A Letter to my Gym Teachers

Dear gym teachers of my past,

Remember me? Jimmy Trescott? You know, that little uncoordinated kid in your class back in the day at Beaver Country Day School or Wamilton-Hehnam High? I’m writing to you all these long years later to share with you a piece of information that I think is of critical importance for you to hear.

You. Were. Wrong.

That’s right, dead wrong. You guys always assumed I was the non-athletic kid, the one who always got “Stuck-in-the-Mud” on purpose just so he wouldn’t have to run around as much. In fairness, I think I was one of the only guys who couldn’t successfully do a pull-up until junior year of high school, but those days are gone. Remember, Mrs. Pickle, how at 9th grade parent-teacher conferences you told my my Mom that, “I always thought of Jimmy as a math/science kid?” Granted, I know you were an English teacher and physical activity wasn’t your area of expertise. Still, your cutting words have stuck with me like a crappy simile to this very day.

Gym teachers, it’s time for me to hand in all those Presidential Fitness Test commemorative patches you gave me that made all us National Award Winners look so feeble next to the toned Presidential Award kids. Wanna know why? Because I accomplished something last week that I had never done before in my 22 years of life: I scored a soccer goal.

That’s right, last Friday we went to play pickup soccer at the DUT fields. Of course, now that we’re anywhere in the galaxy outside the USA, they refer to it as football (they also use the metric system: one issue on which I find it impossible to be patriotic, America just has it wrong). Turns out that everyone else here decided to do exactly the same thing, so we had to wait until enough of the 1.3 billion other people left before claiming our spot on the pitch. Since we only had enough people to stake a claim on half the field, we made friends with some other random Chinese dudes and played half field.

Now, I will admit that having a former D1 soccer player and a Columbian guy who’s been playing since he could breathe didn’t hurt my chances, but I’m also certain that ball wouldn’t have passed between the pair of sneakers we were using as goalposts had my foot not directed it in that direction first. All in all, a very satisfying game; we played for over two hours and beat our opponents by a few goals. So, gym teachers, let this stand as a point of pride for the nerdy and organized-sports-uninclined. I hope retirement has given you a chance to think long and hard about this.

Sincerely,
Jimmy

PS: So last night I read Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching (I killed off all the books I brought in the first week), and it's all about not taking pride in ones accomplishments yada yada yada. Thus, today, when I went back to play soccer, Karma kicked in and took out my left quad. I can now walk again...sorta. Go figure.