Making the Cut

The bowling trophy on my office windowsill hints at the mileage I’ve gotten in my life from just showing up. But the recent death of Coach Lowe recalled what I’ll call my Zenith of Presence.   

I may have mentioned the trophy in a past blog post. It’s one of the cooler things I own, because a) it visually belies my lifelong mediocrity at sports and because b), at the time I received it, it literally dwarfed the achievement of my older brother—with whom I’ve always competed on some level, albeit one-sidedly and to my mind unsuccessfully.

Ken and I were members of a youth bowling league during the 1967-68 season. That would have made me 9 years old at its start and Ken 12. The Summer of Love had just happened in San Francisco, but at 10-lane Berkeley Lanes in Berkeley Heights. New Jersey, fall 1967 began my Year of Showing Up. When league play ended in late spring 1968, Ken received a squat, standard-issue participant’s trophy for having averaged a solid but not league-leading 140 or so pins per game. I, however, was honored with the towering piece of hardware I still display—depicting a golden bowler in mid-roll, placed literally on a pedestal. I was rewarded not for my barely triple-digit average, but for—per the inscribed abbreviation—“Perf Att.” Which is to say, perfect attendance.

I think my brother, decades later, still suffers trophy envy. Not only was he a much better bowler than I, but he was on his way to becoming an Eagle Scout in those years and probably missed a Saturday or two at the bowling alley only because he was busy shoring up a creek bed or perhaps serially helping old ladies across the street. Also, on one memorable day sometime in the late 1960s, Ken lost the tip of his thumb to a lawnmower. I can’t remember if that happened during the 1967-68 bowling season, but if so, bloody disfigurement certainly might put a guy on the bowling league disabled list for a while. (What I remember most vividly about that particular day, of course, was that Mrs Johnson next door made me a delicious lunch, with ice cream for dessert, while my parents were rushing what’s-his-name to the hospital.)

While I’m tempted to ascribe many of my bigger successes in life to simply having Been There, that would be a stretch in most cases. Take, for instance, my marriage and my unbroken streak of gainful employment. Both things owe more to my having been in the right place at the right time—respectively, at DC parties that my future wife attended, and at a newspaper that gave me an assignment I’d parlay into a job in Washington—than to my just having been present, period

When it comes to sports, though, simply showing up has brought me huge rewards. It resulted not only in that bowling trophy in adolescence, but also in a GPA boost in high school, and, in between those two instances of good fortune, what I to this day consider my crowning athletic achievement.

As far as that bump in grade-point average goes, I’m defining “sports” broadly. At Grimsley High School in Greensboro, North Carolina, in the mid-1970s, the halt and the lame—figuratively if not quite literally—among male students, at least, could sign up either for physical education (PE) or what was called “PEI.”I no longer remember what the “I” stood for—the Google search term “physical education PEI” unhelpfully yields data on school fitness in a Canadian province—but the gist of that “I” in the Grimsley context was “Invalids” or “the Inconceivably unathletic.” If you were a jock at GHS, you definitely took PE. If you played the occasional game of sandlot baseball or even just tossed a Frisbee every once in a while, you signed up for PE. But if you were too fat, too ungainly, too genuinely disabled, or simply too averse to physical activity to exercise with the other boys, you took PEI.

You know how college-level Geology sometimes is called “rocks for jocks”—good for an easy C, at least, for guys who are as dumb as boulders but must meet a science requirement to remain academically eligible for the football or basketball team? PEI was sort of the high school equivalent of that, but for nerds and social misfits who were fearful—for their lives, their academic standing, or both—to compete alongside the “normal” kids, and to be judged for their ability to do pushups or to circle the track in a prescribed time.

It wasn’t like PEI participants didn’t have to do anything, but they didn’t have to do much. I saw them in “action.” They’d do a fraction of the pushups. Half the laps, with walking optional. Those kinds of things. Being in PEI did carry a bit of a social stigma, but if you signed up for it you probably already were stigmatized. My friend Downs Brown, for example, already had the strikes against him of being named Downs Brown, looking weird, dressing oddly, and being exactly the kind of pasty, zitty guy who’d be most comfortable hunched over a computer, except that computers didn’t yet commercially exist. Downs gleefully went the PEI route, and he probably got an A on his report card. Unless he had tried to engage his redneck gym teacher in a conversation about the merits of Yes versus Jethro Tull. Which is quite possible. In which case, maybe drop that A by a letter grade or two.

Anyway. With my one hand, pudgy body, and transplanted-Yankee ways, I already felt like enough of an outsider without seeking further self-segregation. So, I signed up for regular PE. I wasn’t good at any of the activities. I certainly didn’t exhibit any ability to stay alive at dodge ball, let alone to run fast or climb a rope. But what I had done, irrefutably, was Shown Up. This greatly endeared me to my gym teacher, Mr Sawyer, who clearly had expected me to go the PEI route, and who probably felt, looking at my empty sleeve, that I had more justification than most students to do so.

Mr Sawyer—known (not to his face) as “Buzz” due to the existence at that time of a comic book character with that name—saw in me a guy who’d been offered the easy way out but had declined. It didn’t matter that I saw myself in no such way. He’d tell other kids to do things. He’d tell me to “try.” He’d tell the jocks to wake up out there, and the laggards to get the lead out, but he’d say nothing to me as I brought up the rear in all given activities and exercises. Later, when Buzz Sawyer became my driver’s ed instructor, I met his one-handed wife. That connection certainly didn’t hurt me. But one never should underestimate the power of low expectations. If you think Just Showing Up holds potential riches in and of itself, combine that with the allure of being the Cripple Who Nevertheless Can Do Something, Anything, and you’re suddenly grasping the gold ring with your one and only hand.

This brings me to Coach Lowe, who was my gym teacher at Kiser Junior High School when I first arrived in Greensboro in the ninth grade, and who also managed the baseball team. Then in his mid-30s, he lacked the mania of The Andy Griffith Show’s Lt Barney Fife but shared the sad face and drawling manner. So, naturally, that was what the kids called him behind his back: "Barney." It didn’t help, Barneyness-wise, that the school system required him to teach sex education—a subject toward which his complete and utter embarrassment was clear, and about which his lack of experiential knowledge was widely assumed. There was, however, a basic decency about Coach Lowe that showed through, and a seeming discomfort in his own skin to which I could abundantly relate.

Maybe that was why, in spring 1973, I decided to try out for the baseball team. God knows why else I did, except that, being the only kid at school who wore a hook, and having few friends as a newcomer, I may have figured I had nothing to lose. Surely my baseball “career” to that point had been anything but stellar. I’d spent one year in Police Athletic League ball in New Jersey, where I generally struck out at the plate and bungled throws at first base. I did knock in six runs, but all by walking with the bases loaded. Given my propensity for whiffing when I did swing, I was somewhat loath to take the bat off my shoulder. And control was not the forte of many pitchers in that league.

By the way, I probably needn’t make clear what you already assume, but the PAL was not a league for which one had to try out. Every kid was guaranteed playing time. And the coaches all were cops, so they were used to dealing with worse things than juvenile butchery of the National Pastime.

Anyway, on tryout day for the Kiser team, I was one of 40 guys seeking 25 roster spots. I felt intimidated from the get-go, especially as I awaited my turn at bat and saw several of my competitors loft deep flies and scorch line drives. But when I got to the plate I surprised myself by somehow hitting a few balls fairly hard. They all were foul balls, but at least I’d made contact. My fielding wasn’t so hot that day, as I recall, and my stamina for running laps was no better than it would be at Grimsley under Buzz Sawyer’s watchful eyes. Coach Lowe and an assistant wielded clipboards and wore blank expressions. I went home that day thinking I’d given it my best shot, but certain that when the first cuts were announced, my name would be among them.

The next day, a list was posted in the school gym. On it were the names of eight boys who needn’t report for the second tryout. Amazingly, “Eric Ries” was not among them. I had beaten out—charitably or not—eight two-handed peers for the opportunity to make the team. I was ecstatic. I wanted to hug Coach Lowe, but wisely thought the better of it. I was certain he was rewarding me for my mere presence at the tryout, and for the fact that I hadn’t sucked quite as badly as he’d assumed I would. I had no expectation that I’d similarly made the second and final cut. And I didn’t. But Coach Lowe had given me a moment of athletic triumph I knew I’d always remember and cherish.

And I have. Years later, having lost the teenage fat and taken up running as a weight-maintenance pursuit, I finished a five-mile race at a pace of slightly under seven minutes per mile—Olympian by my standards. It was a hard-earned effort, as I pretty nearly blacked out from exhaustion at the finish line. I knew at that moment I’d achieved something I’d likely never repeat. And I never did. Still, that athletic memory remains only my second fondest, after the moment I didn't read my name on a sheet of notebook paper in the Kiser Junior High School gymnasium.

I’d long forgotten Coach Lowe’s first name when a friend forwarded me his obituary a couple of weeks ago. David. David Allen Lowe. He’d died of kidney cancer at age 77 at a retirement home in Greensboro. Everything I read reinforced my memories and feelings about him. The very first sentence noted that he was “better known as Coach Lowe.” He’d been a coach and teacher at Kiser and Grimsley for 30 years. He’d continued to coach baseball for ”various traveling teams” in retirement, and had tutored children at a Baptist Church. He’d evidently never married—certainly no proof that his sex ed students were right, but not a refutation, either. The accompanying photograph showed exactly the Coach Lowe I knew—a young-ish man with little hair, sad eyes and a tentative smile.

There weren’t many comments on the funeral home’s “guest book” page, but two of my favorites were, “You touched a lot of lives and really made a difference in this world” and “There will be some home runs hit for Dave today.” I never came close to hitting a home run for him, but he did touch my life in a way that, in retrospect, I wish I’d have told him. The best I could do was post this remembrance in the guest book:

“The proudest moment of my sports “career” was making the first cut when trying out for the Kiser baseball team in the ninth grade. I was born without a right hand and was pudgy and slow, to boot, in those days, but Coach Lowe appreciated my hustle, spirit and a few long fouls I somehow managed to hit. He was a wonderful coach and a fine man. I’ll always remember him fondly.”

One other guest book signer wrote, “Our loss is Heaven’s gain.” If there is an afterlife, I hope it’s not all angel wings and halos. Maybe eternity needs sports leagues to fill the time, and maybe everybody gets rewarded for having made the heavenly cut and having hopped a few clouds to get to the ball field. If so, I know just the guy to coach a baseball team.