Bullying having bullied its way to the bully pulpit this week, I thought I’d tell a bully story of my own. I was in eighth grade, a somewhat solidly built klutz with a mind that was expanding at light speed. Then came time for football tryouts. I was not athletic in general, nor was I a practitioner of football, though I knew the game well enough and followed some teams and players.
I was a good kickball player, so when the coaches told us to group up according to position, I gathered where the kickers were gathering. It was a skill position, I knew that, and grunts like me were supposed to volunteer for wherever we would be least harmful. The quarterback candidates gathered right next to where the kickers were, and the best athletes in the class were there, including J, one of the school’s top athletes in numerous sports, but also to my estimation up to that point, kind of a mean and unpleasant kid.
I was a pretty fair ski jumper, not nearly as good as J and notably one other, K, but I was consistently fourth or fifth on our team. One time at a pretty big match, I had a good cross country run and a really good jump, and neither of them had great jumps that day and I beat them both in the combined. K congratulated me with all of the warmth imaginable and J didn’t say a word.
So there we were at the tryout and J spotted me in with the kickers. “Hey Elliott,” he shouted. “What are you doing over there?’
“Trying out for kicker,” I said.
“You can’t be the kicker,” he said with a mean, sneering laugh, and I felt myself shrinking. He was right. Who was I kidding? I was new at this. This was important to a lot of people. Nobody was ever going to trust me to kick the ball. And my being corrected on this point was coming from a likely candidate for quarterback that year. Surely if anyone had a say in who might kick, it would be him. “You can’t be the kicker.” He said it again.
Everyone in this story has been referenced by the first letter in their first names only. The next in this cast of characters will be called by his full name, for his act on this day, his simple act, is one that I have remembered since that day and will remember forever forward. Pete Richardson, all 180 pounds of eighth grader that he was, was standing by in the nose tackle group and overheard the exchange. He walked over closer and planted two feet not far from J.
“He can try!” he barked with a scowl that seemed to indicate to J that Pete would be happy to start the season early if he wanted to make his smart, funny, non-athletic friend feel badly about himself. J returned to whatever nothing he had been doing previously, and I have honestly forgotten whether I ever thanked Peter, so I guess this story is my way of thanking him now.
