Were you a good athlete as a kid?

People sometimes ask, what was it like to play with -- or against -- Magic Johnson? I did a few times when we both were in HS and college (I'm a year older).

OK, it's like this. Magic (or other pro- or high-college level players) wouldn't play with gumpy guys like me in serious games, but if you were just shooting around waiting for the courts to fill up, he'd play 3-on-3 for a while.

Some of the other college level guys were real pricks about it; if you weren't at least a high-school starter level player, they'd say, "get the fuck off the court," even if there was nobody else waiting to play.

Magic didn't really care. He wouldn't bully around playground players just for the hell of it, as long as you didn't try to drive on him or steal the ball off him. Then he'd smack the ball into the upper deck.

He'd try to split up the teams so the gumpy guys were matched up against each other; if you could get free from your gumpy guy defender, he'd throw the ball to you. But if you missed more than about two shots, he'd say, "come on man, you gotta make that."

Probably 90 percent of the time, he'd just be screwing around. But for a minute or two, he'd flip the switch, and... holy shit.

One time, I turned backdoor, and got past my gumpy guy defender, and watched Magic go up for a jumper. I tried to duck inside the third guy to get position on the boards. I suppose if I'd been a foot taller and could jump, I'd have gone up for a lob pass.

BOING! As soon I got a step inside the third guy, the ball appeared literally out of nowhere and bounced off my jaw, straight up in the air. Half woozy and shaking my head, I grabbed the loose ball, staggered and tossed it in off the board from 2 feet away.

"Great shot, man," Magic said with a chuckle. I kinda giggled as blood ran down my lip. He hadn't really thrown it that hard, thank god.

And I did see it coming for a split second; playing with him even in jackoff intramural games, you kinda got used to the ball just snapping to you out of nowhere.

Then the big time guys would arrive, and us gumpy guys got off the court.

 

Quit football as all I wanted to be was a place kicker and not thrown onto the line — too violent tor me.

Also did rowing at a Big Ten school for my sophomore year. Fall semester. Only to get me in shape for walk-on basketball tryouts.

Late October hits and it’s the tryouts. Best shape of my life. 60 kids in the tryout.

I’m hitting threes, creating my own shot, limiting my ballhandling and playing good defense. Survive Monday. Back for Tuesday. Survive that.

There are 6 of us left. I can’t sleep all of Tuesday night. Tossing and turning.

Wednesday night. My boss at the pizza shop gives me the night off because he knows what my dream is.

For 40 minutes, the coaching staff has us play a 3-on-3 half-court game. It was like Hunger Games. No fouls. Just hacking and defense.

I didn’t get it. The most violent kid out there did. He couldn’t score a lick but had a great handle, really tough and could stop all of us. He lettered four years (and we all cheered for him hard).

I never went back to rowing after the tryouts. That was my peak.

However, a silver lining. I joined the women’s team as a practice dummy and I loved it. Practiced twice a week against the women just to be physical and throw elbows. They made the NCAA tournament the year I did it and I was extremely proud of my role.

The next year, I transitioned into sports media and that opened a ton of doors for me as I worked a lot of the women’s basketball games.

 

I sucked. I was tallish, but far too skinny and not fast enough on my feet. I finally got shoulders in my early 20s, and now I look like the guy who played linebacker in high school and could still play it now almost 4 decades later. It’s an illusion.

 

I was the fat kid in school. Cut from my small town little league team in 1980 in favor of keeping a pair of girls.
Moved away, played against the town in high school and homered against them to win the game.
Ended up being all-state in football, played on a state finalist team. Also won a state championship in wrestling in the 285-pound class with a 33-0 record in a Midwestern state where wrestling matters.
Ended up going to a mediocre Division I wrestling program where I got to compete against 3 Olympians and a 6-time NCAA champ named Carlton Haselrig from Pitt-Johnstown. I was an average D1 wrestler but I did beat the NCAA Division III champ when I was a junior.

 

If college counts, I kicked an extra point in the spring varsity game to help the B squad beat the A squad that went on to trample LSU, 48-7. I later added the intramural field-goal kicking title at 51 yards.

 

Outing alert - you're Stefan Fatsis.

 

Lucky enough, and didn't realize just how lucky at the time, to be able to do fairly well in high school in football and baseball (captain, MVP, and all-conference in both). Took it completely for granted - always just assumed as a kid I'd get to play in high school - and only realized how fortunate I was when I had kids of my own. Older son loves sports but is painfully unathletic. Younger son actually has slightly above average athletic ability but had only minimal interest in any sport until age 11; is more interested now at 14 but is too far behind to catch up in this day and age when the top kids play so much. When they talk about potentially getting to play varsity sports in high school and I have to just play along it's heartbreaking - I don't have it in me to tell them the truth as I didn't get into parenting to quash my kids' dreams.

 

About a decade after my occasional playground hoops runs with and against Magic Johnson, I had a summer during which I had about six part-time jobs, of which one was announcing and running the scoreboard on an occasional, intermittent, informal basis
for the Men's Municipal City baseball league where John Smoltz was playing as a just graduated HS senior.

The league included stud HS players, off-season college players (a few from Big Ten teams, a few more from MAC or D-II/III schools, and a few dozen former studs in their 30s or so working jobs in city government or the auto plants. So they had quite a mix.

The summer wood-bat leagues as we know them really hadn't developed yet; there were summer leagues in Alaska and Cape Cod, but those were for the top level college studs.

During the school year, doing my part time stringing job, I'd covered some games Smoltz played in, so I had a nodding acquaintance with him.

One of my fairly good buds from the stringing job had the main summertime job of running the scoreboard, announcing, and playing music between innings for the muni league games.

This involved three games per weeknight and sometimes four games on weekend days. Needless to say there got to be times he had to go take a piss, or adjourn to the hellhole baseball bar across the street for a couple hours.

I believe he got paid $15 a game for all this, but he was the employee of record, so the city would only issue checks to him, so he said, "if you can fill in for me sometimes, I'll throw you a $10 bill for each game." So what the hell, why not.

Anyway, John Smoltz's HS season ended and he joined one of the muni league teams. It was quite a big deal, Smoltz was an All-Stater and had been drafted by the Tigers. As it turned out, I was gonna do the scoreboard that night and I saw Smoltz as he arrived at the park -- alone -- and started to loosen up.

One of my other part time jobs that summer was to coach six (6) youth baseball/softball teams for the city rec department, which involved four boys and two girls teams, in age groups from 8 up to 16. (Which could probably be a book all in itself.) I suppose I was in the best "baseball playing" shape of my life. So I showed up at the mens league games in my coaching gear from the daytime, basically sweats and a baseball jersey.

Anyway I gave Smoltz some crap about arriving late from his HS games, and he said he wasn't pitching that night, he'd probably play OF instead (he'd been a stud hitter in HS as well) and he said he was gonna just throw half speed for 15-20 minutes.

He said he wanted to throw a few minutes with somebody standing in the box, and since i was in baseball duds anyway, why didn't I put a helmet on and stand in?

I said, what the hell, why not? "You want me to swing or not?," I yelled out. "For the first 10 pitches or so, no," he said. "Then I'll step it up, you can swing if you want to."

So he cranked up to "about half speed," and he said i could swing. I think in the next 25 pitches, I might have foul ticked one or two. Most I completely whiffed. I was starting to get sweaty, so I said "give me three more," and he kind of smirked.

The first two were smoke: I think I smelled them going by. Then he laughed, said "last pitch," and tossed an eephus changeup down the middle. I swung from the heels and tapped a scuffer which rolled slowly to a halt down the first base line. I went to my car, toweled off, and went back up to the press box.

Now that I come to think of it, that was the last time I ever batted against a baseball pitcher I was really trying to hit. I suppose if I'd have tried to run out my scuffer down the baseline, I might have beat it, because Smoltz was laughing too hard to make a throw.

 

Well, have you learned not to say, "What the hell? Why not," yet?

 

I say it before almost every post I make here.

Quid infernum, quidni?

 

"Pros vs. Joes" was the best, or, when the local sports talk radio show does a segment like having Brian Scalabrine play against the best guys from your Local Y. The gap between high school and D-I college player is enormous, and the gap between that and pro player is even bigger.

 

I've long believed that you cannot fully grasp just how good top-level athletes are until you see them up very close. A few decades ago I skated with a few NHL players in very casual pickup situations (where I had no business being on the ice) and it sounds entirely different when guys like that skate because their stride is so powerful and they're pushing off with so much force.