  There is the Welcoming of the Involved, the Invocation of the Event History, the Identification of the Group Leadership, and eventually, the Exhortation to Fun.  Occasionally the speechmaker will also slip an Explanation for the Newly Involved in there, somewhere after the Welcoming and before the Exhortation.  This turns out to be one of those occasions, and it’s a good thing, because when it occurs, I find out that we are not at a batting practice as Jack has been maintaining.  We are at a full-out baseball clinic: one where volunteers from the Shadetree varsity team will be working directly with the junior league kids to help them improve every aspect of their game.  The Chief Speechmaker, a sharp-voiced man in a maroon windbreaker, is only a few feet from me, and so therefore are the varsity players, standing in a line-up behind him.   They are grim-faced boys, muscular and lanky.  They slouch slightly, shifting between cross-armed stances in an ominous silence that makes them look sullen and powerful all at once, and they regard us through narrowed eyes beneath the brims of their caps.  They do not smile.

Jesus, I think, as they stare back into my eyes. They’re TALL. Like oak trees in pin stripes.  They bear no resemblance to anything I remember from my own high school days.   I realize with some amazement that I am actually afraid of them, wouldn’t want to run into them collectively in a dark alley.

This, too, though, is an illusion.  Or at least, temporary.  As Windbreaker introduces them, names each player’s position and accomplishments in turn, the wall of quiet menace they project dissolves into sheepish grins and good-natured ribbing, the smack of a dusty glove on a hunched shoulder.   Their silence is just nervousness it seems, the discomfort of staring down this many kids and parents without the safety of a backstop between them and the crowd.

Hnh, I think, strangely relieved.  So do they throw that attitude because they’ve been taught to, because they’re emulating the pros?  Or because that’s the kind of body language that people who pursue baseball tend to have anyway? I shrug inwardly, chalk it up as a mystery.  Probably both. There are undoubtedly many other things they could be doing with their Saturday, in any event.  It’s awesome of them to be here.

There are nine practice stations scattered all across the fields, one to a skill set, each marked with a fluorescent orange flag like a golf tee. Windbreaker explains that the groups of children will each start at a different station, then are expected to rotate through all the remaining stations in turn at 20 minute intervals, running to get from one station to the next.  He looks determined enough to pull it off.

“OK, COACHES, FIRST STATION!” he barks, blowing a whistle. “LET’S GO!”

Everyone scrambles.

There aren’t enough of Jack’s Angels to constitute a group by themselves, so they get split up and pasted onto other teams, some of them being ushered in one direction, some in another.  Jack’s first station is Base Running and nearby;  he starts off for it at a walk, then breaks into a run at the command of the coaches, swept up between them and the other little boys who have already torn off as fast as their legs will carry them.  I lope easily alongside the crowd, pacing them.  When we arrive, I pause long enough to let Jack establish what general area I will be standing in, and then pull back to a respectful distance to leave him alone, let the coaches and players do their work.

It starts almost immediately. He loses his place in the line of boys waiting to run because he is more interested in the orange golf flag-   running around it with his hand gripping the pole, testing it to see how flexible it is, pulling it back and letting it spring-  then loses his place again because he misses the cue to run from the base coach, and the boy behind him plows past him and on.  When he runs the first time, he does it with his arms held stiffly straight down, wrists pinned to his outer thighs, as if he is Sponge Bob Square Pants.  When he runs the second time, he windmills his arms in great paddling circles and lolls his head from side to side with his tongue out, like a cartoon wolf.   The other boys (and some of the coaches) stare at him like he’s from another planet, then ignore him.  I wince.

At the next station, Batting Stance, there are tees set up with balls on top of them, facing the 10-foot high chain link fence that separates the infield from the stands.  Rather than venturing into the combat zone, I split off from the group and assume a position behind the fence, looking through it at the players.  It affords the best vantage, if you can avoid flinching every ten seconds as a baseball slams into the chainlink.

Jack recognizes the tees from Teeball. He isn’t particularly interested in the instruction the varsity player is giving to the boys on the right end of the line, but he does want to get his hands on a bat and clout something with it, so he goes down to the left end of the line and mixes with the handful of boys there until they give him a turn.   He whiffs the tee on his first try, socks a ball into the chainlink on his second, setting the tee swaying.  He prepares to use the bat as a golf club to sweep at rocks on the ground, but I stop him with a word through the fence and he puts the ball back up on the tee instead.   When his backswing for the third try nearly takes another kid’s head off, the player hustles down and intercepts him, starts showing him how to stand and what to do.

I sit at a pine-planked table, watching.  Behind me, other parents are straggling through, following their noses to a snack window selling coffee and cheap hot dogs.  A raven-haired woman with tired eyes and a tremendous purse lowers herself tersely to the next table over, then digs in the purse.  She pulls out a cel phone and starts dialing.  I double-take at that for no reason, find myself suddenly disoriented.  I glance around at my surroundings:  at the fence, at the snack window, at the sky.  It takes a moment for it to dawn on me what’s wrong, to realize where I am.  To remember.

I sit at a pine-planked table, watching.  Far, far out on the fields, beyond the chainlink fence, Jack’s team is running the drills of their soccer practice.  At this distance, he is almost indistinguishable from all the other boys:  a bright blonde speck milling through other specks in a sea of green.  I stand and walk to the fence, grip it with one hand and peer through the links for a better vantage.  The sound of a blowing whistle drifts faintly across the distance back to my straining ears.  I’m not used to being this far away from him.

The bright blonde speck separates from the other specks and stops moving, remains motionless on the green.  At length a larger, taller speck crosses over to it and remains motionless likewise.

“Uh, oh,” I say.

“Christ,” breathes Faye. “What now?”

The disgust in her voice is unprecedented, and chilling.  I glance over my shoulder at her.  She cranes her head halfheartedly to see out onto the field, without sitting up, then slouches back against the table and fishes in her jacket, frowning.

“Not sure,” I remark, returning my gaze to the field.  The tall speck is shifting, gesturing, but they are both still in the same place.  My mind fills in the soundtrack against my wishes: Jack frustrated, crying, complaining about something he doesn’t like, or that someone did something to him, or that he got cheated somehow, wanting to quit; the coach trying to reason with him, trying to console him, trying to get him to participate, not wanting to abandon him but not being able to favor him at the expense of the other kids who just want to play…

“It’s probably nothing,” I say cautiously, backing away from the fence.   I sit down, still facing it, still waiting for the specks to move, rejoin the others.  “He knows the drills. He knows how to do them. He knows he can do them because we showed him how. Practiced with him ’til he got it. I can’t imagine why he’d be freaking out.”

“Because he’s terrified of the other kids!” Faye blurts out.

I stare at her.  She opens her mouth to continue, but then clamps it shut.  “It doesn’t matter,” she snarls, taking her cel phone out of her jacket and flipping it open.  “He’s never gonna get it.  He’s never gonna succeed at anything.  All he wants to do is just sit inside all day and play video games.”

She ditzes with the keys.  “He’s just like you,” she adds.

I stick my fingers between the links of the fence and tease him, pull them back as he makes a grab for them, then do it again and let him get me. He laughs and makes a face. Just like me, I think.

Our day continues. At the Bunting station, he needs to go to the bathroom, so I have to thread him around the bleachers and fencing and off the field, to the concrete blockhouse where the toilets are.  By the time he gets back onto the field, he’s dead-last in line, and there isn’t enough time for the coaches to get through the kids remaining.  They do so anyway, using up some of the time from the next block to make sure everyone gets a chance.  That in turn delays him getting to the Outfield station, where the boys have to divide into partnered couples to throw to each other, so by the time he gets there, all the boys are already partnered up and he has no one to throw with.  At the Ground Ball station, where the players run forward, crouch and scoop up the ground ball, then throw it back and dash to the rear of the line, he brings the entire process to a screaming halt by scuffing his feet slowly through the tan dirt while staring bizarrely out of the corner of his eyes at some point on the western horizon.  I cringe and wait for the blast to come, for some coach or player or other kid to stand up and roar at him to get the fuck off the field and out of the way.  But it never comes.  They watch him, silently, and I watch them watching him, and the relative silence makes it seem in that moment very far away and unreal, like an image through a telescope.  After he stops the ball and throws it back, he doesn’t bother to get back on the end of the line, and they don’t tell him to.

By the time we reach the final station, the actual Batting Cage, no one is running to reach the flag;  the sun climbing over its noonday crest and the steady exertion have taken their toll.  The Cage is shady;  it has a green padded wall for the pitcher to stand behind that protects him from being hit, and a radar gun that tells the batter how fast the ball goes when he hits it, and all of three of those things interest Jack enough that he enters it gladly to try his hand.  They pitch the ball to him gently until he gets two solid hits, then congratulate him on succeeding.  When he wanders back out, he throws his arms around my legs and leans his head against my stomach, in the universal sign for “please pick me up”.  I’m probably the last person left in his life who’s tall enough and strong enough to still do it.  And I do.

The Angel coach’s son wanders by at that moment.  He stops to look at the spectacle of Jack in my arms, then notices it’s me and scuttles off quickly, shooting me a smoky glare.  I grin with all my teeth, Kzin-style.  Looks like I made an impression.

“Nice job in the Cage,” I tell Jack.

He doesn’t comment.  “I’m hot,” he says, laying his cheek against my shoulder and closing his eyes.

“Me too.”  I carry him over to a nearby sapling and stand beneath its shade.

“Is it over yet?” he asks.

I look around at the milling people.  A man smoking a cigarette drags a huge bag of what looks like fertilizer past second base to a rain puddle and opens it up, then takes handfuls of brown stuff out of it the same color as the dirt and throws them into the water. It has no obvious effect.

“No,” I tell Jack, with a wry smile. “They’re gonna make more speeches.”

“Rats,” he says.

[to continue to part 3, click HERE]