Confessions Of A Stoop Ball Champion

In recent years, my athletic accomplishments have been, as always, forgettable or absurd, but they now include a note or two of triumph, although played, predictably, off key. These are, in order of occurrence, if not consequence:

1) When, in my final high school game, I loped in from my linebacker position—the casual, reflective blitz—and tackled a fullback for a five-yard loss, inadvertently saving the day. I learned after the game that the ball had not been on our five-yard line as I had assumed. It had been on the goal line. I am, I have been told when I recount this feat, the last of the great Jewish linebackers.

2) When I saved an old, confused gentleman from drowning while a lifeguard and lover at an Adirondacks hotel. He had been in the act of stepping from a rowboat onto a dock and had fallen into the lake. I saw him frantically treading water and, after a mad dash, leaped feet first to the rescue. My feet hit the bottom of the lake with an unexpected and jarring crash. The water was only up to my chest. I waded behind the old man and, taking hold of his waist, firmly pulled him down, so that his churning feet touched bottom, to his great surprise and relief.

3) The day I won the Camp Kilmer swimming meet for Hq. Co., 1264th SU. I was covering the meet for the Eagle, the post newspaper. With the last event, the 400-meter relay, coming up, my company was deadlocked for first place with Hq. & Hq. Det., Reassignment Station. We were a cinch to win the relay as Frank Nauss, a two-time All-America from North Carolina State, who had already won three races for us, was swimming the freestyle leg. However, due to some overlooked technicality, Nauss, along with another one of our swimmers, was not permitted to take part in the relay. As I recall it, this left Hq. Co. with only three men for the four-man event, and in imminent danger of being disqualified and losing the meet. Sizing up the situation at a glance, an intellectual attainment that had heretofore eluded me, I raced into the locker room, changed into swimming trunks, feeling as Superman must when he rips his clothing off in handy doorways and alleys, and swam the breaststroke leg for Hq. Co. I was given an enormous lead and lost all but a few yards of it as I floundered, spluttering, up and down the pool, but we won the relay and the meet and, returning to the Eagle office, I modestly recorded my achievement in the next-to-last paragraph of my story. You can look it up.

This was not, however, my last race. Every once in a while, when I am tediously swimming my laps at the YMCA on West 63rd Street, I race some innocent, preoccupied stranger in the next lane and am almost always victorious. Alas, I suspect those I have defeated never knew they were in a race, but, at 34, victories are as hard to come by as they were when I was 12, and once again I am Frank Fremont, grim, crew-cut captain of the Gilbertian Garwhals, the peerless champions of the dice swimming league.

But when my stepson, who is 9, challenges me to a race to the corner of Prince and Sullivan Streets, near where we now live in the southern and shabby reaches of Greenwich Village, I tell him I will race him in the summer, on the beach. When summer comes, I will tell him it's too hot out for running or that I have not rounded into shape quite yet. And so winter passes into summer and then back to winter again, and pretty soon I won't have a ghost of a chance of winning, and the race will be still unrun, my stepson still shouting, "Last one to the corner's a rotten egg—no penny tax, no nothings, no back talk, everyone included, no backs, touching black, for 1964, period." And I will watch him charge off. I am not by any means the last of the great Jewish spectators.