Quest of a Closet Poker Player

I used to be the undersized all-everything athlete growing up.  Now I’m the oversized non-athlete all grown up.

This is the third part of a series on how has poker impacted my life, and am I better for it.  The criteria I will use in looking at this question include all parts of my life:

• Spiritual
• Financial
• Career
• Physical Fitness
• Marital Relationship
• Parent
• Intellectual
• Friendship
• Psychological

My father grew up in a town of a few thousand in Northeastern Mississippi.  He was the third of three boys, his older brothers in high school before he started school.  He was a bright boy growing up, but he was a great athlete.  You know the kind.  He was the quarterback of the football team, the top player on a state playoff basketball team, catcher with a nice bat for the baseball team.  He had a love for all things sports, and his first born had a bat and glove as soon as he could walk.  Our first home movies are of me at age three hitting baseballs and running the bases.

I grew up with baseball with a short attempt at pee-wee football.  Coach Harvey (”He who hesitates gets clobbered) put his good friend and assistant coach’s runt of a boy in as a wide receiver when I was eight or nine.  Coach Harvey wasn’t really much of a believer in the forward pass since eight year old’s couldn’t actually catch or throw balls with accuracy at that time.  This was also before the West Coast offense was invented.  No, Coach Harvey was a big believer in the I-formation, in smash mouth pound-it-out football.  My three memories from that season on the Chiefs:  having Karl Harvey (5′ 2″ and 150 pounds at age plow over me in drills, tackling someone once during a game and having 20 other boys jump on top of us, and The Play.

The Play was called that because, well, it was the only offensive play all season where they called my number.  I think it was either a post pattern or a fly, I’m not sure.  Coach Harvey may have had some sort of bet on the opposing team, because after the ball snapped and I was streaking down the field, I suddenly found myself in a strange combination of Cover 2 and man coverage by some defensive back who may have been Calvin Smith (you can Google it yourself).  Indeed, I was triple teamed as the ball hung in the air, with two of the boys knocking me to the turf as the third cradled the interception.  With that, I decided undersized, slow wide receivers didn’t really have a place in football.

My father had moved from softball to golf then to tennis as his participatory sports passion, and I joined in with lessons from Carol Ann Vest when I was nine.  I was hooked, both by the sport as well as by Carol Ann.  Her mother, Dorothy Vest, was an institution in Mississippi tennis, and Carol Ann was great with kids.  This was before Child Services was invented, and my mother would drop me off at Parham Bridges at 8:00 every summer morning with $5 in my pocket then pick me up at 5:00 every afternoon.  This at nine years of age.  I would help Carol Ann do any chores around the pro shop or courts, then play any of the other boys or girls who would show up.  There was a group lesson thrown in somewhere, but we mainly just played for hours at a time.  Ping pong was thrown in as well, either playing each other or playing Round-the-World.  We’d walk to Swensen’s to eat ice cream and gaze at the high school girls or head to Krystal’s for some micro burgers.

I quickly made my mark, beating the top seed and other country club boys in the State 10 and under Qualifying and making the finals of my first tournament.  We moved to a small town an hour south of Jackson later that year, and our tennis program was good for a small town but lacked the resources and player pool of Jackson.  We had three girls ranked either #1 or #2 in the state, and I often played them.  There were few boys to play, so I would play adults at the Country Club.  There were very few men who relished being beaten by a twelve or thirteen year old, so those matches were also tough to come by.  I stayed competitive in tennis throughout school but only in the high school competitions, having lettered six years in tennis.  The summer tournament circuit had gotten too expensive for us to really participate, so I played very few of these tourneys.

I also played basketball at a church league in junior high after being the last cut for the 6th grade team.  One too many full court passes did me in.  Coach German took a liking to me when I was in 9th grade (8th and 9th grade was at the former black high school; we had six schools students progressed through), so he put me in his PE class along with his football and basketball players.  Coach German was 6′ 8″ I think and had played football and basketball at Mississippi Valley or Alcorn State, I forget.  He’d been cut by the Buccaneers when they started their team, and he was becoming a junior high football and basketball institution.

He was of the Bear Bryant school of coaching.  The two stories I remember from his days coaching:  once, two boys were fighting on the football field during practice.  He took them to the locker room, made them strip, and told them to fight until one of them couldn’t stand.  The other was a punishment he’d deliver to his basketball team.  Each player would stand on the wall with his heels touching it, then bend his knees halfway.  His back and butt had to stay on the wall as well as his knees, and Coach German would leave the boys there for fifteen or twenty minutes at a time.  Go try to do it for five minutes, keeping your back on the wall and gently bending your knees.  Brutal.

I made the intramural basketball team in 9th grade, and we played the teachers in front of the student body one day.  I had a nice streaky outside shot and was a decent point guard.  Coach German stole the ball with some ill-advised pass, and I sprinted back on defense as he dribbled toward me.  I squared my bod and leaned back as Coach German soared over me for a two-handed dunk.  He picked me up by my shirt and started me back toward the other way, telling me, “You shouldn’t do that, boy,” all with a big grin on his face.

I made the high school team but rarely saw playing time.  I traveled with the team as a sophomore, working as a statistician and dating a senior cheerleader.  I started for the JV as a junior and played sparingly.  Our coach was dismissed, and I quit the team then rejoined during my senior year.  I’d wanted to focus on tennis to make one final push to win the state championship but wanted to get back into hoops when it came around.  By that time I’d missed the summer practices and bonding with the new coach, and while we were good buddies I played rarely.   I had a streaky outside shot and was a better than average passer, but I was a fairly poor defender against quick guards if we were playing man defense.

I tried to walk on in tennis at Tulane but didn’t make it, one of the last cuts for some sort of JV type squad.  My groundstrokes were never very good, and I didn’t have much of a chance having played little during the summer.  I played intramural sports while I was there for my fraternity then transferred to Mississippi State as a junior.  I drifted away from sports as I was pretty alone in those difficult two years for me.

My adult life hasn’t held much sports.  I got back into tennis in G-Vegas until we married, got out of it again until we moved back to the ATL.  I was enjoying ALTA a couple years ago, the largest tennis league probably in the world, and was both enjoying the newfound camaraderie that it provides as well as just getting the competitive juices flowing again and wanting to improve and get in better shape.  A cartilage tear followed by getting scoped pretty much ended my play as my knee still is in pretty bad shape.  I can’t do anything very physical without it swelling up.  Anything includes simply coaching soccer with the boys.  I normally have to ice my knee down and take a couple of Alleve just to get through the next hours.

I’ve become the kind of man I used to detest growing up, having moved through being plump then chunky and now wallowing between overweight and obese.  I probably weigh more now than I ever have.  I do next to nothing physically.  I have a bike and barbells that I could do, yet I do nothing.  I’ve lost weight on the Atkins diet a few times before, the first time dropping 35 pounds and getting the lightest I’ve been in a decade.  I haven’t checked any vital signs of my key organs in several years, and I’m sure the numbers wouldn’t be good.

Has poker caused any of this?  I don’t think so, nor do I think that it has even been much of a contributing factor.  Sitting at my computer has contributed, but even that is a red herring.  Let’s strip all the words away from this:  it isn’t physical fitness, it isn’t exercise, it isn’t sports, it isn’t jogging. This is about a body that isn’t being maintained properly and is in decay.  As with any of this, I can’t lose 25 or 50 or 75 pounds in a day, and I can’t run a marathon tomorrow.  I can only take one step, do a few sit-ups, ride my bike for five or ten or twenty minutes, do one set of weights, eat differently today than I did yesterday.

Eating.  The yang to the yin of activity.  Food is more of a retreat for me than even poker, and it is a metaphor for so many things in my life.  I eat out constantly, I eat junk, I eat what I want, I eat when I want, I sneak this snack.  And I drink Diet Coke or unsweet tea or coffee with cream no sugar because, well, because I don’t drink things with sugar.  I’m kind of on a diet…

Oh, and I don’t smoke and don’t drink alcohol.  I’ve had probably three or four sips of wine or champagne at toasts, but otherwise I’ve never had a drink.  Growing up in a dry county in Mississippi as a Southern Baptist, it wasn’t too much of a sacrifice.  Being a good kid, I wasn’t really exposed or pressured very much.  At Tulane, I was the only student maybe in their history that didn’t drink, and I was trotted out at fraternity socials as some sort of missing link freak to be observed by Chi O’s.  So I’m the perfect designated driver in that regards.

In summary, poker I don’t think has very much to do with my health; possibly giving me something convenient to do rather than working out, but I’d do something else.  The question is can I change?

I’m 42 now, and I’ll never look like Fuel or Iak ever again.  But this really isn’t about being a prettier boy.  It really is about being alive when I’m 52 and 62, as well as moving from lethargy to engagement with my boys and Sweetie over the next five-fifteen years.

I can’t answer this.  Previous performance in my life says I won’t change.  But can I?  I’m not much on wild aspirations, on promises of what I’m gonna do.  I’m a realist or a pragmatist or something.  I see the glass as three-quarters empty rather than half full, and I think I’ve done well in life because of that.  So no, I don’t know.  It would be great to be healthier in April or April 2008 or April 2015.  There it is, though.  Not pretty, but these are the facts.  I’ll include something on this in my five year plan, and I hope I can make a right-hand turn in my life in this area.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 6th, 2007 at 10:09 am and is filed under Uncategorized.