I was digging through my Oregon historical ephemera when I came across this poster, a gift from my fifth grade teacher. I thought I’d post it to generate some smiles and teary nostalgia.
Oh to have been there! Vernonia! Jimmy Snuka! Tough Tony Borne! It sure smacks of better days for rural Oregon! The whole town probably turned out.
After a 15-year hiatus, I returned to tennis. I don’t know why I picked this time, but it was time. I’d talked about it. I’d written about it. You can talk and write about something to inertia, even death. Not so with tennis, which was once one of the most important and joyful activities of my life.
Everything was arranged for my comeback:
I had a racket ready—a thrift store beauty for $1.99, Belgium-made, a wood and boron composite, probably one of the last models made with wood. For my backup racket, I had a Jack Kramer Autograph, in perfect condition, that I really didn’t want to use, for fear of damaging. I mean, it was most likely 50 years old.
I bought a can of balls for $2.99, approximately the same price I paid in 1981! Preposterous! There’s nothing comparable to this lack of increase in American sporting life, or American life in general, excepting of course, the Big Mac and the Whopper.
I had an outfit picked out—loose brown corduroys with pockets large enough to hold balls, a baggy blue and white Western shirt that would give me plenty of room to swing and serve, and some black Puma low-cut sneakers that seemed perfect for tennis.
The outfit was obviously ludicrous, and I relished in its ludicrous nature. I didn’t care. No one would ever see me play anyway. I’ve driven by rural tennis courts the past 22 years and have seen exactly two people play. Two! Most of the rural tennis courts in Oregon were turned into skate parks or abandoned 15 years or so ago, so the tennis player in rural Oregon has gone nearly extinct. I would be the last Rural Tennis Player in Oregon (Cannon Beach and Gearheart don’t count) and get a book out of it!
Yes, I was poised for the return. It was summer!.My fitness was sound. I knew how to play. All in needed was a tennis court. If there was one tennis god or goddess left in America, he or she would reveal one to me, one not yet totally gone to seed. The court might even have a backboard! A glorious backboard where I would fall in love with the game all over again and recall those hundreds and hundreds of hours in my youth of hitting against a backboard in Rivercrest Park in Oregon City, defeating Connors, Borg, and McEnroe in five-set Grand Slam Finals. Tennis reigned supreme in that era. Everyone played. And I would again.
Not too long ago, my boss and I rescued an ancient tetherball pole lost in the grass on a construction site. It was one those set in concrete inside an old tire and it made me wonder so you bought the pole somewhere, it came with a rope and ball, but you provided the tire and poured the concrete yourself?
Millions of these quasi homemade jobs and more formally installed ones graced American backyards in the Great Era of Tetherball. Thousands of tetherball poles stood in elementary schools, parks, prison yards and Christian youth group summer camps.
A few still stand in the backyards, fields, but now abandoned, forgotten, forlorn, the rope and ball clinking against the rusty pole in the breeze. What a sad sound to hear because you know no one is ever playing tetherball on that pole again.
Once, mirth and pain emanated from the ground around that pole. Nothing now. One wonders if there is one tetherball pole left standing in a school or park in America that actually gets any use. Does anyone even play anymore? And what are the rules? Question: who invented tetherball? I’m not going to Google it.
Tether is such a great verb. It feels pejorative, but I can’t say anything pejorative about tetherball, unless of course, I dive deep into the pain inflicted upon the body when the game got intense, on the schoolyard, or in the backyard after too many gin and tonics and someone cranked up Black Sabbath on the tower speakers.
Did anyone ever die from playing tetherball. You know, when a player pounded the ball so hard, upward, that the rope whipped around the neck of the other player, lifted her off the ground, and hung her right there.
Yeah, it happened somewhere in America. I hope to God some mystery writer put a murder-by-tetherball scene in a book. You wanted the asshole or shrew dead, then you killed them playing tetherball! It’s the perfect crime! It was an accident!
As a sixth grader, I played tetherball at a Christian youth group summer camp along the Yamhill River. I think I won a championship. I earned it by beating a girl, my childhood crush, first girl I ever kissed and she had a black eye. I think I gave it to her during the game.
I also have memories of playing tetherball at Mt Pleasant Elementary in Oregon City. There were two or three poles and players lined up to participate. I vaguely recall a circle around the pole, perhaps dived into halves.
Interestingly enough, boys and girls played against one another. The girls were somewhat taller in elementary school, which is an advantage, and I remember one who seemingly never lost. I also remember trying to get into line to play against the girl I liked so that meant strategically losing to someone. Of course, I wanted to beat my crush and I did, but she took a few games off me. I never let her win.
Oh the pain of aggressive tetherball! Blocking the ball, pounding it, having it pound you, the rope stings and burns. You can also lose and never touch the ball! Is there another sport like that? Is tetherball even a sport?
I have no desire to Google to learn if Portland started an adult tetherball league inside some cavernous brew pub or pot shop.
*****
We rolled the pole into my boss’ truck and he drove it to his place down the road. We unloaded the pole, wheeled it to a good level spot in the grass and then stood it up. Perfect! We couldn’t play yet. No ball or rope! But there was a promise of tetherball fun in the near future thanks to Amazon.
Is fun the right word?
A few days later, I squared off against my boss. In an earlier conversation, I had learned that he had suffered trauma at the hands of tetherball bullies as a young corpulent lad.
The game began. Thirty seconds in, I was winded, but holding my own against my boss, whose childhood trauma was obviously resurfacing. (The vodka probably helped with that, too.)
I was shocked at how my muscle memory for tetherball instantly returned. I mean, it had been 45 years! I had forgotten how much talking there is when playing tetherball. You can taunt your opponent! You can hurl profanities! You can try to hurt him and draw out the demons!
At some point, my boss took command, got the right angle, got the rope whipping around the pole, and kicked my ass. I sat down on the grass, exhausted. He wanted to go again, but I demurred. There would be a next time, maybe even a tournament.
I will close this meandering stream of consciousness on football, with a heartbreaking story of getting my teenage heart broken while attending a high school football game. It was the last game I ever attended as a student. The story goes like this:
It was my junior year. I’d retired from football the previous season after the injury and intellectual exhaustion with arrogant coaches (in plaid polyester shorts) who breathed bromides with every scream. I had a Super Bowl crush on a fellow junior, easily the most exotic female on campus: clothes, hair, makeup, moves, foreign born but not a foreign exchange student. Her signature look was matching or clashing headbands and leg warmers. She was utterly self-exiled from the popular crowd. I suspected they feared her. No one could fathom her. I no longer recall how we met or what established and eventually deepened our mutual attraction. We might have had a class together that first semester. I do remember our first and last date together—if date is the word. It transpired at a football game! We arranged to meet at halftime of the Homecoming game. Why halftime? Why not opening kickoff? She made the call. She was quarterbacking. We met near the concession stand. A light rain fell. As she approached, I saw she was wearing a red headband and red and white-striped legwarmers. Our school colors were red and white. We got close. Her face was flushed, crimson, and sported a crooked smile. She slurred a little hello and teetered. She gave me a big hug and I breathed in deep: hair, body, soul. It was all booze. She reeked of alcohol. I had never smelled it up close on a person like that, evaporating, damn near visible, but I knew what it was, even thought I didn’t drink in high school and had never been drunk. She told me she’d been drinking rum and produced a half pint out of her purse that was almost empty. She didn’t offer me a belt. In the background, I heard the marching band. I saw the glare from the lights. I smelled hotdogs and hamburgers sizzling on the grills. The PA was announcing some raffle or car wash. She took my hand and led me away from the concession stand, into the darkness of the nearby side streets. She asked where my car was parked. My 74 blue VW Dasher was a few blocks away. We found it and slid onto the back seat. She took a final belt of rum and the bottle somehow got stowed. We started making out. I think I got drunk on rum from kissing her. A rum makeout fog clouded the windows. We were probably in there until the fourth quarter. All we did was kiss. The makeout session concluded. I walked her back to the stadium. She disappeared into the crowd. She’d invited me to come along, wherever she was going, but I declined. I have no idea why. It might have been the dumbest decision of my life up that point and for the next 20 years. I never told a single person about this “date.” I recorded it in my journal where no one has ever read of it. We never had another date. We never spoke of what happened. There was never a look from her in the halls. Every time I see a Dasher, I wince. Luckily, Dashers are almost vanished from Oregon.
I am writing this on a Sunday morning. The NFL games are underway and the religious services connected to them are in full fervor. I won’t be watching because I don’t have television.
The greatest of all my football memories was a family affair. I’ve published multiple versions of this story before but I now realize it fits into a larger context of my life. Thus, it makes perfect sense to include it here.
On Thanksgiving day 1979, my family played the last of its “Turkey Bowl” football games. It was a generational affair pitting the male cousins (Matt, Darin, and Kirt) versus the uncles (Karl, Dan and Dale) as Grandfather watched. The tradition began in the early 1970s as a diversion from the boring half-time show of the Dallas Cowboys game broadcast on Thanksgiving afternoon.
The routine was: watch Detroit lose in the morning, gorge on a feast prepared by the women, watch Dallas play most of the first half, then at the two-minute warning, change clothes, toss the football around (the weather never mattered), play our 45-minute game on a muddy field, come back in, not change clothes, feast again, and settle into a game that invariably saw Cowboys’ quarterback Roger Staubach pull it out at the end.
As the years passed, the game evolved from a friendly Kennedy family photo op to an intense rivalry. Grandfather kept score as he prowled the sidelines, never cheering, thinking about pie for dessert, shooting bad photographs, and proud to see his brood on the field.
I played quarterback for the cousins and we lost every game, usually as a result of gimmick special teams plays or trick touchdown passes. We came close a few times, and after an especially aching defeat in 1978 when we lost on a Hail Mary with the score tied, we pledged right there on the field to go all out and win the next year.
That meant ratcheting up the seriousness of the game so that’s exactly what we did. We repeatedly talked strategy on the phone in September. In October, I recall at some family gathering Darin gave Dale, the younger uncle, a tube of Ben-Gay, saying “You’re going to need this when the next game over.” Dale didn’t think it was funny.
About a week before Thanksgiving, the cousins met and an incident occurred that made me realize just how serious we’d become in pursuit of victory. In a discussion on how to thwart Dale’s big-play capability, Darin set up a wooden folding chair, coiled into a perfect three-point stance, and announced, “This is what I’m going to do to Dale.” He then exploded into the chair, sent it flying into a wall ten feet away where it shattered into a half dozen pieces. We were in a church at the time.
It would almost be literature if I could write the game was close, hinged on a final play. I cannot. We blitzed the uncles from the opening kickoff and won 49-14 on a dry field at Ainsworth Park in Northeast Portland. We scored on every possession. We seemed faster, more into it. We never let up on the uncles as they had on us in the earlier games of the rivalry. When the rout concluded, we all shook hands, and I remember feeling great in a way that I had never felt before.
We headed back inside, I think the women might of asked “who won?” and the two teams gathered up a second big meal, and caught the rest of the Cowboys’ game.
In six months Grandfather would be dead from a heart attack, Darin off to college, my dad no longer part of this family’s holidays because of divorce, and I would get my driver’s license. We never played football as a family again.
Let me now consider something else about football that I noticed a couple of years ago, something vexing and quite revealing about American culture. It is the now widely accepted practice of college and professional (high school?) football players of celebrating routine plays, such as making a first down on a running play at midfield early in the second quarter, or making a special teams tackle while trailing by 28 points in the fourth quarter, or scoring a meaningless touchdown with seconds to go in the game. You see this all the time and you used to never see it. I doubt coaches allowed it, but more to the point, players would have never conceived such absurd self aggrandizement for something as trivial as making a first down on a seven yard run with nothing at stake on the clock.
Why this shift?
I see nothing wrong with orchestrated celebrations after exciting touchdowns, although I much prefer the simple spike or nonchalantly handing over the ball to the official, like the way Barry Sanders always did. It was no big deal—he’d be back.
Again, why the change? It does coincide with the rise of social media and the general self aggrandizement of all aspects of American life, but there has to be more to it than that. I wish announcers would talk about this habit and call it out or ask about it. But nothing is ever mentioned, not even in passing. Maybe they don’t even notice. Maybe we’ve become nearly immune to this sort of beating on our proverbial chests to get people to notice us and our accomplishments, like tackling a punt returner for no gain. I fear in the past I may have been like this in my creative life, but never again. I like the Barry Sanders way of celebrating.