My One Great Athletic Achievement
The story of hitting my sister on the head with a football from 40 yards away
Exercise and I always have had a fickle relationship. Part of that comes from having little to no coordination. I’m also easily bored, and it could be said on the physical front, lazy. As a kid, I played football — mostly holding the practice dummies so my faster, stronger teammates could unload on me — and I did some long-distance bike riding and church softball as an adult. But that’s about it.
Even though I love the statistics and strategy in baseball and appreciate the athleticism found in other sports, football is my one-and-only sports crush. It’s a gene pool thing.
Growing up in the 1970s and ‘80s, I thought all babies born in Texas had been genetically infused with a strain of football before they could leave the hospital. After all, weekends — if not entire weeks — were devoted to the sport from early August through late January.
The neighborhood where I grew up, a series of single-story homes built in the mid 1950s, largely consisted of couples whose children were grown, much older, or not interested in playing football with a nerdy statistics quoting kid 12 months a year. So, starting when I was 9 or 10, I spent hours developing my arm by throwing at the trees on our street.
I was becoming proficient at 7-yard down-and-out routes until one of the neighbors got pissed for my throws clipping his oak tree. At this point, I started working on posts and go routes that would just land inside the cement curbs that lined our street in an effort to keep stormwater from flooding our yards.
Eventually, even though I couldn’t run, I became good at throwing a long pass, which leads to the story of my greatest athletic achievement.
Off to West Texas
Christmas was travel time in our family, except for a couple of years when my dad was in the hospital, because my teacher parents had the week off between the holiday and New Year’s. We celebrated Christmas Eve with Fran and Bill Waranius, the childless couple across the street who became my second set of parents, then hopped in the car to see my grandparents 250 or so miles to the north in Longview. Sometimes, we branched out to see other relatives in Waco or my cousins in the small town of Albany, close to Abilene.
Albany, population 2,000 give or take, was and is a one stoplight, often bone-dry town, distinguished by its beautiful 19th century courthouse and the annual Fort Griffin Fandangle, the oldest outdoor musical in Texas. Like everywhere else, I always felt out of place there, and was constantly ribbed (good naturedly) by my mom’s cousins after naively asking whether the town had any shopping centers, a then new and trendy term in the mid 1970s.
Aunt Frances, a pistol who lived into her late 90s, was a sweet woman with a fiery disposition who lived on or just above the abject poverty line. Her small, two-room house, a former oil field office, had the bathtub in the kitchen and a half-bath (toilet and sink) in a walled-off space in the living room. At the time, her youngest son, Kerry, lived in a trailer next door with his wife and their two sons.
Frances and my mom always had a soft spot for each other, and my great aunt always took great care of me while I was in Albany, even after I narrowly missed shooting her son in the balls. That, alas, was not my greatest athletic achievement. It was, however, one of two Albany memories I’d like to forget.
The Toss
The events happened on separate trips less than a year apart. More than 40 years later, I remember both as if they were yesterday.
My parents had given me a full-sized NFL replica football for Christmas, which I packed in the car for the Longview pilgrimage. I didn’t really have a place to throw it there, however, which meant I had to wait until we got to Albany.
Frances’ house was across the street from a field, and we were standing outside. Mom was talking to Frances and Kerry near his trailer. My sister Julie, then only 4 or 5, was picking flowers in the field. I was standing next to Dad with my football. Given his glassy, pharmaceutically enhanced eyes and 90-degree neck angle due to spasmodic torticollis, we were not playing catch.
I boldly stated: “I’ll bet you I can hit Julie on the head with this football.”
My dad angled his body, squinted, and looked. My sister’s back was turned some 40 yards away.
“Go for it,” he said, figuring I didn’t have a chance.
I launched the ball, which took off on a perfect arc in what years later seems like perpetual slow motion. My mom saw what was happening and started to run, alternately looking at my completely unaware sister and threatening me within an inch of my life.
Before Julie could look up, she was knocked down. Dad and I started walking toward her as I began to think of the various punishments my mom must have been mulling over.
“I’m in trouble, aren’t I,” I asked rhetorically.
“Yeah,” my father said, “but it was a nice shot.”
Not so nice was the next shot — the one and only experience I had with a gun as a child.
The Shot
Kerry and my dad went out one dry, arid day — it rarely if ever rains in Albany — for target practice. They took me along but said I had to sit in the truck while they shot at a bunch of bottles in a field. Without a book to read or football to throw, boredom set in quickly.
The handgun — I don’t remember the make — was in the front seat. I picked it up and started making those sounds you do when fake firing a gun (“Phew. Phew. Phew. Phew.”). I thought I was smart by not holding the gun up so Kerry and my dad would see it in my hand. Instead, I just pointed it at the truck’s floorboard.
I managed to occupy myself for a good 10-15 minutes and then, when I saw them walking toward the truck, made the huge mistake of pulling the trigger. The gun’s safety was off and it fired, the bullet ricocheting off the truck’s manifold and striking my bowlegged cousin in the jeans.
The sound reverberated through the truck bed. I couldn’t hear a thing, but I could read the lips of my stunned cousin. “He shot me in the balls! He shot my balls off,” Kerry was mouthing, cupping himself with one hand and pointing at me with the other.
That was not the case. The slug had grazed his thigh. Kerry was fine and laughed about it after the shock wore off, knowing he had something else to rib me about for years. After all, it wasn’t the first time I had left my mark in Albany, so to speak.
I knew I never would do something that stupid again. The next day, I spent the eight-hour drive home in a ringing version of silence, happy to get out of Albany alive and not in jail.
In 2012, my mom and I attended Kerry’s funeral. During the eulogy, the pastor mentioned my hard-living cousin had lived all nine of his lives and had “borrowed a few others.” I thought back to that day and wondered if I took one of them.
To this day, I am so grateful he was not hurt worse. It’s one reason I’ve never been able to stand guns.