I consider myself blessed.
My professional baseball (or basketball or hockey or soccer) career ended when I was 12 years old. By then, I’d come to realize that I wasn’t much of an athlete and wasn’t sure I needed the aggravation that sometimes comes with youth sports.
And I had my friends. And we had our games.
There was hardly a day after school up through my junior high years when the neighborhood boys — Jeff and Mark and Jimmy and Michael, sometimes Paul or Pat or David or Peanut — congregated for a game of something. We played basketball on Jeff’s court or the one my dad and I constructed in our backyard. We got enough bodies for three-on-three touch football. I was probably the one responsible for starting regular street hockey encounters. I even got a game of street soccer going once, using our hockey goals and a grapefruit-sized ball I’d picked up at an indoor game in Baltimore. (It’s still in this house somewhere.)
We kept score. Then we forgot what it was and started all over again the next day.
That’s what I miss quite a bit during this pandemic: Seeing the neighbor kids playing games in the street. But the virus didn’t knock them aside. They just didn’t exist all that much before it arrived.
As a nation, we have become so focused on organized youth sports that we’ve all but abandoned the kind that used to spring up organically in my Maryland neighborhood. Back then, my friends and I thought we were so good at street hockey that we wondered how we’d fare against some kids from another part of the city on a neutral site, like the outdoor surface behind the local elementary school. (I recall that opportunity not going all that well.)
We’re a month now into our sports isolation. A live MLB, NHL or MLS contest in person is out of the question, watching one on television as it happens is a distant memory and the next one seems too far off in the future. While some of the reruns from the past year or 10 have broken up the monotony, it isn’t the same thing when you know what the result will be when you tune the channel to the game.
That’s where seeing a neighborhood kid or two playing out an imaginary contest — solo or with a friend or relative — would make for a pleasant reprieve right now.
An office colleague lives a half-block away from me. His three children are outside quite a bit, sometimes in their backyard, where a hockey net doubles as a baseball backstop. He was out there with them the other day, doing what looked like baseball cutoff practice, but it only happens occasionally.
A boy and girl — I think he was wearing a Lebanon High football jersey at the time — were shooting hoops in their driveway down the hill last week. A couple of very young’uns ride their bikes up and down our street on occasion, but they’re not out there to race.
What I wouldn’t give to look out one of my upstairs windows right now to see a half-dozen boys and girls with hockey sticks in their hands, chasing a ball up and down the pavement, trying to deposit it behind an ersatz goaltender guarding a portable net. I could easily grab a folding chair, set it up in the window and watch them go back and forth.
One of my great joys of youth was taking a football into the backyard and practicing my punting. Not for distance but placement: We had a big apple tree out back, and I’d deliberately line up the kicks so that a low-hanging branch would block it, forcing me to scramble back, pick up the ball and return it zigzag through the onrushing assault of imaginary tacklers.
I believe I even whispered a play-by-play account through the whole thing.
I’m blessed to have been able to do that when I was young. I’d be further blessed to see someone in the neighborhood giving it a try one of these days.
Greg Fennell can be reached at gfennell@vnews.com or 603-727-3226.