Saturday, May 19, 2012

Uncertain Touchdowns in High School


I’m not the most coordinated person in the world but I can run pretty fast. Once in high school I actually scored three touchdowns during gym class.  I was surprised and very excited, but I figured that once I had the ball the rest was easy and I simply outran the other players.  I did enjoy the sensation of imagining the other players standing still as I worked my way to the other end focussing on the end point more than the players.

However, months later while I was playing a defensive position I overheard the teacher and classmates talking about giving me a touchdown.  I was deflated because to me, points scored that are unearned provide no satisfaction whatsoever.  I realized then while it’s entirely possible I scored those three touchdowns fairly because of my speed, it was also likely that I was fed one, two, or all three of them.  So if I did score those touchdowns they drained all satisfaction from them because I’ll never know the truth.  In this case though I was able to show my pride: instead of taking the free but unearned win, I simply played defense to the best of my ability, frustrating attempts to feed me the ball, until they finally gave up trying to feed me a fake win. 

Some prefer a fun lie to a not so fun truth. Me, I refer the truth every time, because when a truth is pleasant, the good stuff is so much sweeter because you know it’s real.

2 comments:

Eric said...

Damn straight. If its just handed to you, what's the point? Did you ask them about it? What part of you scoring wasn't valid anyway?

Andy E. Nystrom said...

I didn't ask them about it. My coordination's not great now but was even worse them so I think they thought there were doing me some sort of favour by letting me have a touchdown they didn't think I'd otherwise get. I didn't know how to raise the topic at the time so didn't. I wish I had asked about the previous days' touchdowns though so I could have found out if they were fed to me or not.