Sam Juliano 2017 Contest

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cats in the Craddle - Sammy J style!

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#2 Submission from Sam

TAXi - Sammy J Style!

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http://www.groundstrike.com/songs/Taxi.mp3

 

 

 

 

 

 

#3 Submission from Sam

One of the Best Days in My Little Life

Our classmate Mark Duffner has been a football player or football coach almost all his life, and is currently the linebackers coach with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.  He’s been inducted into the Hall of Fame for both William and Mary, where he played, and Holy Cross, where he coached.  Among other honors, he’s been the Coach of the Year and National Coach of the Year a total of 6 times.  He’s been a coordinator or coach in the NFL for the past 20 years.  But missing from his resume is the time he played on MY team at Annandale High…

This is a story about one of the best days in my life.  I don’t have any children, so I don’t have any birth days to compare with.  And even though I have been married, the lady divorced me after a brief 21 years, so I can no longer rate my wedding day up there amongst the best.

First, let’s face it, in high school I was a nerd at a time when nerds weren’t as sexy as they seem to be today.  I was born with amblyopia, or “lazy eye”, which I learned later in life to mean that I had no “stereo vision”, which results in zero depth perception.  I was not tall, always a little overweight, and had absolutely no athleticism in my body.

My late father, who in every other respect was the best dad in the world, didn’t play, watch, or have any interest in sports.  He was an Italian immigrant who came to the US as a boy with his father;  his mother abandoning them to stay in Italy.  By age 10 he was working full time after school, and so he never had time to play any team sports.  Later, when other fathers were having a catch* with their sons, my father preferred to study towards his bachelor’s and master’s degrees, having missed out on college because of the war and his career in the Army.

So I lay a little of the blame for my lack of “sports ability” on my Dad and the rest on my (lack of) physical condition.  Believe me, without depth perception, if you swing at a ball with a baseball bat, you’ll connect only out of sheer luck.  If you put your hands up to try to catch a ball, it’s far more likely the ball will bean you on your head.  It’s either embarrassing or painful, or both.  Realizing my limitations in junior high at Poe, I watched sports rather than try to participate in them.  In any group, someone has to be the worst at something, and I readily admit I was that person when it came to sports.

And as long as I’m randomly spreading blame around, let me add that my name – Juliano – is not really a “sports” name.  Too many syllables, and too hard to yell out quickly.  Take Guthrie, Duffner, Early, even Tedesco – those are good, solid sportsman names.  You got a “Guth-ree” in the game, you’re gonna win.  Not so much with “Ju-lee-ann-oh.”

When you get to high school, you don’t really get the option to participate or not.  You’re thrown into the dodgeball fray with guys who are much bigger and much stronger than you’ll ever be.  And who are they going to aim at?  Some equally big strong guy?  Hell no, they aim at the nerds, the human clay pigeons of the high school gym world.  With no depth perception, I usually didn’t realize that a ball was streaking towards my face until I felt the painful sting of rubber flattening my nose.  I’ll admit only now that on a couple occasions, that sting was so bad – not to mention so humiliating - that my eyes would well up.  But good lord, I didn’t want to be known as a crybaby too, so I did everything possible to hide that.

So it went with each individual sport.  They were all tests of strength and endurance, qualities I completely lacked.  The guy doing the fewest sit ups, push ups, tip ups, pull ups, and all those other ups, and with the slowest times in the 600 yard run and various dashes was usually me, or one of the other few unfortunate cretins who crapped out on the athlete gene.  With each of these failures comes another heavy dose of humiliation.

And then there were the team sports, like basketball, softball and even crab soccer.  This was where the real humiliation kicked in – specifically, the day of picking teams.  By unwritten rules that transcended history, the coach called out a few of the jockiest of the jocks to be the captains of teams that they would then pick.  Like Draft Day in the NFL, the jocks would work their way round-robin through their gym classmates, and fill out their team rosters for the sport at hand.  The best and the brightest went in the first few rounds, followed by the capable, if less spectacular.

Then they got down to the dregs.  Unlike the NFL draft, every classmate had to end up on a team, so they couldn’t just walk away and leave the rest of us sitting in the locker room (although, God knows they would have liked to).  The mood became darker, and a painful process followed, where the dregs were sized up from least dreggy to most.  The question became not who would be an asset, but instead who would be the least drag on the team.  With each dreg selection, groans came from those already picked.

Inevitably, there were two people left unpicked:  me and some other boob.  One team grudgingly took the other boob, leaving me alone in the spotlight of shame.  More than once, the captain of the team who got me by default would say, “you can have Juliano too, if you want him” followed quickly by “no thanks.”

Don’t get me wrong:  this is the way it should be, and has to be.  This is what natural selection and survival of the fittest is all about, manifested in high school gym class.  I knew and understood this.  This is also the stuff of sitcoms.  We’ve all (including me) laughed as the Sheldons of the world get passed over when brawn is the most important criteria.  Unfortunately none of this makes the humiliation any less humiliating to the humiliate.

During my Junior year at Annandale High in the spring of 1970, Coach Secules came in to the locker room one day to say we were going to pick four teams for spring softball.

Ugh, a beautiful spring day about to be doused with another sobering shot of indignity.

He looked around at the young men in his class, and called out the names of Jock 1, Jock 2, Jock 3, and…

… Juliano.

“Ju-lee-ann-oh?”, people exclaimed.  “Are you kidding?”  Groans of annoyance came from everyone, except me, of course; mainly because I was in a state of shock.

In that moment, Coach Secules, bless his heart, had at once broken thousands of years of precedent, and had gifted me with a reprieve from the ignominy that otherwise would have befallen me that day.

This was hope for all of us nerds!  A triumph of the wretched!  A win for all the losers!

No, I’m sorry to admit, it wasn’t, because I immediately picked the top jock for my team:  Duffner!  Then in every following round, I picked exactly the same person who would otherwise have been picked in that round – that is, the best person still available, where “best” equals “most athletic”.  The only thing that really changed was that instead of me being the last man left standing, that day, that dishonor went to the other boob I normally competed with for last place.  Yes, I felt badly looking into the hopeful eyes of my fellow dregs and then not calling any of their names.  Hell, I wanted a winning team!  Would you have preferred if I had gone “bottom up” and picked just the dregs?  That happens only in fairy tales.  This was real life.

Playing on my team, for me at least, was kinda fun, because it took some of the pressure off – I never wanted to let down the real athlete captains that had gotten stuck with me.  I knew my place and pretty much let the big guys assign positions and call the shots.  I assigned myself to far, far outfield and just prayed that nobody could ever hit the ball that far.  We were the Juliano Jockstraps, in case you were wondering.  I don’t think we won the pennant.

Epilogue:  During one of the Jockstraps’ games, a guy actually hit the ball all the way out to me.  This was an easy out for anyone else, but a sure-fire home run with me out there.  I put my glove up mainly to soften the blow of the ball hitting my face at that velocity, when, wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles, I actually caught the ball!  I was so excited I jumped around, waving the ball, and screamed at the guys that I had actually done it!  But for some reason they did not share my jubilation, and in fact, were becoming increasingly angry… “Throw the damn ball!!!” they all yelled.  Yeah, here I was a junior in high school and not only was it a red-letter day for me to just catch a fly ball, but I had never, EVER heard of “tagging up”!  Fathers, don’t let your babies grow up to be like I was.  Seriously, it’s incumbent on every parent to at least have a catch* with their kids, boys and girls alike.

*I’m using “have a catch” from “Field of Dreams” – I’ve always said “play catch”, and apparently everyone else in the world does too, but if Kevin Costner and Shoeless Joe Jackson say “have a catch”, who am I to argue?

I did, finally, become a little more athletic when I started running in college, and I have done it ever since, culminating in a number of marathons run during my later years.  Dad and I both became college football fanatics.  While living in Annandale, Dad completed his bachelor’s degree from Oklahoma University, and his master’s degree from Nebraska.  With me having graduated from the University of Texas (and my sister from Texas A&M), quite a rivalry sprung up in our house on college football weekends.

Nearly 50 years later I still remember and thank Coach Secules for that moment of glory, or rather for sparing me that moment of inglory.   His is the only coach’s name I remember, except for a sadistic one from Texas who, in 5^th grade, made me run 2 miles on a dusty rural school track barefoot, because I lost my gym shoes that day.  Mom spent much of that night tweezering stickerburrs, goat heads, and shards of broken glass out of my feet.  Yeah, I remember you, too, Coach Simmons, you SOB.