Gym Class Struggle

THOSE WHO CAN'T DO, TEACH, AND THOSE WHO CAN'T TEACH, TEACH GYM.
—ALVY SINGER, Annie Hall

Few memories unite us like memories of gym class. Not all of us went to Sunday school, played Little League, sweated through geometry or got lucky at the junior prom. But most of us—famous or infamous, rich or poor, big or little, fast or slow, girl or boy, freak or geek—endured a half-dozen or so years of gym class. Gym class is such a common touchstone that it has become a staple of pop culture: Before he traded up to become a physician, Bill Cosby, as Chet Kincaid, spent two years teaching gym in the first incarnation of his TV show. In Prom Night ghastly things started to happen to Jamie Lee Curtis and her friends when the mischievous Vicki mooned the weird janitor in the "girls' change room" after gym class. Two Seinfeld protagonists first met, we learn, when George fell off a rope during gym class at JFK High and landed on Jerry's head. Few coming-of-age sitcoms have finished their run without the obligatory gym-class scene: indeed, Kevin Arnold seemed to wander through The Wonder Years in a perpetual gym class. Remember the T-shirt that Eddie Murphy wore in Beverly Hills Cop? It read: MUMFORD PHYS. ED.

We remember gym class so vividly because it brought out emotions and existential crises that are central to our development. Fear. Intimidation. Humiliation. Nausea. Abject failure. Angst. Neurosis. All that...and showers, too! I've got to come clean here (which was not always the case when I hurried through a cold gym-class shower): I rather liked gym, respected most of my phys-ed teachers and was rarely the class klutz. Still, there was something serious about gym in my day, oriented as it was toward competition; competition creating, as it does, winners and losers; winners and losers creating, as they do, joy and depression. After watching my two sons plow indifferently through years of phys ed, I came to realize that gym class, for better or worse, isn't what it used to be. So many of the rituals that helped turn us into maladjusted adults are for the most part gone: stepping into clammy gym suits that smelled like a biology experiment gone wrong; beginning that perilous climb up the rope, followed by the humiliating and painful rope-burn-inducing descent; running pell-mell into walls after putting your head on the knob of a baseball bat and spinning around, a sadistic endeavor known as Dizzy Izzy; being joined at midyear by the girls for a few weeks of square dancing, an activity that raised hormone levels and crushed toes in equal measure; going all-out to live up to the expectations of our beloved dead President in that somewhat inexplicable physical-fitness test; trying not to be too obvious as you hid your privates with a towel en route to the showers.

Boy, were those the days or what? THE MAN who led me through many of those adolescent rituals was Carl T. Anderson, whom I associate with the color gray. Gray slacks, gray short-sleeved polo shirt. His temperament always seemed kind of gray, too, somewhere between pleasant and angry, usually closer to angry, particularly on the day when Bobby Hennessey marched into gym class wearing long underwear under his red gym shorts to protest Mr. Anderson's taking us outside for touch football in November. Just before her son, a freshly minted physical education graduate of Temple, went off to teach in March 1957, Mr. Anderson's mother sewed blue piping onto his slacks to give the outfit some color. But the stripes lent a military aspect to his bearing, fortified during the years when he had us marching around the ball field: Left, right, left, right, to the left flank...harch! Mr. Anderson never looked at you straight on. He cocked his head and peered at you out of the corner of his eye, as if you were subhuman, the way a drill sergeant looks at a raw recruit.

Mr. Anderson taught physical education in the Hamilton Township School District in southern New Jersey for 39 years before retiring in 1996. For four of those years, from September '59 to June '63, fifth grade through eighth, I was in his gym class at Mays Landing School. I had several gym teachers after Mr. Anderson (heck, I'm old enough to have had a gym teacher in college), but Mr. Anderson remains most clearly in my mind, the gym teacher's gym teacher, the man who drummed into you the rudiments of sport, the virtue of standing "double arm's length apart" (the requisite space to execute a jumping jack) and the inviolate rule that if you forgot your sneakers, you played in socks. I would say that Mr. Anderson came out of central casting—the taciturn manner, the rock-solid physique, the no-nonsense disposition—except that central casting's gym teachers are invariably sadists or nincompoops with whistles. (If you can't teach, teach gym.) Which is not to say those types weren't, and aren't, out there. Mr. Anderson's substitute from time to time, for example, was a crew-cut Army veteran named Ray Smith, who was fond of turning suddenly and hurling a volleyball at the midsection of any male who dared engage in mischief.

I went back to my hometown not long ago to have a chat with Mr. Anderson. We drove to the old school, and he started shaking his head as we walked across the playground on which a lone basketball hoop stood.

"Look, what would you do here?" he said, pointing to the blacktop, then looking up at me, head cocked.

"Well, I, ah, I'm not sure."

"Paint the lines!" he said. "Make this look like a basketball court. If it doesn't look like a basketball court, kids don't treat it like a basketball court. Do things right!"

We entered the school, now being used as an alternative education facility for disruptive students. A stream of profanity emanated from what was once my third-grade classroom. Mr. Anderson shook his head and waved his hand in disgust, a gesture with which I had been quite familiar decades earlier. The gym was occupied and noisy, so we talked in the auditorium.