Ends and Odds: The Ravings Of An Old Man by Dave Jaffe. Chapter One, part one

      One Hopeless Athlete. Part One


     With one exception I was nearly hopeless at playing sports. As a very young boy I went to soccer games and cheered on my favourite teams. They happened to be the local Barnet soccer team and the north London based Tottenham Hotspurs. Yet I couldn't play soccer for beans. I missed kicks, squandered chances to score a goal and often fell down when I should have run past a defender.
     Once in Canada, my athletic skills shrivelled even more. I didn't learn to catch or throw a football until I was in my early 20's. Even then I always felt awkward on the football field. "You throw the ball like a girl," one of my friends said to me. In the early 1960's this was the ultimate insult that one adolescent could hurl at another.
   On the baseball diamond I was as hopeless as I was on the football field. I missed easy grounders, dropped simple fly balls and rarely hit the softballs thrown at me by canny pitchers. "Hockey is the Canadian game," my father once said. Yet I only learned to skate in my mid-teens and couldn't stick handle the puck or even make a decent pass on the ice, let alone fire a slap shot.
    I loved to shoot baskets on the basketball court. Yet as a team player I wasn't worth a damn. "We can't have you on our team," one player on a community team told me after I'd played  a game or two with this group. "You're not just good enough." I quickly vanished from this team and after that only played in pickup games. Even then I was usually the last player to be chosen.
      In short I was a classic teenage nerd, hopeless in sports, but a reader of so-called "intellectual" books  by authors like Aldous Huxley, Bertrand Russell and George Orwell. Many years later I came across the life of  one of Canada's famous prime ministers, namely Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Trudeau, as his biographers Stephen Clarkson and Christina McCall Newman point out, "turned his back on populist sports his father had reveled in such as baseball, hockey, lacrosse and boxing." I did the same. The teenage Trudeau boasted that he would only take part in diving, skiing and canoeing. Yet Trudeau was a skilled athlete. I was no athlete at all.
    Yet even back in grade school I would swim in local pools. I loved swimming in these pools as a teenager too and sometimes swam up to an hour or more. Here no one bothered me or expected anything from me. "I did things alone," I told a woman who once headed up the human resources department of the Vancouver Public Library. I told her that I loved swimming because I did it alone.
    "It sounds to me that you were scared of competition," she replied. Once I thought about what she'd said I concluded that she was probably right.
      Yet to-day at the age of 75 I'm still swimming. I became partly disabled at the age of 32. I can walk a bare six or seven blocks a day. Yet in a swimming pool, I'm the equal of many able bodied people. The athletes of my youth have long since vanished. Even great athletes retire or hang up their cleats in their 30's or even their 20's. I on the other hand, will go on churning through the local swimming pools for as long as I can. In the end, a heart attack, a stroke or terminal cancer will bring my swimming to a halt.  Until then I'll pursue the only sport that I was ever competent in. Long live swimming. It's saved me from complete desperation in the athletic arena.