Cardboard Gods by Wilker Josh

Author:Wilker, Josh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Seven Footer Press
Published: 2010-06-07T16:00:00+00:00

My seventh-grade team lost its first game by a couple points, then lost its second game by a few points, its third game by several, and so on. We would lose every game that year.

Many of the pummelings were punctuated by my glasses getting raked off my face. This would generally happen during struggles for a rebound that bore a resemblance to the battle captured on the lone Darryl Dawkins card in my collection, part of my exceedingly brief and desultory foray into collecting basketball cards that occurred a couple years after my basketball career began. In the Dawkins card scenario, I was spindly Kevin Grevey, awkwardly reaching for a ball far beyond my grasp while getting gratuitously drilled in the base of my spine by Doug Collins. I would be losing my glasses in the next moment, as one or both of the opposing team’s board-dominating behemoths semi-accidentally lowered their elbows into my face.

After a few of these incidents my frames finally broke, and from then on each spectacles-related calamity entailed both of my lenses dislodging from the frames and skittering across the floor. The ref eventually blew his whistle and members of both teams got down on their knees to locate the frame and lenses for me, at which point I’d then go to the bench and wrap more adhesive tape around them while my coach, a much-beloved youth league icon named Mick, rubbed his eye sockets with the heels of his hand in the manner of someone with a migraine.

My team was, as far as I could tell, Mick’s first-ever losing team, which made me ashamed. Worse, I started to suspect that I was bad luck, the reason any given team might lose. I’d watched Mick coach my brother’s good seventh- and eighth-grade teams, and I’d been on the losing end of several severe baseball diamond beatings by Mick’s dynastic little league squad, the Yankees. I had always wished that Mick could have been my little league coach, since it seemed that everything he touched turned to gold.

Mick was revered as a great teacher of sports, especially baseball. His little league team was always getting the jump on everybody else, having preseason training camps inside gymnasiums during those never-ending weeks in Vermont when the calendar says spring but snow and freezing rain keep pounding down. Mick was dedicated, even umpiring all the games his team wasn’t playing in, which probably also allowed him to probe for weaknesses among the opposition. Contrary to the clichéd image of the dominant, red-faced, win-at-all-costs little league dictator, Mick was actually quite soft-spoken and mild, though he also was able to carry an air of authority about him. I was far from the only kid who wasn’t on his team who wished he was.

But the real key to his success, at least in the commonly held view, which mixed admiration with envy, was that unlike other little league managers who just picked names out of a hat when it came time to draft new nine-year-olds every year, Mick “scouted.

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