Dinner in the Café is so much fun. There's food, friends, tables... uh, pizza, ice cream, chairs - okay, so maybe there's not a whole lot of entertainment to be found; I mean it is just a cafeteria. One thing that has never ceased to interest me, however, is the slew of student athletes who pour through the doors on crutches, in wheel chairs, and with 40 oz. bags of ice wrapped around their head with gauze bandages. "What's wrong with your face!?" I ask them in horror. "Practice," they respond.
Practice? What sport are you practicing for? I was totally unaware we had a bear wrestling team or a shin-kicking squad (and if we do someone needs to get me a schedule for those games ASAP). I picture them filing into the health services building one by one: "And how, exactly, did you dislocate your eyeball?" "Well, I was practicing my breaststroke, and..." "And your spinal column broken in two? How did that happen?" "Coach had us do wind sprints." "Sever your brain stem?" "Stretching." Man, practice must be tough.
When I was an ignorant child, I had dreams that one day I would play football in college and then in the NFL and also be an NBA all-star on the side (I am white and 5'9", just to let you know how that turned out). I wanted to go to a school with a storied gridiron tradition and an over-the-top stadium filled to the brim with drunk, overweight men that know who Lee Corso is. Even still, I often find myself wishing that Asbury had a football team to cheer on in big games, and to have somebody to root for that's not the stinkin' Cats. However, I imagine that if we did have one all of its players would have died back in Spring training. I am so glad I quickly abandoned that hope.
At this younger time in my life, I played on the line for my middle school football team. Weighing about as much as a small tractor (but only half as fast), I pretty easily defended the quarterback from the onslaught of pre-pubescent, Superman-undies-wearing defenders; but, boy, did I get banged up. I would come into school the next day bruised worse than my ego on report-card day (no wonder those social workers kept showing up at my house). Though, somehow, in my nine years of playing football I never once broke a bone, was concussed, or needed to fasten a ridiculously large bag of ice to my crotch.
Has anything in the history of Asbury athletics been more detrimental to signing prospective students than the terror of seeing the disemboweled, dismembered, and disfigured bodies of their future teammates scattered about the campus? From the looks of it, signing an athletic scholarship is tantamount to enlisting in the Marines. "The few. The proud. The martyrs." I won't even play intramural sports for fear of being killed; I would be the first person to ever be decapitated in a game of ultimate Frisbee.
Allen Iverson - one of the greatest small players in the history of basketball - in a moment of brilliance once said of the triviality of practice, "We're talking about practice, man. We're talking about practice. We're talking about practice. We're not talking about the game. We're talking about practice." So, there you go - not only is practice wholly unnecessary to become a superstar athlete, it will also get you KILLED. And you know what they say: "You can't be the sixth man if you're six feet under."
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