Eureka Memories: Traumatic gym class divided otherwise really happy kids

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First rule of gym class ... don't complain about gym class.

Second rule of gym class ... it could be a lot worse.

Take, for instance, the popular game that is now judged so anti-social and violent that it is outlawed in most schools. Consider, the game of dodgeball as it was played at Eureka junior highs and at Eureka High School in decades past.

Dodgeball.

The people who enjoyed and were good at the game were athletes, not bullies. So, we preferred to call the game War. (Well, lots of the athletes were incredible bullies, too. I wasn't. We just called it War at Winship in my youth because we didn't rightly know what smearing a queer had to do with our game. We were blissfully naive.)

War was everything that I loved and lots of people hated about gym class in Eureka.

The physical education instructor would choose two team captains. He always chose from the same pool of athletes, so I would get more than a fair share of chances to choose a team made up of elusive kids who could throw accurately and spot a ball in the corner of their eye and catch it just before it hit them.

I loved the strategy of selecting a team. Friendship didn't come into play until we picked the best players. Get 7, 8, 9 players into the process and then being somebody's friend played a role in your selection or whom you chose to select.

Life was simpler in the 1960s and 1970s when all we knew about games is that we played to win. People who didn't try to win in gym class had grades that reflected their lack of interested in becoming triumphant at any cost.

My closest friends were captains and, for the time, sensitive young men. We weren't the athletes who were bullies. We didn't need education code revisions to insist that we treat others like we wanted to be treated. Still, we never paid any attention to the fact that the same kids wound up picked last or nearly last every time we chose teams for War.

Gym class taught us lessons about a chain being only as strong as its weakest link.

Knowing that you were being forced to stand in line waiting to be chosen because you weren't very good at a game you didn't like had to have been traumatic.

We were sensitive kids, but ... we weren't going to pick a kid too early just to help him feel better about himself.

The two teams spread out on opposite sides of the basketball court. It would've been safe and civil if we'd put a team on each baseline under the basketball hoops in the full gym. It was, literally, war with teams using half the gym and throwing the volleyballs from one sideline to another. There was no time to react and anybody with a strong throwing arm, and hands big enough to grip a volleyball, could do some serious damage. (Even to the kids who stood with their backs slammed up against the gymnasium bleachers.)

I loved War, perhaps, more than any other gym class activity. I didn't question the barbarism because the kids who were treated in a barbaric manner never complained. If they complained, the bullies just made their miserable experience even more miserable.

It didn't make sense to announce that one hated War and hated being hit by the ball and didn't like to throw a ball at other people. Somehow such a statement would've been interpreted in my youth like this:

"Please. Please! Give the 7 biggest, strongest guys the volleyballs and let them stand right up front and, please, make them throw the balls at me ... full speed ... all at once. And, don't forget to aim at my head!"

The P.E. teacher would say the same thing before every War game.

"Gentlemen ... we're aiming for the waist down."

The P.E. teacher must've figured that comment meant he avoided being subject to a lawsuit. We all ignored him.

The target was always the torso. If that meant the slightly angrier, more aggressive War specialists missed the discussion of anatomy where it was explained that the head wasn't part of the torso ... too bad for the easy targets.

I wasn't a headhunter. Unless, I got a chance to take out one of the bullies who was a headhunter. If team captain types turned on one another, it seemed to please the coach and the other kids. Honest.

When I became a P.E. teacher at Cutten School in the 1980s, I let different kids pick teams. I'd have the athletes/bullies sit out sometimes so that the others could enjoy the game. It wouldn't have been hard to make War fun for everybody, but P.E. teachers in the 1960s and 1970s were, arguably, less sensitive than most kids in their classes.

Distance running is trendy now. At Winship in the 1970s, I didn't know anyone who like running "The 600."

Before the class activity and after calistentics, we had to jog through the parking lot, around the island with the redwood tree in the middle and back. It was about 600 yards.

We all hated it. The fact that some gifted distance runners, usually bookish types who weren't good at games, took it as their moment to shine didn't help. We loathed The 600. We'd finish the run gasping for air, even those of us who were involved in team sports.

How on earth could a jog of 600 yards have seemed so inhumane? My son's 15 and he runs 2, 3, 5 miles -- for fun or to stay fit for organized sports. My daughter, 13, decided to follow her brother's lead for a couple weeks and ran a mile a day -- easy. The old man bitched like an old lady about a 600-yard run. Running was hard and running wasn't cool. So, we despised it.

Eureka High P.E. teachers made things easier by making us run around that area where basketball courts existed directly across from the gym. It was a small city block, not nearly 600 yards. We still griped and griped.

We laughed once, too.

Mark Parris was a tall, quiet, but truly funny kid from Winship. He said things we didn't expect. Did things no one else thought of and was, if a kid can be such a thing, pithy.

Mostly, Mark was funny. He was funnier than I ever remember him being by sheer accident, though.

The run around that tiny block at EHS required we file past the cement post that was used to help block the school driveway with a chain after school hours.

The posts on either side of the driveway were about hip high to most kids -- maybe a little higher for some. A little lower for taller kid like Mark Parris.

Kids likely jogged by those cement posts for 25 years thinking, "I should jump over that thing." I say it was likely because history indicates that high school boys had a boundless ability to come up with stupid ideas. And, trying to jump a cement post while jogging was about as stupid an idea as one can imagine.

Mark Parris was an A student and more thoughtful than most. Then, one morning, he decided to jog at the cement post, put both hands on top and try to vault it ... legs spread wide ... to impress us and make us laugh.

He made us laugh.

Little is funnier to a group of teen boys than to see a friend slam his crotch directly into a cement pole. I was there. I'm absolutely certain. It wasn't just the sight of Mark Parris slamming his crotch into the cement pole that was hysterically funny.

Boys know that nothing hurts like getting hit, ah, down there. I broke into tears and moaned for nearly a half hour once ... when struck in the nether region by a plastic baseball tossed gently in my direction. It hit a soft spot. Mark Parris slammed his boy body parts into a cement post.

It has been over 35 years and the story makes me smile more every time I tell it. I've only told it 100, 200 times.

The question that went unasked when playing War was, "Why are we playing a game where we try to hurt each other?"

The question I had about running 600 yards was, "Why are we running at all?" I'm not sure a P.E. teacher of that time could've explained cardiovascular fitness to me or anybody else. Not that jogging 3, 4, 5 minutes was a cardio workout. We ran because, you ran in gym class. You played a game. You took a shower.

Who didn't despise school square dancing?

Oh? We all hated it?

Square dancing was to some just as traumatic as being chosen last for War was to others. I dreaded the long walk toward a long line of girls to find one whose eyes didn't shout, "Don't ask me! DON'T ask ME to dance!"

In my square dancing youth, every girl's eyes seemed to be shouting that at me. And, I was in the middle of the pack of boys girls could tolerate, I figured. There were guys girls wanted no part of ... ever.

Square dancing was supposed to teach social skills. However, just forcing a group of boys to each pick a girl and ask them to square dance doesn't do anything but reinforce to the cool kids that they stayed together because they were superior and to remind the rest of us that we didn't understand anything about ourselves, our primal urges or the other sex.

Winship was nightmarish for me. I had worry warts on my hands. The only reason I never had a girl refuse to dance with me is that I was a good judge of where I stood in the social order and asked girls in their gender's corresponding order to dance.

Square dancing actually taught interactive gender diplomacy.

I would never in a million years have rushed over to ask Brenda Anderson or Rene Rosenberg to square dance. Never! I decided who was in which league and they were way out of my league. So, I'd leave room for the popular dudes to get to the popular girls and get on with it.

If P.E. teachers wanted to teach social skills, they could've let us pick partners and then shook the couples up so that the popular boys had to dance with girls not their equal in the brutal high school societal structure. Brenda Anderson or Rene Rosenberg would've had to dance with me and found it was tolerable to dance with a guy too nervous to speak to them. Maybe, I'd have found Brenda Anderson a chatterbox and not just a girls I thought was prettier than any girl at Winship.

But, teachers just stood there and started the record player.

Nothing happens in gym class these days, you know? It's all different. It's like a free period to most kids who balk at games and don't care what the P.E. teacher says.

My son insisted that 98% of the kids in his middle school class refused to run the mile ... ever. The mile run at Green Valley Middle School became my son trying to run down a magnificently conditioned eighth-grade girl who could run like the wind. The other kids walked.

"I would've caught her in the final 400 yards today," he once said, "but, I had to weave in and out of the kids who just walk."

Last year at his private Catholic high school, he complained that P.E. class was wasted walking around the track.

"I feel like an idiot. If I walk, I hate it. Today I ran the entire 15 minutes and ran past a girl who give me trouble for showing off," he said. "I'm just getting a workout in. What should I do?"

I told him it could've been worse. He could've had to ask her to square dance with him.