Watching the Olympics

I've never been an athlete. In grammar school, I was almost always embarrassingly last picked to play dodge ball. The words said with great sighs by team captains, "Well, I guess we'll take Dorine", will ring in my ears for eternity.

In junior high it got worse. I sprouted above most of my peers in 6th grade, making me clumsy as well as not very swift. Defensively, I became the girl who, in gym class, always claimed to have cramps so I could sit on the sidelines and keep from getting sweaty. I hated the dumb blue one piece gym suits we had to wear and the even dumber "girls" rules for so many of the sports, like basketball where you could only dribble the ball for so many steps before you had to throw it. I couldn't stop breaking the rules.

In high school, sports went outside and I tried but failed again. I was too short (everyone grew taller suddenly) and still not swift, so track and field hockey were out. Tennis was a bust as well when I discovered my depth perception sucked. Balls curved around me, over me and far away from me. My racket was everywhere except where it was supposed to be. Then, in high school, one gym teacher took me aside after watching me lead my classmates in warm-up exercises. Running her right hand through her short bleached duck tail of a haircut, she stepped on the stair with her leg with its scarred knee, looked at me like a disappointed mother and said, "You just don't have what it takes to be a leader. You let the girls joke around too much." That was it. I was never going to enjoy any kind of organized athletics.

I'm not one to sit around lumping my fate, so, I turned to unorganized sports, things I could do outside of school without teachers or having to be picked by a team. I learned to ice and roller skate. I wasn't too bad either -- after many falls and bruises, I twirled and skated backwards through a crowd. There were were no rules and I was happy just messing about. In my twenties, I beat guys twice my age with bad knees at racket ball. I compensated for my lousy depth perception because the walls were close and it was a short hop to reach the ball as it came whizzing toward at me. Then, I picked up on running in my thirties, surprising enjoying pushing myself, alone, for the first time -- until I went to cross the street just a block from home and got hit by a car that was trying to beat the light. The bastard hit me and drove away, leaving me lying on the blacktop in the sun's glare on his review mirror.

So watching the winter Olympics -- is, well, nice watching handsome young men and women compete and risk serious bodily harm -- but after a while, it fades into background noise. Can you blame me?