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Some people aren’t meant to become jocks
By “some people” I mean myself
As a kid, I loved sports, despite a notable lack of athletic ability. Slow, chubby and lacking coordination, I nonetheless threw myself into both sandlot and organized sports, such as Little League, with way more passion than talent.
I grew up in a semi-rural area where people raised horses and had acreage. Two kids in my neighborhood had real baseball fields with backstops and embedded home plates, and on weekends and nearly every day after school, someone had a game going. Usually five or six kids would show up, which meant that I would get to play…if 18 had ever shown up, I would likely have become a spectator. My Little League career was notable for the fact that I was the only 12-year-old who didn’t make it to the “majors.” I would have been joined by another 12-year-old who was even chubbier (he had to have material stitched into the sides of his jersey to fit him) but his dad was a local Chevrolet dealer who sponsored a top-level team, so he got to play on it. I learned that Little League wasn’t a meritocracy.
A couple of years later, I was a sophomore in high school, and like most everyone else, figured that the most reliable way to be popular and impress girls was to be a jock, who were easy to identify by their letter jacket and the cluster of girls that seemed to…
