The Ultimate Flashback

I was playing Ultimate Frisbee last night in the MUN gym, something I've gotten into in the past couple of weeks, and for the most part, I'm enjoying it. It gets me out of the house, meet some new people, and gets me some physical activity aside from walking back and forth to MUN everyday. But last night, in the middle of play, something happened to flash me right back 30 years to public school.

There was a 'rockstar' playing on the team. You know the type. He's big, loud and he's wearing the t-shirt from the Mile Zero Ultimate Tournament that he attended way back in 1992, just to prove that he's a serious athlete. This in a sport where most people show up in cutoffs and t-shirts that advertise beer or old rock concerts.

So the Rockstar has the disc and he's looking for someone to pass to. I'm about 15 feet away, in the clear, and he sees me. But does he pass to me? NO. he wastes the pass on an overhead hammer throw all the way to the endzone where there is NO ONE WAITING!!! Let me make a pertinent point in ultimate frisbee: short passes win the game. It's a frisbee, not an exocet missile! You can throw it as hard as you want, but in the end, it's still a big hunk of plastic creating a whole lot of drag, and if you throw a long shot, there is an ever increasing possibility that someone from the other team will throw themselves in front of it.

So the frisbee bounces off the wall, which makes it an incomplete pass, and the other team gets the disc. And then Mr. Rockstar has the fucking nerve to exhort the rest of the team to 'get closer' to him so he doesn't have to throw long shots. This is just like public school all over again; where the cool kids (they thought they were cool back then, but 99% of the cool kids from my public school are doing hard time now) would throw to their buddies, or waste their shot trying, unsuccessfully, to score the winning point by themselves.

When I was in public school, three little words that never failed to make me feel like shit were, "Let's pick teams", cause I knew that I was going to be the last one picked. So I avoided sports in public school and for the most part in high school as well. I've never understood just what in fact, the PE teachers in public school were trying to instill in me, when they forced me to participate. Was it some sense of fair play? Cause there was nothing fair about it.
Was it some out moded idea that sports would bring us all together in some sort of an alpha male bonding ritual? Cause all it did was push me further to the margins of public school society.
Was it a love of the game? Cause all it instilled in me was a total hatred of anything even remotely sports related.
In fact, I was so totally pleased to get to high school cause I knew that PE was an option, not a requirement. I was thinking on the way home, that part of the reason that I'm enjoying ultimate is that teams are decided on the basis of what colour t-shirt you are wearing when you show up. And that if I'd had more balls in public school, I would have told them to shove their archaic system of torture up their ass, or at least said, "No. I'm not playing."