It was the day after the summer league championship meet, and I told my dad that I thought no other film captures the essence of youth sports better than Bad News Bears. The original 1976 version starring Walter Matthau is both surreal in its depiction of poor sportsmanship and truthful in its portrayal of the emotions that engulf parents, coaches, and child athletes. Dad and I had been on the phone for nearly an hour, and the conversation that at first centered around his fear of worsening neuropathy claiming his legs had veered suddenly to the kids’ swim meet. Dad’s first question on the latter topic was whether Cartter won all his individual events. Cartter, in fact, won none.
The day before on Sunday afternoon, Danyelle and I set up chairs beneath a row of oaks in the Rec Department parking lot and watched the meet unfold from our shady respite at the edge of all the hubbub. Between us and the white cinder block building, fourteen neighborhood swim teams covered most of the small lawn with pop-up tents. All afternoon in the bright midday sun, kids in speedos and swim caps shuttled back and forth between these heat-trapping holding areas and the rear entrance of the pool. Between races, they played cards and sucked down popsicles. Many of their parents gathered on the blacktop to the side of the building where a massive screen displayed a livestream of the events inside, but Danyelle and I stayed put in our back row seats, content to tune in to the livestream on our phones when the kids swam, removed from the fray, watching from our shady vantage point while people scurried about importantly. I thanked God for the light breeze, for the fact I was in no way in charge of the event, and for the last remnants of my sons’ cluelessness regarding the competitive landscape.
When I was Cartter’s age, I swam in the “city meet,” and I had a firm grasp of the idea that if I won, I would be “city champion.” Thanks to the growth of the metro area and the cleaving of my former summer league into two separate entities, there is no longer so clear a distinction. To win at our “East Cooper League Championship Meet” doesn’t bestow such a lofty title; it doesn’t get the media attention that the “city meet” still commands; and it doesn’t garner as much discussion among the parents. I prefer it this way for my children. Danyelle and I had no intention of pumping up the meet’s mystique in our house. As the deadline to declare approached, we were wary about signing up at all and thereby giving yet another day away to swimming, but the boys perked up when they heard the words “championship meet” and said they wanted to go. Such was their ignorance of the meaning of those words, that on the morning of the event as we were packing the car with coolers and chairs, they asked what other teams would be there. They don’t know their best times; they don’t really understand what a league is; and they certainly don’t grasp the depth of competition that exists in the local area or the state. They know that they want to win; that’s about it.
“I was expecting three individual titles and maybe some records,” my dad said when I told him Cartter got third, fourth, and fifth in fly, free, and back respectively. Cartter left some meat on the bone with a couple of mistakes on back and free, but he showed definitively that he’s in the league’s upper crust. Meanwhile Scotty, who was possibly the youngest boy in the meet, finished in the middle of the pack in back and fly. He crushed his heat in the backstroke, which earned him a rubber duckie prize at the end of his swim. They swam pretty much exactly as I thought they would, and from my shady spot on the meet’s fringes, I enjoyed seeing the way they handled the ups and downs of the competition.
The boys had never swum in a meet without me on the deck, and watching remotely highlighted for me how much their races truly belong to them. Out of earshot, visible only on my screen, they were a world away, totally apart from me and my influence. The livestream on my phone froze after Cartter swam the first leg of the free relay and didn’t start working again until after Scotty had finished the anchor leg. “There they are!” I said when the feed came back to life, but as soon as I said it, I was immediately in doubt. Could that really be them in the palm of my hand? From my seat out in the parking lot, I was staring at the grainy image of two little warriors in green water-patterned jammer pants standing on the deck. Undaunted by the meet proceeding around them, they were taking a moment for themselves. Cartter had walked around the pool to meet his brother at the finishing end, and after Scotty climbed out, the two of them spoke to each other; then Cartter stuck his arm out, and they clasped hands, not like little children, but in the way of young men on the field of play; it was the type of handshake one might expect in a pickup basketball game. Moments later, they were walking toward their mother and me, smiling. Their relay had been entered with a fast time, but two of the top four boys weren’t there, and they’d finished last in their heat; this much they knew, and they took the loss with a sweet-humored indifference, rolling their eyes and grinning. I couldn’t have been prouder.
That was the first event. The rest of the afternoon, the boys kept on disappearing into the oddly distant world inside my phone, the visuals lagging the sound of the races coming from the building and adding to the strange sense of separation. Then, their mission complete, they’d return to our spot in the shade. After Scotty won his backstroke heat, he set his duck on top of our cooler with a workmanlike air and promptly sat down with a comic book, done for the day. Cartter’s eyes flashed with anger when he approached after finishing third in butterfly, the event he clearly had a mind to win, but he gathered himself and moved on without incident. I offered brief encouragement and little feedback. It was only after Cartter’s backstroke when I caught myself about to overstep.
“I had to bite my lip after Cartter’s backstroke,” I told Dad in between bites of the chicken and rice that Danyelle had left out for me. She and the boys had already eaten. I was late coming home from practice. After a thirty-minute interstate drive, I was having dinner alone, shoveling food with one hand, the phone pressed against my ear with the other. I recounted to Dad how I had run into the lane line as an eight-year-old at city meet and ended up fifth, and how, as an eight-year-old at his league championship meet, Cartter scraped the bottom on his backstroke start, didn’t surface until halfway down the pool, and finished fifth. I told him how I couldn’t believe that I almost thoughtlessly repeated to my son what Dad said to me all those years ago.
“What did your father say?” Dad asked.
“He said, ‘You could’ve won if you hadn’t run into the lane line,’” I told him. Dad had meant it as encouragement I knew, but still, the comment mainly served to embitter me. It confirmed what I already suspected: that I was good enough to win, and I blew it.
“Ah! If you just hadn’t swum such a stupid race!” my father’s voice laughed through the phone.
You could’ve won. Of course, it was the wrong thing to say, even though it was spoken in innocence, and as much as Dad laughed at his idiocy, I was incredulous that the same phrase had nearly escaped my lips following my oldest son’s disappointing loss. How could I, a decorated, veteran age group coach nearly succumb to such a thoughtless impulse? In the aforementioned film, Walter Matthau’s drinking in the dugout, the parents’ jeering from the stands, and the children’s rampant obscenity all seem too outrageous to be true, but so is one’s ability to get lost in the competitiveness of youth sports. Sometimes the surreal is required to accurately portray real life, and that is what the southern California little league in Bad News Bears is: surreal. “Yes!” the film screams, “This behavior is shocking! Stop acting this way! Have a little fun for God’s sake!” Of course, it’s harder to recognize such behavior in oneself. Only because I’ve written previously about my father’s comment at city meet and the way it made me feel did I catch myself about to exacerbate my son’s wounded pride, and even then, I almost did it anyway. How we do lose ourselves in the moment.
As often happens when Dad and I talk for a long time, the conversation eventually turned to his divorce with my mother and his difficulty in understanding her choices. Dad had been certain that he would never get a divorce; being left for the kids’ swim coach couldn’t have possibly crossed his mind when I was an eight-year-old crashing into the lane line at city meet, yet one day, he looked up, and that was exactly what had happened. Turns out that ultimately, compared to the drama of real-life youth sports, Bad News Bears isn’t absurd enough. Here the two of us are twenty-five years later, me still trying to figure out how to win in the pool, and Dad still trying to figure out what happened to his marriage, both of us quick to forget that so much is beyond our control.
I gave the boys a little speech on the drive home about how proud I was of their effort and their stoicism. No telling how much of it, if any, resonated with them. They were eager to return to the comic books in their laps and were much more expressive regarding where we were going to get cheeseburgers than they were regarding my assessment of their meet. I’m sure some part of my speech landed, but it’s highly likely that some other offhanded remark I made to them that day was more impactful. It’s impossible to know.
I caught sight of them through the window playing baseball in the back with their friend the other day. They kept at it oblivious to me watching from my spot in the kitchen. Scotty was pitching, and after each errant throw, a lengthy timeout ensued to make room for discussion, as if the boys were planning what to do the next time the ball bounded past its intended recipient. The bat on their friend Bennett’s shoulder was certainly no match for their ineptitude. Scotty was not, as they say, “pitching to contact,” and during the lengthy conversations between each pitch, he would frequently drop the ball as he lackadaisically transferred it from his glove to his hand. First one, then two, then all three of them ended up sitting in the shade under a nearby tree. Then, back to the house they came, still completely unaware I’d been watching them. I think tonight I’ll let them watch Bad News Bears.
The Raging Elitist 