The only college sport I ever played was soccer, on the new club team my small college put together during my sophomore year. I only qualified because I showed up and didn’t suck at it. Two weeks after starting practice (which was fun and I loved), I got kicked off the team because the coach discovered I was on academic probation.
But some skills don’t go away entirely, and that’s what mattered on an August day in 2015, at age 68, when I was limping slowly down the 184th Street tunnel (above) to the A train’s 181st Street station in New York. That’s the tunnel, above. At the far end, two guys were kicking a soccer ball back and forth, and didn’t stop when a thick crowd, fresh off a train headed uptown, filled the tunnel, moving in my direction.
A few weeks earlier, I’d had my right hip replaced, and I was just beginning to become fully ambulatory. So I was hoping not to collide with the crowd—and that the ball would not find me. But it did. By reflex, I trapped it with my right (bad) foot, and then shot a perfect pass through the crowd to one of the two guys. After the crowd passed, the two guys came over and enthusiastically began talking to me in Spanish.
I smiled, said “Muchas gracias,” and continued limping toward the train. But it felt good to enjoy a moment of apparent competence in a sport at which I was not yet entirely lame.
Leave a Reply