I really can't remember any moments of personal sports glory probably because I am not a very good athlete but I do love to to compete in sports.
So I want to tell about a totally inglorious moment instead; I hope that is okay.
It was the end of the summer after high school. I went to a picnic with a bunch of people to celebrate all of us going off to college. We were drinking beer and after a while some guys and I started playing touch football. We chose up sides and pretty soon the game started getting a little too competitive. Pretty soon some guys started calling out to play tackle instead of touch. I was the last guy that held out for touch so tackle it was.
On the ensuing kick off the ball came right to me and I caught it and made a couple of good dekes and was headed downfield towards the end zone. All of a sudden I was blindsided by a flying tackle and went hard to the ground. A couple of guys piled on and I heard and felt a distubing thing. It was my collar bone breaking.
I went to the emergency room and I was fitted with a terribly uncomfortable wrap that went under both armpits and was cinched up in the back to keep my shoulders up instead of sagging so the bone would mend properly. I called it a bra for some reason. I'm a pretty big guy and my "bra" gave me the look in the shoulders that you would see on the Frankenstein monster. I started calling myself Lurch.
To make matters worse I had been hiking in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada the day before the picnic and I came in contact with the dreaded "Poison Oak". By the time my first college classes started my face was broken out with some pretty bad patches of poison oak.
You can imagine what I looked like when I walked into my classes.
Think the girls were impressed?
__________________
The sands of time past keep shifting according to how we remember or forget or refashion it in hindsight, which is no sight at all.
Kajal Basu
|