That the gym was packed wasn't a surprise, but it was new, like nothing we'd experienced before. I played on a JV team that wasn't bad as I remember, played for a coach we all loved, in part, I think, because he had a tough job being really serious. At any moment, he could break out a huge smile so whatever firmness he'd been able to create would simply vanish. He was a sweet man, a good man, a history teacher who, in class, was just as capable of giggling at times we didn't expect it. One of the requirements for good teaching--especially in high school--is that the students know only that they don't know exactly what you're going to do next minute.
When I think about that night now, that huge crowd, I'm guessing he was as on edge as any of us. Never before that season had we gone through opening ritual layups being observed by an entire gym full-up with fans. The cheerleaders were out before the game had even begun. This one was the big one--arch-rivals, Cedar Grove, a team with the only roster we'd face all year long that held as many Dutch-American names as ours did. Just down the road. The student-scorer behind the official's bench was my first cousin. Familiarity breeds contempt when it comes to high school rivalries.
I don't know who won that game. I don't believe I even played much. It would be interesting to see some aged score book, but I'm guessing that Coach Modahl wouldn't have put me in, even though I was a starter.
Yesterday, I opened up an old folder I've had along for the ride for years. I started sifting through papers--mostly English assignments--that had me shaking my head. "Alfred Prufrock," one of them said, old ditto sheets, print barely visible. I remember reading T. S. Eliot in college, then again in grad school, finding him really tough-going. I had absolutely no idea that I'd ever had to read him before, that I did actually, in high school, that I even took a semester test that aimed at evaluating my understanding of "The Love Song of. . ." Honestly, I drew a blank.
In part, I didn't--and still don't--remember being assigned T. S. Eliot because my high school years were given, in total servitude, to athletics--to football and basketball, to track and baseball. I was, for four years, among the Oostburg Flying Dutchmen's most dedicated gym rat.
As to be expected, maybe, given my childhood. I grew up a half a block from adjoining baseball fields, and a broad green space wide enough for football any time of year but mostly in the fall, when the season began cross-town in high school. Two basketball courts were blacktopped when I was a kid. I remember chains for nets hung on the rims. We thought we were in heaven, and we went to a Christian school.
Sports not only dominated my life, they were my life. Nothing else came close, although during my last year of high school, a girl took a piece of my heart.
When I think of it today, I suppose the packed gym that night was, in some ways, the beginning of my high school athletic career. Nothing else really mattered much. That night, before that jam-packed crowd, was the advent.
But we were only into layups when something happened, something I was powerless to stop. My heart simply started galloping, racing, beating far too hard and often than I'd ever experienced, and--even though I don't remember it clearly after all these years--I got scared. I got really scared. Something in me let me know this wasn't normal. Something said, "heart attack."
I went over to the coach and told him while the rest of guys were still running through the rituals. I'm guessing he put his hand on my chest, probably felt it himself. I don't know how it went exactly, but soon enough I was in the locker room, and then, sometime later, our family doctor, who happened to be in the crowd that night, showed up, felt my pulse I suppose, put his hand up on my chest.
I haven't the foggiest idea what he said that night, but what I do remember is that he made me feel as if what I was experiencing was nothing to worry about.
I don't remember whether that wildly beating heart kept me on the bench that night or if I got back into the game once the madness in my chest abated. I think not. I'm guessing I stayed out. What I do remember is that Dr. Jensen made me feel as if whatever it was that was going on in my heart wasn't dangerous or even out of the ordinary. He didn't call an ambulance. He just sat there beside me and smiled.
Last night, going through those old high school papers, I found another, not quite as old. Doc Jensen was our family doctor, so I saw him again, more than once, I'm sure. Somewhere in the time that passed between that packed gym my sophomore year, 1963, and the time I went off to college in 1966, Dr. Jensen told me, in no uncertain terms, that when my time came to be drafted--there was a war on, after all--he'd give me a note that would keep me out of military, a note explaining a condition I had and still have.
I shouldn't be amazed that I still have that note, but I do. I found it just last night in that folder full of mostly high school stuff.
In 1970, my college career ending soon, I got on a bus to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, with at least two of my friends because we all commanded to so appear and get a physical for the draft, for military service. In my pocket, I had a letter from Dr. Jensen, just a few short sentences. Here it is.
I was, for the most part, a third-rate lineman for the Oostburg Flying Dutchmen, but I was honorable mention all-conference in basketball; I threw the discus farther than anyone else on the track team, and held down a steady third base come summer baseball.
But if you ask me about memories, I'd pretty much go blank. I remember catching a tackle-eligible pass when we played those same arch-rivals, but mostly I remember that because I knew a certain cheerleader for the enemy would later that night be sitting right beside me in my parents silver '64 Impala.
I loved playing ball, no matter what the shape. Sports taught me a great deal about winning and losing, about putting out for the sake of something bigger than yourself. I learned to lose and to win, to give and to take. I played basketball in college for two years, baseball for all four, got a trophy somewhere down here in the basement for being the best defensive player on the 1970 Dordt College team. I wasn't built for speed, but I was built to be behind the plate. I was a catcher.
And all through college and even after, in town teams and church teams and pick up games in empty gyms, I had occasional attacks of what Dr. Jensen calls paroxysmal tachycardia. What's more, just a day or two after my last day in the classroom, I took a ride to Sioux Falls again, this time in medical helicopter, because I'd suffered a mild stroke attributable to the kind of a-fibrillation that has reoccurred through all those years.
I have what a cardiologist told me was "a chaotic heart," a description I rather like. My heart beat is "irregularly irregular," he says. And, yes, I take blood-thinner, have since that mild stroke and will, my doctor says, for the rest of my life.
It's impossible to remember my high school years without remembering all those hours in a gym or a playing field. I was a jock. I can't imagine ever reading T. S. Eliot. Most of the notes in that old folder were about Macbeth. I came away from that old folder knowing, as only another English teacher could, that Granny Goehring worked her fool head off to try to teach us things she obviously felt deeply about, as if we cared.
But no single memory of high school had as profound an impact on my life as the night the JV team I was on was over there at the rival's new gym, warming up before a packed crowd.
No day or night I spent in high school was so significant to the remainder of my life as the night in a jam-packed gym my racing heart kept me out of Vietnam.
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