By the time I graduated to middle school my confidence in the usefulness of PE and its coaches had all but disappeared, but for some reason I still gave team sports a chance. Maybe I thought that at a different school the coaches would be different, but unfortunately PE coaches worldwide have to pass a standardized insanity test, and those who are sane enough to be capable of putting together a complete sentence are disqualified from the job.
Oh well. In any case, my first year at my new school I made the soccer team. I say "made" as if there were tryouts and the possibility of getting cut from the team, which is what I'd like to think. This was a decade ago though, so I no longer remember--but I have a hard time believing there could have possibly been cuts, because the girl who totally freaked out that one time a gnat flew into her eye managed to make the team. ...
There are so few things I remember about middle school, but I do remember Ann shrieking in agony, blindly swatting at her face like she was having some kind of seizure, and rolling about on the field. All the other girls on the team ran to help her, thinking (based on the screams of agony) that Ann must have been stabbed in face by the invisible man, only to be told, "A FLY FLEW INTO MY EYE!"
This incident would later become Ann's War Story, the harrowing tale she would regale us with in the locker room even after other members of the team has suffered broken legs or concussions. And for the rest of high school this story became the one thing I had in common with some of the other girls on the team. We hadn't done anything together since our last game in 8th grade, but whenever we found each other in the presence of one another up until our final year of high school we could always say, "Remember that time a fly flew into Ann's eye?" and crack up. In a few months my class has a reunion, and I'm sure the fly story will smooth over many awkward moments.
My point in telling you all of this is that I want you to understand that, Ann being so much of an exception that her exception actually manages to open up alternate dimension, I was the worst player on the team. I wasn't so bad though. Apart from my having a top speed of 1 mile per hour and apart from my inability to dribble and apart from my complete lack of aim when kicking. And apart from the fact that I couldn't head the ball because it would leave me blindly crawling around on the field looking for my glasses. Okay, I guess I was pretty useless.
But as far as PE coaches go, the soccer coach actually wasn't all that bad. He had a sort of condescending fondness for me, the girl who was on the bench for 95% of every game, as if he viewed me as his dumb but lovable golden retriever after spending so much time together on the sidelines. I don't really blame him for his warm disdain for me. I'd probably act the same way towards someone I thought was nice but who didn't know how to say something as basic as "good morning" in any foreign language, because that's what I value. This guy on the other hand valued soccer, and I happened to be completely illiterate in it.
Like all coaches, however, he was a weird man. He came from Bulgaria, spoke terrible English with an accent that reminded me of Oscar Kakashka from "Hey Arnold!", and I suspect his status in this country was not exactly legal. I'm not entirely sure why so many of my coaches were foreigners; maybe because schools have a hard time finding physically fit Americans? Anyway, our Bulgarian would give us sayings and chants to remember how to play well, but they were borderline nonsensical, and one of the more bizarre ones was how to do a penalty kick: "Heppy feet? Megic hop!"
He also gave some of the girls completely random nicknames derived from the names of anglophones who were really cool in previous eras, which you could totally tell he heard about in English class. How do I know? Because we would do the same thing in our language classes at school. The teacher would hold up a picture from the language book featuring a long-dead French starlet or director and would ask us in irritatingly slow French, loudly like an American speaking English in a foreign country, "QUIIIII EST-CCCCCCCE?"
For some reason it's impossible for language books to have current famous people to practice with, so instead of immediately responding, "C'est Britney Spears" or "C'est David Beckham," the class had to waste about five minutes first asking, "How do you say 'how do you say' in français?", then asking, "Ok then, comment dit-on 'I've never seen that guy before in my life'?" Followed by the teacher explaining that "this person is a famous French guy...at least I think so....who?...um...well, no, the book doesn't explain who it is...well, this book was published in the early 80's and I think it was more obvious back then who this was...well no, Nadine, I don't know what he's up to now, obviously....um...fuck it, do you guys want to just pretend this is Kobe Bryant? Now, QUIII EST-CCCCCE?"
So it was pretty easy to imagine Coach Kakashka sitting in an ESL classroom somewhere, with the teacher holding up pictures of James Dean or Marilyn Monroe, shouting loudly and slowly enough that even profoundly deaf people in Greenland could hear and understand, "WHO IS THIS?" The result of all of this is that on our team we had a Frank Sinatra and a Sammy Davis Junior, but no Justin Timberlakes.
And so for two years I, James Dean, put in my time on the soccer team. I wish I could tell you that this was enough to get through my thick head that I'm not cut out for team sports, but unfortunately this was not the end of my sporting career at secondary school. My fat ass started in a cheerleading uniform, forced my soccer shorts to struggle to contain it, got chafed by my cross-country running uniform, and ended up getting massively bruised before my unceremonious departure from the lacrosse team. But these are stories for another day.
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