I like to play sports. I’ve played baseball since I was about seven years old, starting with t-ball. This last spring was my final year of playing on the majors in Little League baseball. Next year, who knows? I might go on to play in Juniors or maybe just take a season off, this last season was kind of messed up. But baseball isn’t the only sport I like to play or have tried out. At school, I’ve been known to play a pretty mean game of soccer during recess. And for a couple of years, I played flag football. My mom played high school basketball and it’s fun to shoot hoops with her or play a little one-on-one after school. I swim, tried a game of water polo, even volleyball both in the water and on the beach. One thing I haven’t really tried is hockey.
Now, I like flag football, but when I saw that real football meant crushing your opponent, I wasn’t too sure I wanted to play tackle football. And then there’s wrestling and boxing. Boxing is heck of cool. My uncle and I play around kick boxing, but those kinds of opportunities don’t come around much since he lives in San Diego and works in Tijuana, Mexico. That’s a long commute just to play around and not really do kick boxing. If you were to corner me and ask me what my favorite sport is, it would have to be kick boxing.
I used to think it would be fun to wrestle like the guys on World Wrestling Federation, but then I found out it was all fake. I watched the real stuff on television during the Olympics. I can tell you that was not what I thought it was and no longer wanted to roll around on the mat smelling some other dude’s stinky armpits. After I figured I didn‘t want to wrestle, a friend of mine was talking about this guy who was wrestling and the other kid had gotten his teeth stuck in the kid’s head. It was pretty freaky hearing about how this kid with the other kid’s teeth was moving all around the mats trying to get “undone.“ Yeah, that’s definitely not for me. But hockey? I’ve played around outside with a hockey stick my dad got me one year for my birthday and it’s fun. But then I saw it on TV and I thought, heck yeah, that’s something I really want to do! And then we got the video game, NHL, and couldn’t wait to do it for real.
So, the story goes like this. I helped out in the school cafeteria after lunch with a couple of my friends. Someone got the bright idea to use the brooms as hockey sticks. We found a Gatorade cap and were having a blast shooting the “puck” all over the gym floor. Yeah, it’s all fun and games until someone looses an eye … or in my case, until someone needs stitches over their eye. One of the kids, I won’t use his name (Mom says it’s to protect his identity or something), reared back with his “stick” and smacked my forehead. It stung pretty bad, so I decided to leave the cafeteria and go outside to play wiffle ball. On my way there, some kid asked what that “red” stuff on my forehead. I reached up, wiped my hand across my forehead, looked and saw it was all bloody. The next thing I knew, my Dad had to come take me to the emergency room where I wound up having to get five stitches.
If you’re curious as to if I still want to play hockey after that, you’ll have to wait and read my tale about when I was “skating” through the house a few years after the cafeteria incident.
By Ry-Guy (C) 2008, All Rights Reserved
