The Moral Imperative of Fitness

Several lifetimes ago, in a smelly storage closet adjacent to the basketball court in a Midwestern high school, a goateed civics teacher looked over a dozen or so sweaty teenage boys kneeling before him, and frowned. It wasn’t that he was upset; frowning was his usual expression.

He preferred to carry himself in a serious way, because his was a serious business. In the classroom, he educated bright, young, bored minds on the basic functions of their government, and on their duties to participate in it. In the storage-closet-turned-wrestling-room, he turned awkward boys into capable men, dispensing wisdom and lessons in character along with push ups and take-down technique drills.

It had been a hard practice. His practices always were. But this one was a beat-down of historic proportions, intended to redraw the lines around what his young men thought they were capable of. They were not an overly talented team. At best, they could expect to win half of the matches they entered over the course of the season, stuck as they were in a league full of powerhouse teams. Lately, they had lost two dual meets, one in a blowout, and another by a single point. In the first, they were simply outclassed. In the latter, they had run out of heart.

To Jim Aker, that was unacceptable.