Frustrated Former Athletes

Last week, in the late innings of a close game, with a runner on third and the count full, I stepped back into the batter’s box and stared straight ahead at the pitcher. My fingers flexed nervously around the handle of the bat and my stomach churned over the words of a lonely, scary thought: it’s all riding on you. I swallowed once and then once more, and for a second I felt like a real athlete again. But then the pitch came in underhand, and very, very slow, and the spirit ran out of me. I realized, with a sigh, that you can only get so excited about intramural softball, and then I swung…

In high school, I was a pretty good golfer and played number one on the team my senior year. I was the backup point guard on a competitive basketball team and though everyone but me grew six inches between ninth and tenth grade, I still held my own. In the spring, I played shortstop where I fancied myself a white Ozzie Smith: a lot of glove, can’t hit, but just might have a future in the game.

But then college came around and it turned out that I didn’t actually have a future in the game, baseball or any other. I was a whole lot of everything—skill, speed, height, and strength among the things I lacked—away from playing for Harvard and at not even twenty years old, I sadly settled into the aged condition of all washed up. A once proud three-sport varsity athlete, I now have to sate my athletic appetite on the meager fare of pickup basketball and IM softball.

I am certainly not alone at Harvard as a Frustrated Former Athlete (FFA) and if you walk through the Yard on a warm afternoon, you’ll probably see more than a few people wearing t-shirts that now read like epitaphs of a dead career, “1998 All-State Baseball Team,” or “2000 Class AAA Football Champions.” The courts and weight rooms of the MAC teem with FFAs and intramural games are dominated by the shouts, groans and moans of voices that long for a bigger stage but have no place else to play.

Among so many people mourning the same loss, one might think that commiseration and understanding would be the dominant sentiments, but in fact the overriding mode of interaction is surprisingly more hostile.

I’m usually not one to fight, but the three times in my life that I have come closest to getting punched in the face have all come at the hands (literally) of a fellow FFAer.

While everyone is always cordial at the beginning, it generally takes less than ten minutes for a pickup basketball game at the MAC to turn ugly.

The escalation normally starts with a hard foul or an overly aggressive pick, but before you know it, elbows are being thrown, sisters’ are being sullied and the whole game has turned into a frothing pot of latent frustration. After an innocuous comment of mine, made during a Cabot-Quincy IM basketball semifinal game, was misconstrued as a fat joke, the rest of the game turned into a cacophony of cheap shots and trash talk, which carried over into a post-game clash of threats.

For people who miss the camaraderie, excitement, and structure of high school sports, the athletic opportunities open to them in college are woefully unfulfilling. Like the grays that shade twilight, the games are just shadows of the once meaningful athletic events they’ve replaced. In high school, the private satisfaction of competition joined with the public pride of playing for your community to turn sports into more than just a game. And though the private aspect endures in college, the lack of larger meaning strips athletics of one of its most important elements. The events that replace high school sports are just familiar enough to occasionally evoke the old and cherished sensations, the nervousness before a game, the taunt suspense of close action, or the excitement of a big win, and this is what makes them all the more frustrating. They pretend to be the real thing, but the illusion never lasts.

And so when Frustrated Former Athletes take to the inconsequential courts of collegiate recreation, it is with a sense that there’s someplace they’d rather be.

They play with the pride of an athlete who is used to more and not yet willing to accept that the athletic era of his life has closed.

This displaced pride vents itself as a frustrated cry, “I used to be somebody,” punctuated by an elbow exclamation point to the chest.

By now, I’m sure you’re wondering, what happened in my softball game? Well, I’d tell you but it doesn’t really matter, and I guess that’s the problem.

Kevin Hartnett ’03 is a social studies concentrator in Cabot House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.