“Dad, Am I Athletic?”

From the time we males can walk, sometimes even before, we start measuring ourselves against other males based on our physical ability.  Even toddlers wrestle, box, and race to see who is the fastest and strongest.  As we age, our play gets slightly more sophisticated and we enter the world of organized sports where there’s less and less room for debate as to who is faster or stronger.  The answer is right there on the scoreboard.

Most women find this hard to understand.  By nature, and as a general rule (I know there are dramatic exceptions), women are less competitive and more supportive.  I heard recently about a collegiate softball game where a batter who had been struggling at the plate got a hit, but somehow injured herself and couldn’t run the bases.  Members of the other team assisted her around the bases so that she could score.  This was apparently a meaningful run in a meaningful game.  Guys don’t do that unless it doesn’t matter.  If some guy in a college baseball game cracked a game winning home run, but couldn’t round the bases because he broke his leg, the guys from the other team would do a silent fist pump and thank the baseball gods for their miraculous good fortune.  I’m not saying it’s good, it’s just the way we’re wired.

I don’t know how gym class works anymore.  I suspect that it’s been feminized like so many other things in education.  But when I was a kid, the whole system was set up to create a pecking order and identify the alpha males in the class.  Whatever the sport – kick ball, dodge ball, baseball, basketball, football, capture the flag, or smear the queer (I’m pretty sure they don’t play that one anymore), the best kids in the class were named “captain” and picked the teams. It was like a caste system or medieval England – there were Kings, Lords, Dukes, Earls, and a lot of serfs.  The same kids were picked first, while the others sat sadly on the sideline waiting to be doled out at random between the teams after the athletes were taken, dutifully taking their place in left field, knowing their place in the world and having it announced day after day in front of the rest of the class. 

Just in case you are wondering – I was always picked close to last, if I was picked at all.  Sometimes I was simply the last one standing, so there was no need to even say my name.  I just joined the team with the fewest kids.

Lots of perks come with being an athletic kid.  They obviously get the girls.  Even the grownups prefer the athletic kids.  They are confident, often good looking, and win games for the school.  What’s not to like?  Of course, when the grownups aren’t looking some of the athletic kids like to further prove their superiority by beating up on the less athletic kids.  I wasn’t terribly fond of jocks, partly because they beat me up, but mostly because I wasn’t one of them, and I desperately wanted to be.

What I’ve just described is the primary reason that fathers want their sons to be good athletes.  Sure, some dads suffer under the delusion that they’ve got a pro athlete under their roof who will bring fame and fortune to the family name, or at least a scholarship to a DI school.  But for the most part, dads just hate the thought of their son sitting on the sideline, pathetically waiting for his name to be called,  his self esteem dropping in each round that it isn’t.

I went to a small private high school where it was easier to make the sports teams.  In my junior year I decided to take a shot at soccer, and I made the team.  I think everyone did, but that’s beside the point.  For the first time in my teenage years, I experienced the thrill of putting on a uniform, the camaraderie of practice, and the intensity of game day.  It was a great thrill.

When my senior season started, two of our best soccer players were obligated to finish the basketball season and so were unavailable at the beginning of soccer season. Consequently,  I actually started a couple of games.  I wasn’t good, mind you, just a senior on a team with a short bench.  I was developing skills, played a lot of minutes in every game (with one exception), and got to be part of a very good team.  We finished the regular season with only 3 losses, and breezed through the first couple rounds of the regional playoffs.  In the regional semis we met the #1 ranked team in the state.  They’d beaten us soundly in the regular season, but we’d learned a few things since the loss.  It was an incredibly exciting game.  Our goalkeeper stopped a penalty kick, and we finished regulation and two overtimes scoreless.  We went to sudden death overtime.  One of our best players went down with a bloody, horrible-looking injury and we gave up a goal shortly after that.  For the first time in my limited soccer career, I’d watched the entire game from the bench.  The game was too important for me to play.  I still stings a little.

My son Jack (9) is in many ways extraordinary.  But when it comes to athletics, he’s pretty average.  He loves to participate, and has a lot more interest in sports generally than I did at his age.  It’s a great joy to watch him play, and I exult at every victory and ache with every defeat.  I’ve coached two of his soccer teams, and got insight into how his particular league works.  There’s a ranking of players based on a skills assessment, and the coaches are supposed to play equally matched players against each other.  It actually works quite well, and the kids are pretty oblivious.  As his coach, I’ve gotten to see where he stands, and he’s right there in the middle. 

The other day Jack and I were playing basketball in the driveway.  It was one of those sunny, perfect days when all of the kids were within my view doing something.  I’ve been teaching him a few things about basketball from my very limited knowledge, and we play H.O.R.S.E. and “21″.  In the middle of one of our games he asked me, “Dad, am I athletic?” 

I was all too aware of what he was asking.  It wasn’t an objective question about whether he was skilled in basketball.  It went to the core of his self-concept.  He wanted to know if I thought he had what it takes to be a man. 

Now, I know from life experience that performance in athletics says precious little about a person’s success in life.  For some of the popular athletes I knew in school, their best days are behind them.  But Jack is 9, and he didn’t need a lecture. He needed to know how I perceived him.

“Sure you are Jack, why do you ask?”

“I was just wondering.”

I knew that he wasn’t just wondering.  “Did someone tell you that you weren’t athletic?”

“Yeah, some of the guys at school.”

I winced as I pictured the playground at his school.  I imagined the anxiety he feels as he waits to see where he stands in the pecking order. 

“Jack, if you weren’t athletic, you couldn’t have finished your triathlon.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

He seemed encouraged by that, and I allowed him to experience a little success in our game.  The day after that conversation, he experienced the elation of striking out two kids in his first inning as a pitcher, followed the next day by the dejection of making a base-running error that cost his team the game (and his third base coach – me – shares in the blame for that one).  I know that his ups and downs will continue, in sports and in everything.

I’ll do what I can as his dad, but there are things that I cannot control, and he’ll have to sort a lot of it out by himself.  But one thing I need for him to know, and something I need to remember myself, is that God is very unlike us, and very unlike the kids on the playground.  When choosing a king for Israel to succeed Saul, he appointed Samuel to select from a family of brothers.  He was presented with the oldest and strongest first.  “No”, God said.  “Do not look at his appearance or at the height of his stature, because I have rejected him, for God sees not as a man sees, for man looks at outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.” 

Samuel worked down the line of Jesse’s sons, seven of them, all strong, tall and carrying the bearing of a leader.  God rejected all of them.  “Is there anyone else?” Samuel asked the father.  “There remains the youngest”, he said.  The youngest son hadn’t been counted worthy enough to be there for the selection, so he had to be brought in from the field.  And so, God chose King David.

God is so unlike us, but we are so very like ourselves.  We look for the strongest, while God says time and again that he works through the weakest.  The very things we seek to instill in our children – self-determination, self-confidence, and independence, are things God is calling us replace with surrender of self and submission to him.  Do we teach our children to delight in their infirmities, or do we simply pray that they will not experience them?   

I still wrestle with how I should have answered that question, but I am convinced of this much – Jack’s standing in the big scheme of things has nothing to do with his ranking in the playground hierarchy, and for me to convince him of that, I need to be firmly persuaded of it myself.