Just Because You’re Fat, It Doesn’t Mean You Should Play Football

I stood in the changing room feeling uncomfortable and ashamed. It was the start of third grade, and I was experiencing the annual unpleasantry of getting fitted for my Catholic school uniform.

At some point I had gone from normal kid size to “husky,” the politically correct term used to describe fat kid pants. Several feet of excess material spilled past my feet onto the floor. Apparently there were some eight-foot-tall third graders who also wore size 28 husky. My mom did a lot of hemming in those days.

I began to think of myself first and foremost as a “husky” kid. Husky kids don’t ask girls out or sit in the back of the bus. Husky kids generally aren’t star athletes either, but I was still expected to try. I was a boy. Boys played sports.

Little league wasn’t too bad until I was relieved from my usual post, happily picking dandelions in left field, to fill in as catcher.

The pitcher on our team was a pint-size Nolan Ryan with an erratic fastball and an insatiable appetite for pain. Our coach really wanted to reign in those wild pitches; I suppose he thought that a husky kid might make a better target.

Trembling in terror, I closed my eyes and extended my hand as the pitcher rocketed baseballs in the general direction of home plate. If by pure luck the ball did hit my glove, pain shot though my thumb due to it’s poor fit. “Toughen up, Kavanagh!” was all I heard as I tried to hold back tears.

I spent the rest of the season cowering behind home plate. Although I was in constant fear of of bodily harm, I still refused to wear the uncomfortable, absurdly oversized cup that my Dad had bought for me. I’m lucky to have retired from baseball with my man bits intact.

 

Basketball was another disaster. Every practice we did laps, and every practice I came in last. But wheezing my way around the gym was a cake walk compared to the humiliating torture of shirts-versus-skins.

Shirts-versus-skins was a practice scrimmage that used an archaic method of identifying players on the opposing team. One team left their shirts on; the other was forced to remove theirs.

The phrase sent shivers down my ten-year-old spine.

“Please don’t be skins, please don’t be skins,” I recited to myself, like some sort of desperate petition to the gods of junior-league basketball.

“Kavanagh, you’re on skins!” the coach’s voice inevitably echoed across the gymnasium.

So I was forced to trudge up and down the court with my little gut hanging over my mesh shorts and developing man boobs flopping on full display. I felt like a baby beluga whale in a pair of Nikes.

Soon I hit puberty. I got taller. I got huskier.

Phrases like,”Hey big guy, looks like you should be a linebacker,” or “We could sure use you blocking for the Eagles,” started to come my way with more and more frequency. It made perfect sense–if there was one thing that husky guys were put on this earth to do, it’s play football.

With visions of girls and glory dancing in my head, I signed up for football my freshman year of high school.

First, I had to get a physical at the sports medicine clinic to get cleared to play.

“Wow, you weigh that much?” the clinician exclaimed as a step on the scale.

“I don’t know, bitch, aren’t you supposed to be telling me?”

The first couple practices the coaches had to determine what positions we would play. I was too slow to be a fullback and too chubby to be a linebacker. They shipped me off to no-mans-land: the offensive line.

I was terrible. For one thing, I was a foot shorter than the rest of the lineman. Also, I never quite got up enough motivation to want to physically hurt another human being–kind of a prerequisite for playing football.

“Get angry, Kavanagh! Get ANGRY!” my line coach screamed at me every practice.

“I don’t understand the source of all this aggression!”

Occasionally I found myself off the bench and actually in a game, usually attempting to defend some nose tackle twice my size. I mastered the art of the “look-out” block. That’s when an offensive lineman turns around as a defender breezes by him to yell, “Look out! You’re about to get your head taken off!”

Our team was as bad as I was. We went a solid 0–10, never coming within less than 7 points of an opponent.

Freshman football marked the end of my athletic career. I’d love to say that it helped make me a man or taught me some discipline, but it didn’t. It felt like just another experience where the husky kit wasn’t quite fitting in, even if it was the one place where he was supposed to.

Just because I was fat, it didn’t mean I should have played football. I don’t regret the experience, but I wish that I signed up for reasons other than external pressure and internal expectations.

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