Recognition
I was never a great athlete, though I enjoyed participating in sports. Growing up in my neighborhood with my few friends, I wasn’t a bad player. I could hold my own when we played together, and though I wasn’t the best player on the field, I was above the average player in my small local group.
Then I got involved in team sports. Now, being among more elite players, I was not the chosen one. In Little League, I remember batting .000. I either struck out or walked. Anything I hit was usually caught. I wasn’t even put in the game when we made the playoffs. Though my father came to some of my games, he was looking for an athlete just like he envisioned himself to be when he was younger. He always claimed that he played soccer for the German National Team as a young adult in Germany. (A claim that I have never been able to verify). I did not fit that image, so I was somewhat of a disappointment to him, I guess.
At school, I was always one of the players picked last because of my height (I was small) and lack of skills compared to other kids I played with.
Enter Ice Hockey at age 15, where I was placed in the league below my age group. I thought I should have played better than others because of my age difference. I didn’t.
Then came college. In college, I didn’t do too badly on the intramural teams I played on. I quarterbacked in touch football and held my own in soccer, though I did get winded fast. I drifted to playing goalie, where running wasn’t as important. There, my handicap was my height and my lack of forceful kicking ability.
I was also part of Stony Brook University’s first ice hockey team. Being one of the few players, initially, that could skate backwards, I was given the position of assistant captain. That lasted one year, after which many other players surpassed my abilities. After three years on the team, my career stats were one goal and three assists.
Following college, I occasionally played some pickup hockey games in New Jersey with a friend of my brother-in-law. These games were late at night, so I would stay at my sister’s house and go to the games myself. No one came to watch me. No one on the team I played for knew who I was except the friend of my brother-in-law. One game stands out in my memory. I guess the other team that we played against wasn’t very good. We won the game by a score of 12 – 3. I scored 5 of those goals, and I scored them in different ways – wrist-shot, slapshot, on breakaways, etc. I couldn’t believe how well I played. I felt on top of the world. When I went back to my sister’s house, everyone was asleep. The next day my brother-in-law asked me how the game was. I said, “I scored five goals.” He, too, was very impressed. I wanted that feeling to remain, which it did for a few days.
Later in life, I did play more sports. This time I was better than I was as a kid. I played tennis, soccer, and softball. I had a lot more experience. I enjoyed playing, but it never gave me the same feeling as in that hockey game.
As a side note, when I was 28 years old, my father wasn’t doing so well health-wise. I would call him periodically to see how he was doing. I’m not sure how we got onto the sports conversation, but in one conversation, I was talking about something I had done (at that time, it would probably have been indoor soccer, in which I played goalie for an adult team). He told me that Leslie, one of my sisters, and I were the only athletes in the family.
My eyes started to fill with tears. It was a very emotional moment for me. Realizing that my father actually did accept me as an athlete, no matter how I performed, was important to me. He acknowledged it for the first time, and I needed to hear it from him. That, too, was a feeling I wanted to keep forever. If only life were always like that.
