To get out of taking PE each semester I decided I would take up at least one sport. For some strange reason, the sport I chose was wrestling. While I was Varsity for 2 of those years, I took my junior year off, I have to admit I wan’t very good. I didn’t win much and I only remained top of my weight class in school because I took advantage of the new kids who would be in my weight class.
You see; starting with my Sophmore season, I would spend the first few weeks of practice finding our everyone that would be in my weight class on the team. I would then spend those weeks ‘practicing’ with them and ‘teaching’ them how to wrestle, In reality I used that time to beat the snot out of them so that when it became time to challenge me for the varsity slot, no one ever would.
My senior year of high school I also took advantage of the system at least until I was caught. The way the system worked was that during your sports season you were excused from PE. When the season ended you were supposed to report back to your PE class. Well when wrestling ended that year, I forgot to go back to PE and for several weeks just hung our in the library. I was eventually caught and sent back. But at least I escaped it for a bit.
I also played football for one season. My Sophmore year, which did not start off too well. At the end of my Freshman year they held the first team meeting for the Sophmore team. During that meeting they passed around a signup sheet where we put our name, weight, and position we were trying out for. Well I had always been good at football and loved knocking people over, so I put down my name, why weight (98 lb’s), and position (linebacker). After the sheet had made the rounds the coach took the sheet and began reading it out loud so he could put a face to each of the players. When he got to my name it went like this…
”Leonard Johnson, 98 pou…Hahahahaha…linebacker? Where are you?
I raised my. Hand and he looked at me and let me know that it wasn’t happening. Instead my one year consisted of specialty teams and tackling dummy for the first string. I also set out on a mission to show up every first string that I possibly could. Occasionally I would succeed. Where upon the coach would start screaming at the first stringer about being out played by the little guy. Of course the school had the tradition of putting stickers on the helmets for touchdowns and other significant plays. Well, I am happy to report that I was the only player on the specialty teams that earned a helmet sticker, It was for tackling a the kickoff returner who had just finished running over the rest of my team, I was the last one that could stop him and I laid him out flat. Shocked everyone, but me. When the season ended, they actually suggested I go out the following year, but I knew how it would end and didn’t want to ride the bench.
Now the last sport I played, er joined, was tennis. Now my brother Doug joined the tennis team and quickly made his way to varsity for several years. Me not so much. Junior Varsity was it and then only as a doubles player with a fellow named Joe Navarro. Poor Joe, I was probably a pretty bad influence on him. I disliked the tennis coach, probably because he was had also my Geometry Teacher, where he did not appreciate my sense of humor. So when I went out for tennis, he stuck Joe with me and then relegated our practice to the handball courts most of the time.
Now practicing tennis against the handball wall gets boring pretty fast. So what’s a fella to do? In mine and Joe’s case it meant that we would gather as many tennis balls that we could lay our hands on. From there we would locate the coach out with his varsity team and launch balls at him, seeing if we could hit him. Good news is we were never caught, bad news is we never hit him.
Central Coast Senior 