Against My Own Grain
The challenge of excelling at what doesn’t come naturally.
I have always gone against my own grain. In high school, I aced math and rarely exceeded a B in English. With an aptitude for numbers, I could have slid into a good life as an accountant (a profession later experience taught me to respect). Instead, I majored in English education and journalism in college and struggled to become a writer. This contrarian inclination has made my life hard but also interesting.
I first learned just how interesting it could be in 1971, my eighth grade year in junior high. To my father’s great disappointment, I seemed to have inherited my mother’s lack of athletic ability. I couldn’t catch, I couldn’t throw and I ran funny. So of course I played football. Not for my school, which didn’t have a team, but for the Throgs Neck Steelers, a freshman division team in the Bronx Umpires Association. An unaffiliated league, the BUA ran divisions up to semi-pro, their freshman division teams ranging in age from thirteen to fifteen but with no weight limit.
Having turned thirteen a month before the season started, I just qualified. And I found the perfect position for a non-athlete: center of the offensive line, the hiker, the guy with the undignified job of passing the ball back between his legs to the quarterback. At 115 pounds, I came in a…
