Rites Of Passage (Part 2 of 7)

At this point, Roger and I walked through the massive gym. We then went outside just as the football team was heading down to the stadium to practice. These were guys I had known the year before in ninth grade but they all looked so huge with the uniforms, shoulder pads, and other protective gear on. I stayed pretty close to Roger for this part. I wasn’t really sure how we were going to get on the football team. My Dad had said that football players had to practically dedicate their lives to the sport, with three-a-day work outs and watching their diet. I had been running a lot of miles in the morning when it was cool, but that was it. We saw one of the assistant coaches, or at least he was an adult and we figured so. Roger ran up to him, and I followed. “Hey coach!” he yelled. Coach Tom Jones, who later became the school’s head football coach, looked at us. Roger said, “Could we join the football team?”
Coach Jones swallowed. He was probably thinking, “What kind of stupid joker do you take me for?” Instead he said, “Well, I might have some fourth string spots on the sophomore team. Come back tomorrow and I’ll see. You guys are welcome to watch the sophomore team practice though.”
Coach Jones was excellent at psychology. He usually used it to motivate his players. In this case it was to persuade two guys from joining the team when his players had already been doing three-a-day practices for almost a month. We watched the practice though. Coach Jones ordered all the team to run the width of the field twenty times. Roger and I sat there in the stadium as the noon sun blistered down upon us. Even though I could run ten miles in the cool of the morning. I don’t know how those guys did it. And then they had to practice everything else. Also as I sat there, I learned that beyond this team there was the junior varsity and then the varsity. It was only the varsity that played in front of the crowd. They were the ones who got the glory. (And only eleven men at a time, I also learned.) My hopes of instant gridiron achievement faded very quickly on that day.
Roger and I left the practice after a few minutes and we went and found our lockers. We put our gym clothes in our lockers. A few days later, the custodial staff did their annual cleaning of the lockers before school started. The custodians had first dibs on stuff that had been left in the lockers. When I next opened my locker, on the first day of school, I found my gym clothes missing. I later saw an older lady custodian wearing the T-shirt of my gym clothes. I was humiliated.