Hello to any who loses a moment of their life to read about a part of mine. This is my sport page where I hope to rant, talk, discuss, berate and a slew of other pretty words that have very little to do with sports.
I feel that a sort of laying of the resume before you before we proceed is essential. I mean it’s only fair you know my qualifications.
Ok, good, I’ve none. I mean as a kid I threw things at my sisters, I ran away from potential chanclazos from my mother with lightning fast speed and I had a sort full of myself bully type attitude (being bigger than everyone kind of naturally leads you down that path). Beyond these things I was not an athlete. I didn’t learn how to throw a football, not a spiral…a football, until I was 11 years old. My father, never home, always working himself towards a future “Cats in the Cradle” scenario with his only boy, was not around. He’d lost any hope of my having some kind of sports prowess years before as he confessed sometime in fall of ’94 as we scrambled to find me a baseball glove for, well baseball, which I’d just joined at high school. He’d sold the glove to someone figuring, based on my disinterest in sports, I’d never use it. Our poorness and his lack of faith let me to a gifted sorry excuse of a glove my uncle had. The glove, nearly twice my age, was at least broken in. It was an ugly yellow color, so worn it wobbled when you shook it despite closing your hand and the best part (worst) was that it had no cushion in the hand area where the ball hit every time you caught a throw. Now I was very good at throwing (accurate I mean) so the kids that threw the hardest liked to warm up with me because they knew they were getting a good throw at the chest, all the while I was getting bruised bones at the base of my fingers on my palm. I never loved a glove more than I did the new one I’d get the following year.
I played, well let me be clear, I was part of the baseball team my four years in high school from the dreaded off-season stuff all the way through the spring, minus the few months my junior year that’s played, sorry, participated in football.
It wasn’t entirely my fault I sucked at sports. That blame goes to my father. See, I had no foundations in any sport. No little league, no pony, no pop warner, no anything. My father worked too much to be able to take us to such activities, which now run rampant with minivans and parents ruining weekends. And since he figured if he let us car pool we’d certainly die because other people weren’t him.
I had no foundation for sports. I had intelligence, though, so I figured things out. Unfortunately I wasn’t the whip that I would become and by the time I figured it all out I had graduated. I took with me from baseball, my best conditioning, which wasn’t very good, and the best compliment from the best player in the lower RGV. I’d played four years, sucked the entire time and never quit, and complained very little (unlike Carlos who had a coronary or some serious ailment at least once a week during Wednesday Madness -[lots and lots of running]). I had the most heart he’d ever played with.
My football experience, well that left me with a dominating performance during a scrimmage game where I sacked the QB, clothes lined the running back and had another three tackles. I also learned that if you don’t mold your mouthpiece it will make you want to hurl the entire time it is in your mouth and Porter High school had a poor record because it had poor coaches. I never received a playbook but I was expected to know the plays. I was part of history in that I was on the team that snapped one of the longest losing streaks in Texas, apparently there was a ESPN mention at one point. We beat a dilapidated Pace team playing iron man football, that’s when you don’t have enough guys for the 22 defenders and 22 offensive players so some guys play both ways. In a physical game it’s tough sledding.
College yielded no good experience beyond intramurals which aren’t very competitive. I showed some promise as a QB for a flag football team, I was a good accurate thrower remember, but that glory seized when I pulled a tendon in my elbow during warm-ups because I didn’t believe in warming up, just slinging it like if I was goddamn Nolan Ryan. So my later years at UTB were spent writing sports, where the moniker Rookie came from as I was all about sports and always the new guy everywhere I went.
Throughout the years I have picked up considerable amounts of knowledge on all kinds of sports, why or how I’ve no idea but I’ll find myself watching the most random of sports sometimes and being knowledgable, well most sports. Some I’ll never understand, I’m looking at you cricket.
So that’s me in a sporty nutshell. I hope you read is and I hope you want to discuss some sports with the Rook.
1st Round Bust 