Time to hang it up - circa 2009

Time to hang it up - circa 2009

 

How many of us still own a jock? Or to put it another way - You’re seventy; do you know where your jock strap is?

Jock-strapping, that’s what they called it (playing sports) in the army, and all real killers, like our drill sergeants, frowned upon it, as I recall.

Regardless, I grew up thinking that athletic excellence was synonymous with honor. Didn’t everyone agree with that? It sure seemed like the truth. College was no different; jocks garnered envy as well as reverence, or so I thought. The jock-house was an esteemed fraternity - or so I thought - and I lived in one while an undergrad. In those days if you called me a jock it pleased me. Call me that today and it would still please me. Or better yet, give me an excuse to talk about my former jock life and then you’ve made my day. Was I a tough guy? Far from it – period. But let me spin a yarn about the old days and one might think, “I bet he was tough. He’s just being modest.”

 Alas, for me, playing sports was a pursuit of the highest order.

 Thus, my memory is vivid about a conversation some years back, when my friend Doug Yano and I were talking about how we had slowed our workouts and generally abandoned other athletic activity and he said, “I don’t even own a jock,” which shocked me because it occurred to me that, come to think of it, neither did I.

 Was this what life had come to?

 I thought about it some more and then remembered that actually I did have one jock, or so I thought, but exactly where it was, I was uncertain, which was beside the point because I had not actually worn my one jock in years, maybe decades.

So, where was my jock? I thought I recalled seeing it recently, in the basement, somewhere around the tool bench. What was it doing there? Anyway, I went to look and after darting my eyes in every direction, when suddenly, I spied it above the workbench, hanging on a nail. Huh???? 

I can’t remember the last time it was in my gym bag, much less used – worn. Obviously, it had been saved through a half-dozen house moves over the years.  Why? Who knows? And why now hanging on the nail? Oh well.

It was not that I thought that I might need it someday. Like there was ever going to be another tackle football game.  Nor was it that a jock was something to save, to pass on to the grandkids, like an old baseball mitt. And it wasn’t at all like my old football practice jersey, now somehow full of holes (again, why? how?) that I hoped after my demise, my surviving heirs would come across the jersey and pause briefly to reflect kindly upon my athleticism first, and my life, second. I believe that I saved the jock because – well - what else could I have done with it? A jock is not something one gives to the goodwill.

Of course, I could have thrown it out, but think of this: “Tossing it,” into the bottom of this week’s garbage pail, or on the top for that matter. That didn’t seem right, because there it would sit, or lay, until 7:30 AM Monday when the truck comes around, the cans are emptied and the contents head for the landfill for a million years. Not right, not at all. 

For kids in the fifties and sixties there was the phrase, “Hang it up,” as in “It’s time to hang it up,” which we muttered from time to time as gentle ridicule. What we were hanging up was a jock. I don’t hear that much - at all - these days, but then why would I? It’s not a popular phrase in senior circles.

But from my youth I recall a college teammate, Al Richmond, (I include his name because if anyone ever reads this I’m certain that Al would appreciate the citation) who tried to invoke a ceremony in the locker room after our football season’s last game, his last, when he shouted to all, “I’m hanging up my jock,” and with that he draped it on a hook in the visitor’s locker at Lafayette College. I think a few heads turned and that it got a laugh, or two. 

Oh, did I mention that I was on the college football team? OK, not important, but I was.