My Defective Sports Gene

I have a defective sports gene.

I suspected this long before I knew what to call it.

Daddy loved sports, everything from football to dominoes---a fiercely competitive game in West Texas.  I've seen physical fights break out over bad plays.

My two brothers I grew up with -- Lee Roy and Leonard -- loved sports.  If we had been in school during the fall months instead of the cotton patch, Lee Roy, four years older than me, would have gone out for football.  Leonard, four years younger, did play basketball.

Lew, our “baby brother,” born the year I started to college, played football in high school and apparently did well at it.  I only saw Lew play once.  Pansy and I were back in Texas for a visit, and we went to a game with Daddy and Mother, Lew and my proud parents.

Jeff and Don, our “adopted brothers,” who married our sisters, Leta and Marie, also loved sports.

So I knew by now: Daddy and all “The Boys” loved The Game while I said, "No comprendo."  My sports gene was defective.

Across the years, at family gatherings -- especially at Christmas -- after the sumptuous spread provided by Mother and all the daughters (by birth and by marriage), the women, in gender stereotype, repaired to the kitchen to clean the dishes and rearrange the leftovers for supper.  Then the menfolk congregated around the TV for The Game.  

I wouldn’t have felt comfortable in the kitchen, but I was no more comfortable as I endured The Game.  If perchance the Dallas Cowboys were playing, the room would explode with excited yells every time the ball moved three inches toward the goal or when Landry's movers and shakers stopped a play by the unworthy, insignificant opponents.

Funny how these genetic things can jump generations.  Russell, our firstborn, inherited his father’s weakness.  Jonathan, our younger, apparently has a direct line back to his Grandpa Webb and all The Uncles.

Jonathan loves various animals, including The Dawgs from UGA and Da Bears in his adopted hometown of Chicago.  I think his firstborn, Ethan, may have a direct line back to his Grandpa Webb (yours truly).

About seventeen miles from our home in Anderson, South Carolina, is Death Valley, home of the Clemson Tigers.  Loyal Tiger fans note proudly, “I hear tell our Team has a pretty decent university.”

An Andersonian faces possible deportation if he is discovered to be a closet supporter of The Dawgs in Athens or the Gamecocks in Columbia.

During The Season, my defect makes it a bit difficult for me to enter conversations with other men at Lions Club, at church, at the Y.  They just assume I saw The Game and am just as excited if “We” won or just as angry at the refs if “We” were cheated out of a win.

When our boys were growing up, Russell had no interest in going to games, but Pansy and I let Jonathan go to some games when his buddies’ dads took them.  I never quite knew how he wound up asking, “How ‘Bout Them Dawgs?” instead of being a Tigers fan.  But he also likes Georgia basketball, and I took him across the border a few times for games.

I well remember the last time I was in a stadium.  1980 in Waco.  We spent a year with Mother in her apartment before I returned to Anderson College, now Anderson University.  

Jeff, my older sister’s husband, now deceased, had an extra ticket for a Baylor game.  I went because Jeff invited me.  He was more brother than in-law, so I was glad to spend a few hours with him, whatever the environment.  

The Bears must have had a pretty good team that year under Grant Teaff's coaching.  Word around town was that they were winning.  But I don’t remember who the opponents were.  I don’t remember whether Baylor won or lost.  

My only specific recollection from that afternoon in 1980 is that moment -- probably during the singing of “That Good Old Baylor Line,” to the tune of “In the Good Old Summertime” -- when right arms all around me shot straight out, with fingers curled to represent bear claws.

Rah.