During my time spent in the New Braunfels Independent School District, I was usually given a yellow sheet of paper at the end of a school year, so I could decide what classes to take the following semester. The golden rod paper would usually list the classes you were required to take, i.e. English, Science, Math, and so on. But starting at the end of fifth grade, the paper had included a new item: electives. So, when the end of sixth grade came along, and we were to decide what two electives we would take in seventh grade. NBISD requires you to take at least one class that requires some sort of physical activity, there are three choices: Gym, Marching Band, and Athletics.
Unfortunately for me the legendary Basket Weaving class that all teachers threaten you with did not exist. So for some reason I chose Athletics.
Athletics was different than gym in that, if you wanted to even attempt to join one of the school’s sports team, you had to be in this specific class of sweat mongers and jock-brocks. For some reason I felt that I was going to be able to make it onto the basketball team, despite my inability to play, or even know what a point guard was. So, there I was, a very unfit, and slightly overweight early teen stuck in a room of jocks and preps, who were already much more desirable to girls than I ever was, or likely will be, except maybe in Canada.
As we were forced to work out fairly rigorously every day, we had to have our own set of workout clothes. I had a shirt, and a pair of basketball shorts, but apparently this wasn’t enough for the coaches who felt the need to assign each of a set of school issued workout clothes. They had us line up, and they would look at us and guess what size we wore, and even if they were horribly off, they wouldn’t give us a correct size. Rather like the portal of uniform assignment at concentration camps in World War II movies. When my turn came, and Jones; the grossly obese football defense coordinator looked at me and assigned me an extra large. Now, I wasn’t the skinniest kid around, but I was far and away not going to fit into a pair of extra large pair of gray shorts, and a half shirt. So, as time rolled on, I found a way of getting rid of jumbo clown short pants, and quash my homoerotic half shirt that revealed my chunky mid-drift.
Sometime during the middle of the semester, we were taken out of the mat room, and forced to run around for a few miles. As the actual running track consisted of mud, and was normally used by the girl’s athletics class, we were forced to run the streets around the school, while the coaches piled into a pickup truck and drove around like hillbillies on a gay-witch hunt. I was one of the most unfit in the class, so I was always trailing behind with the other fatties who signed up for the class by mistake.
The coaches usually paid more attention to the real athletes to make sure they were always running, so they were off far ahead and us in the back could slack off by walking, or collapsing from heat exhaustion. Yet, every so often that truck would drive down around the corner, and we would have to start running again, just in case they decided to hunt us down in a manner described by Richard Connell.
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