The street where I grew up is a circle. There were fifteen
houses on it in those days (the two down at the corner with the service road
were moved out during an expansion of the highway some years ago). All the
houses are on the right as you follow the road up and around and back to rejoin
with itself. My parents’ house was the seventh one. It sits just before the
point where the road starts to curve around to the left to form the circle. The
area in the center of the circle, maybe two acres, was a communal space and
everybody who lived on the street had the right to use it. Sometimes we called
it the park, but mostly we just called it the circle. And it was the scene of
some epic sporting contests.
The fellow who lived next door to us sunk some heavy posts in the ground and
put up fencing between them to serve as a baseball backstop. It was good for
those of us who loved to play ball all spring and summer, and it also protected
his cars, which he sometimes parked along that side of the street, from foul tips.
A backstop also eliminated the need for a catcher, which was good because we
sometimes had trouble coming up with enough kids to field two teams. Any ball
the batter swung at and missed or let go by because it was ’way off the mark,
he’d just pick it up himself after it hit the backstop and throw it back to the
pitcher. First base was a tree, second base was a telephone pole on the other
side of the circle, and third base was another tree. A ball hit on the fly
across the street and into the front yards of the Guthrie house (later the
Sanchez house), the Whatley house, the Woodard house, or the Brooks house was a
home run. That happened very, very seldom. We were not a neighborhood of power
hitters.
When there weren’t enough kids to play baseball, we’d play Flies and Skinners
instead. One guy would hit fungo while the rest of us ranged out in the circle.
Catch one fly ball or cleanly field three grounders (“skinners”), and you got
to go up and hit. It was a simpler time, and we could spend hours doing that.
At some point, another neighbor put up a basketball goal on the other side of
the circle, and it wasn’t long before we had a fairly flat area trampled down
in front of it. We usually played two-on-two, occasionally three-on-three, and
since we had only one goal, we had to play half-court style, taking the ball to
the back part of the trampled-down area any time you got a rebound and then
starting from there. Fouls were not completely unheard of, but they were rare.
We’d usually play first team to fifty points won. Usually, the final score
would be 50-48. We weren’t defensive wizards, either.
When there were only two or three of us, we played Horse or Around-the-World or
just shot around. The goal and hoop in the circle were regulation, but there
was also a backboard made out of planks nailed to a tree in my backyard, with a
hoop attached to it. No net. It was lower than regulation, somewhere between
eight and nine feet off the ground. I could dunk in that hoop when I was in
high school and college, the only times I’ve ever experienced that particular
sensation.
My senior year in high school, I was able to skip last period and get out an
hour earlier than any other kid who lived around the circle, so a lot of days
I’d get my basketball and go shoot free throws. I got to where I could hit a
hundred in a row sometimes. I remember those times quite fondly.
There was also a good open space in the circle stretching from the road in
front of my parents’ house to the road in front of the Whatley house that served
as our football field. Out of bounds on one side lined up with the post the
basketball goal was on, and on the other side the tree that served as first
base in the baseball games marked out of bounds. The road at each end was the
end zone, of course. We played two-below, all pass, no rushing the passer,
three completes is a first down. No goal posts, so no extra points or field
goals, only touchdowns. We usually played first team to 48 wins, and unlike
basketball, there were some lopsided scores in those games. Usually it was
pretty close, though. I played quarterback most of the time and sometimes threw
so many passes my right elbow ached until I went to bed that night.
I was playing receiver, though, the evening I planted my foot wrong, rolled my
ankle, and broke a bone in my foot. I broke a different bone in the same foot
playing football with some of my friends in college, and the ring finger on my
right hand is crooked to this day because I was trying to tag Bill Weidman
while playing defense in a game in my parents’ back yard and that finger got
caught in one of the belt loops on his jeans and twisted so that it broke at
the first knuckle. It swelled up pretty bad but I didn’t realize it was broken
until a few weeks later when I went to the doctor and had it x-rayed. The bone
had already started to heal, and they would have had to do surgery and rebreak
it to straighten it up. No thanks. It doesn’t stop me from typing, now does it?
All these stories are probably making those of you who have only known me as an
adult think that I’ve never really seemed like the athletic type. And that’s
true. I’ve always been overweight, and my feet stick out funny. But I
understood the mechanics and the strategies of the various games, and when I
was young I had good hand-eye coordination and, while I was never fast by any
stretch of the imagination, from time to time I could manage to be
sneaky-quick. Also, opponents often underestimated me. When I’d play pick-up
basketball games in college, none of the other team would bother guarding me,
so I could stand out on the perimeter and pop long range shots all day. One of
my friends who’d been an all-city guard during high school realized this and
would feed me the ball, so I knocked down eight or ten shots a game . . . and the
other team still wouldn’t cover me. Hey, you take what they give you.
Don’t regard any of this as bragging. I could manage “not terrible” at times,
but I was really not a good athlete and have never been part of an actual,
organized team except for a couple of summers during college when I played on
our church’s softball team. But I enjoyed
playing. Sports was never the focus of my life that reading and later writing
have been, but it was always good to be outside moving around and sharing those
good times with my friends.
