Trade Deadline

TRADE DEADLINE

“Smuck teams!!”

I’ll back up.

Use your imagination to conjure up the image of about two dozen first-graders trying to organize outdoor activity.

Winded yet?

Ah, but when you’re one of those first-graders, it’s easy. It just happens. And at least in the case of the group I’m thinking of, it was a no-brainer.

In the rarefied air of six-year-old athletics, it does become clear which particular ones should be the team captains. They rise to it — mostly thanks to their actual athletic prowess, although a degree of popularity does come into it from time to time.

I was not necessarily known for my athleticism, although in retrospect, I was probably at least middle-of-the-pack. And I made lots of friends, but was never bound for membership in the Popular Group, at least not the one that looks like John Travolta and his posse in the movie musical Grease. So, as teams were picked, they were picked by someone other than me; and I was a middle-round draft pick.

The school-year-long series of kickball games began in earnest in the very early fall, and it quickly became clear that by sheer bad luck, the teams were almost hopelessly mismatched. One team won all the time. All. The. Time.

Often, the winning team prevailed by run totals measured in multiples of a dozen. I seem to recall at least one ninety-run day for the team we’ll call the Prevailers.

I also recall quite clearly that over the course of those couple of fall months during which afternoon recess was held outdoors, I learned how to lose gracefully. For I was part of the team we’ll call the Futiles.

Occasionally, it got frustrating. Of course it did. I didn’t express this opinion, but other members of the Futiles did. I have no idea of the etymology of the term, but the cry went up every week or so: “these are smuck teams!” It had become understood, at some point on that school playground, that to “smuck” was to win mightily — not to cheat to do it, mind you, but to win so hard that the losing team couldn’t even challenge the outcome. (“Did you see the Red Sox play last weekend?” “Yeah, thirteen to nothing. They got smucked.”)

We routinely got smucked.

Winter came, and we’d have kept playing except it’s much harder to play kickball with six inches of snow on the ground. So, as spring training arrived and the snow receded, we resumed our athletic exploits.

The Prevailers continued to prevail. The Futiles kept on getting smucked, most of the time. When we weren’t getting smucked, we were at least not winning. Ever.

Very early in May, though, came an afternoon recess that was memorable. If, at age six, I’d had any idea that I would one day even be fifty-four years old … I might have felt that I would remember this recess until then. I didn’t; but I do remember it.

Before the kickball game of the day began, my friend Jon walked over to me and said, “Hey Robbie.” (At the time, I was Robbie. In fact, that’s how you know whether someone knew me before I went to college, if they call me that.)

I looked up and smiled. I say “my friend Jon” because quite honestly, he was everybody’s friend. He was one of those frankly amazing people who are immensely popular — the “stars” of their class or team or organization — but absolutely everybody feels befriended by them, or at least treated well. He was popular enough that he certainly could have looked down upon (or even bullied, if he were that kind of person, which he wasn’t) the kids who lived toward the bottom of the popularity list … but he just didn’t.

“Robbie,” he said, “you’re going to switch teams.”

It took me a moment to realize what was happening. I don’t remember which member of the Prevailers was being traded to the Futiles, but clearly, with him, I had become part of a blockbuster two-player deal.

Jon could make this statement because he was the Prevailers’ team captain.

I spent the rest of that school year playing for the Prevailers. At least once, I scored more than two runs in a single inning, which meant that we “batted around” twice, which meant that we sent at least twenty-five batters (kickers?) to the plate before the Futiles managed that third out. “Oh,” I thought to myself after the first, second, third, and fourth games of May, “…this is what winning is like.”

Blessed are the long-suffering…?

Very nearly a half-century later, I still remember and appreciate Jon’s act of… well, I’m not sure what it was an act of.

Did Jon arrange to get me on his rather dominant kickball team out of pity? No: I don’t think most first-graders do pity.

Did he do it because he saw that I was a monstrous athletic talent on a pathetic team and wanted to get me a chance to feel what winning was like, or to feel like I was contributing to successful sports? No: I was a decent player but not Hall-of-Fame material; and again, I’m not sure most not-quite-seven-year-olds operate on that high a psychological plane, or at least they don’t find a way to express it.

Did Jon orchestrate that headline-creating trade because he saw me putting my nose to the grindstone, playing hard, not complaining (much), and therefore wanted to reward me for it? No: whether I was doing that or not, he was too busy (for example:) quite rightly jumping up and down and congratulating his teammate for their third grand-slam of the day.

But I’m reasonably assured that Jon’s kind offer to bring me onto the roster of the Prevailers that warm May afternoon demonstrated to me a way to live my life. Which sounds over-the-top: one isolated moment, most of three months before I even turned seven years old, became a touchstone for a lifetime of behavior?

Well, longer and better novels than this one have been written about such moments. Why not? If I’ve ever tried to help someone out … if I’ve ever taken a moment to feel sympathetically for a losing player or team … if I’ve ever had a moment of empathy, wherever and whenever … I could well have my friend Jon’s example to thank.

Does this count as a heroic act? In that recess-kickball moment, it was certainly momentous to one person, even if few kids on that field even noticed it. Momentous enough that that one person still remembers it, a half-century later.

Maybe that counts.

-Rob Hammerton

(P.S. Belatedly, I figured out that my friend Jon had to have worked out that momentous two-player deal by negotiating with the Futiles’ captain … who undoubtedly was one of Jon’s actual close friends, but whose identity, to my everlasting regret, I can’t remember. Because THAT kid probably deserves a tiny bit of childhood-hero credit, too, for agreeing to the idea.)