PUBLISHED 10/10/2007
Now it happened that three of the runners from PMA were substantially faster than I was. Yet at one stage late in the race, we were neck and neck. What my late-arriving coach didn't realize was that for the runners from PMA this was the fourth and final lap. For me it was the third.
Coach and a few others appeared just as the race became fevered. The four of us were thundering around that final curve. "Hustle!" he shouted. "Hustle, Cheever. Dig it out."
In his hoarse cry, I could hear Coach thinking, What do you know? Maybe I've been wrong about young Cheever.
Then we all crossed the finish. The PMA runners staggered off the course. I made the turn and headed manfully off for my final lap.
Coaches are supposed to have small and weathered hearts, something on the order of a horse chestnut. But this is the sort of performance that breaks even a chestnut heart.
My sporting achievements couldn't have been much good for my father's vitals. The man wanted an athlete as a son.
Freshman year looked like my breakthrough. I made it onto the varsity squad of Scarborough Country Day School's six-man tackle football team. Steve was first-string center. He wasn't all that big; nor was he particularly fast on his feet. Steve had quick hands. The moment the ball was snapped, he'd reach across the line of scrimmage, grab the face guard of the opposing lineman with one hand, and with the other he'd drive the nose he found there back into the face it belonged to.
This happened in games with other schools. It also happened in scrimmages between the first and second team. I was second-string center.
A cobra is supposed to strike so quickly it can't be seen by the naked eye. Steve's hands were that fast. I'd spend the rest of the play staggering slowly around in circles while the tears that had obscured my vision ran down my face.
My father was an unusually articulate and forthright man. He used to like to say that he and I operated "on a basis of absolute candor." And there was something to this, although he didn't tell me about his bisexuality. Nor did I tell him what it was actually like to play second-string for the six-man tackle football team at Scarborough Country Day. He knew that I--a freshman--was on the varsity squad. And it was a fine thing to have won my father's approval. Practice wasn't over until after the last bus had left the school. My father ordinarily hated the chauffeuring part of parenting, but after football practice, he was pleased, he was honored to pick me up. On the way home, he'd stop and buy me fresh dinner rolls at the Ossining Italian bakery. He had a phrase--a mantra really: "My son the football player."
Fortunately, he never went to a game.
As a sophomore, I went off to boarding school and, yes, I went out for football.
All the varsity and junior varsity football wannabes lined up in front of the cage. ("Cage," for those of you who have not been--as I have--varsity athletes, is the term used for the room or the locker in which sporting equipment is left to gather mold and grow fungi.) A whistle was blown and we rushed the cage. We tore off our street clothes and donned equipment. This was social Darwinism at its purest. The toughest, pushiest boys came up with the best equipment. The shy, uncertain boys made do with what was left.
