From the book “America! America?” (Copyright 2003, 2005)
BASEBALL
Just like it had been in Germany, some amount of “physical education” was required in Amarillo High School as well. I had never been an especially athletic person. Gladly I would have done without P.E. – unless we would have played games like “handball.” No, I am not speaking of the kind of handball known in the United States. In many other countries, especially in Europe, handball is a sport with considerable similarity to soccer. Teams of eleven persons play against each other. As in soccer, a goal is scored when the goalie cannot catch a ball that threatens to cross the line between the goal posts. The difference between soccer and handball is the same as the difference between one’s hands and feet. In handball the ball is never kicked. It is thrown from person to person.
If a player wants to run with it, he or she must throw the ball to the ground and catch it again – once every three steps or once every three seconds. Handball is an extremely fast game with high scores – often the game is so fast that umpires whistle it to a stop because they lost track of the ball! I loved that game!
Yes, if I had to take part in P.E., I would have liked to play handball. But I was not so lucky. Nobody had even heard of a game like that. Instead, we were going to play some other kind of game that semester – but that was a game I had never heard of. Something about a “base.” I could not imagine what it meant. Where would that base be? Would we have to go far to that base? Was the playing field on some military compound? What kind of game was it?
When the coach heard that I had recently arrived from Europe he looked at me with what I saw as considerable doubt in his deeply set eyes. He must have known about European ignorance. Then he inquired: “Have you ever heard of baseball?”
“Excuse me, I did not understand. Have I ever heard of what?”
“I see.” His forehead folded into a deep frown, but at the same time a sheepish smile crept across his face. He waved his hand in a wide circle. “You see the tree out there?”
I looked for the tree. “That one?”
“No, no. That’s too close. That one. Over there!”
Yes – there was another tree. About two or three soccer field distances away. “That
one? The one that is nearly on the horizon?”
“Yap. That one. Well, it isn’t quite on the horizon.” His eyes filled with irony. “Now listen, here is what I want you to do.” The smile on his face deepened. And his frown folds had returned to their normal depth. He seemed to be nearly laughing.
“Here is what I want you to do. During each of our PE classes, rain or shine, I want you to go out there and stand or sit under that tree. Understand? Now, if a ball ever gets over there, throw it back to someone.”
“Fine, but what happens if he catches the ball?”
“Then he will throw it to someone else and afterwards it will get over here where we are standing now. But don’t worry about that. Just throw the ball to the next person you see. If it ever gets over there. I mean if. Understand?”
Of course I understood. And all semester, I followed the coach’s instructions with care and precision. Every time when PE started I walked to my assigned place and sat under that tree. Summer turned into fall and fall into near-winter. After a while I had to wear a coat, still waiting for that elusive ball. But near the end of the semester, just once, the little hard ball rolled toward me. I grabbed it and threw it to the next person who threw it again. Some other students, way in the distance, seemed to run in circles. Others yelled.
Had I done it right? Anyway, the ball was gone. It seems that it ended up where they were running around.
Never again did I get to touch that little ball. When the semester ended, my Amarillo PE experience was over. Great. But what kind of grade would I get for sitting under that tree? To my great surprise, the grade marked on my report card was an “A.” An “A” in PE? It had never happened before! How did I get an “A”? Did throwing the ball into apparent oblivion deserve such a grade?
After (but only after) all the grades were final and had been registered in the school’s office I asked the coach why he had given me an A. He looked at me, just as he had done when he first met me. At the beginning, his frown deepened – but then he started to laugh. “Yea,” he chuckled. “Yea, you got an A. But you well deserved it. Why? Don’t you know? You’ve tremendously improved!”
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