You Herd Me!: I'll Say It If Nobody Else Will

We were running late to the game, which probably didn’t mean as much to my dad as it did to me. He was a workaholic who was chronically behind schedule, so this was nothing out of the ordinary for either one of us. Besides, this wasn’t
his
first live sporting event, only mine. And so it was
my
heart that sank when we arrived at the parking lot at the high school gym in Hoquiam, Washington, and found nearly every spot taken. From the passenger seat of my dad’s Buick Riviera, I looked out the window and imagined every spot inside the gym was taken as well.

Of course it was packed. It could be no other way. Within those walls were the great Harlem Globetrotters, the ones I’d seen on
Wide World of Sports
a couple of months earlier. Who
wouldn’t
want to be there?

The Riviera added to our problems. It wouldn’t fit into any of the smaller parking spaces, so our late arrival to the lot was merely the beginning. As we wound our way in and out of the parking lanes, unable to find a spot big enough to dock Dad’s boat, I could feel the minutes pass. Seconds late became minutes late. As my dad made a sharp turn into an alley behind the gym, the way I viewed sports changed forever.

There, right in front of us, was the Globetrotters’ bus. We were face to face, squared off like mismatched fighters, the Riviera and the grille of the parked bus. A pair of players leaning on the bus suddenly stood up straight when they saw us.

And that was the moment my view of sports changed forever.

My eyes went to something shiny in one of their hands. It was a can of beer. As a kid who approached sports with the innocence of a Clair Bee novel, where every athlete was a hero on and off the
field, forever capable of hitting a home run for a sick boy in the hospital, I felt like I’d been punched in the gut. They were sharing a cold one right before “Sweet Georgia Brown.” How could that be? This wasn’t the way it worked. My mind reeled. It was a Miller, although I have no idea why I remember that or why it ever seemed important to the eight-year-old me.

Both ’Trotters looked straight through our windshield and directly into my eyes. I had caught them, and they caught me catching them. My innocence was swallowed along with the last swig of the champagne of beers. They weren’t smiling like they did on television. There were no friendly laughs or buckets of confetti. They glared at my dad and me with a look that said, “You shouldn’t be here, and if you say anything, you’ll regret it.”

My dad quickly slammed the Riviera into reverse, backed out, and eventually found a parking space. We didn’t talk about what we saw. He was probably as disgusted as I was mystified.

First impressions have a powerful influence over an eight-year-old. Seeds are planted and grow from there, often wildly out of control. Tiny shards of truth come together to create an experience that makes the world look like it’s being viewed in a funhouse mirror.

That moment in the parking lot lasted only seconds, but the impression it created is still imprinted deep in my emotional archive.

The alley
.

The beer
.

The stares
.

I guarantee you one thing: What the rest of the crowd saw that night in the cramped gym in Hoquiam wasn’t what I saw. They saw a show. I saw the truth.

The game itself held no virtue. My hometown was so small,
we probably didn’t even get the real Globetrotters. It was something that resembled the Globetrotters on discount, an outlet-store version of the real thing. Maybe the East Harlem Globetrotters. Meadowlark Lemon wasn’t on the floor, that’s for sure, and I recall the shooting percentage being far lower that night than it ever was on my television. They quit taking half-court hook shots before they made one.

Still, it was basketball with confetti and a ladder, and that has a strange appeal to a kid. I watched and probably laughed a few times, but I made sure never to make eye contact with the players I saw standing next to the bus.

My Globetrotter experience didn’t reshape my views on sports—it created them. I had no previous experience to measure it against, so it stuck. It’s still there to this day.

The unvarnished truth is the only kind I know. Brutal honesty is the only option.

There’s got to be another angle. Don’t believe the press release. It’s all being shaped for our consumption.

Most important, form your own opinion.

A few years after the Globetrotter incident, my best friend’s brother, Brad Jones, was invited into the Oakland Raiders’ locker room. His most lasting impression wasn’t the size of Art Shell’s arms or the shininess of Otis Sistrunk’s bald head. Instead, I sat listening with rapt attention as Brad breathlessly relayed the story of watching quarterback Kenny Stabler and receiver Fred Biletnikoff, both Pro Bowlers, playing cards in their jockstraps. He may have said they were smoking, too, but maybe that’s just a detail I created to embellish the scene. Either way, this was yet another glimpse backstage into the grimier side of athletics. As it turned out, the sports world wasn’t one long after-school special playing on an endless loop. It was a flawed world inhabited by flawed humans who
did shocking things like drink beer before a game and play cards in their jockstraps.

There are really two games: the one you see and the one you don’t. The way I see it, the best way to use access to both worlds is to illuminate and reveal, not idolize and adore.

It’s better to be wrong than to be played for a fool.

Sometimes I wonder, is my mind playing tricks on me? The brain will do that, you know. First impressions become distorted over time. Memories can be unreliable. My childhood was filled with divorces and uncertainty, but sports were a constant. I had a lonely upbringing. My sister ignored me; five years older, she understandably didn’t want to hang out with a hyperactive little brother. My father, an optometrist, was, like most men of his generation, an emotionally distant workaholic.

Games and standings and statistics were my constant companions, bringing solidity to the fluidity of my life. They were always there for me, baseball in the summer, football in the fall, basketball in the winter. I sought attention, and knowing the backstage stories—the beer-drinking ’Trotters and card-playing Raiders—meant access and a measure of popularity for a kid growing up largely ignored in a small, rural community.

Those were the stories I wanted to tell then. They’re the stories I want to tell now.

The backstage stories helped to shape my worldview. I knew stuff that nobody else did, and I liked the feeling. I lived in the rainiest corner of the country, but when I think back to my childhood my mind recalls only a string of sunny days. There are no dark clouds in my memory, which has to mean something, doesn’t it? Is it a metaphor for the path my life would eventually take? A defense mechanism? Who really knows?

My first eye-opening sports experience was real, though.

The alley
.

The beer
.

The stares
.

Hell yes, it was real.

And hell yes, it changed everything.

Eight large glasses of water a day. Remember that? To be a healthy human being, you needed to drink eight large glasses of water a day. This was a fact, no debate allowed. Doctors, school nurses, anybody with a stethoscope—even a toy stethoscope—stated it as a matter of biblical certainty.

Even as a kid, I knew this was bullshit. The Surgeon General could have stopped by my house with the yellowed food pyramid chart from the wall of my junior high and I still wouldn’t have believed him.

Eight large glasses of water a day. Who lives like that, a dolphin? Two large glasses of water at every meal and you’re still coming up far short. Are we supposed to bring a garden hose to work?

Where’s Colin?

He’s in the bathroom, where he has spent the majority of his life
.

Years after this was accepted as fact, a report by the
British Medical Journal
, backed by the
American Journal of Physiology
, walked back the ironclad truth of eight glasses a day. It found that liquid, not water, was the important part of the equation. A cup of coffee counts. An apple counts. A baked potato, 75 percent water, counts as much as a glass of water.