Going in to play
By Chuck FreedmanSINCE I was a kid, I've been going out to play. I used to have to ask permission from my mother, later my wife, and finally nobody cared. But the rules were simple. Find some guys, a ball and a way to reproduce tribal warfare without actually killing anyone.
Over time there were equipment problems. Unfortunately, it was my equipment. It began my junior year in high school when I tore the cartilage in my right knee while long-jumping.
Undaunted and taped up like King Tut, I returned my senior year to jump over 22 feet to win the county championships. A priest from one of the parochial schools was measuring the jumps that day. As I emerged from the sandpit, he looked at me and said, "Lord, it was like you didn't want to come down." This was my Mark McGwire moment.
In my 20s, I tore ligaments when I hyperextended my left knee in the Hilo businessman's basketball league. I don't remember any businessmen in this league. I sure wasn't one, and neither was the policeman who jackknifed me on a rebound. It took a tough cop on the floor of Wainaku gym to teach me that my knee could bend backward instead of forward. Unfortunately, you can only do that trick once.
In my 30s, I graduated to the "bracing, wrapping and icing club." In this club you spend half your time playing something and the other half either getting ready to play or detoxifying when you're pau. Along with a generation of aging jocks, I gave birth to the industry of "sports medicine" far too late for it to improve my quality of life. I could have used something more in the order of a spare parts industry, a real body shop.
By my 40s, I'd moved to tennis, a sport which we had viewed as elitist in high school. (People wore "white" and, yikes, girls played it, too.) In my maturing years, yesterday's liabilities became today's assets. I not only played with women, I got my butt kicked by them. But darned if I didn't look dapper in white.
Through my half century of going out to play, I stayed in shape, learned something about mind and body, winning and losing, and the spontaneity of the sandlot. The playing field was so much more clearly defined than real life -- a safe haven from an insane world. The game was the epicenter of wonderful friendships which thrived inside the white lines.
That was until last March, when my knees sang their final swan song at Kilauea Tennis Courts in Kaimuki. Something real bad was going on in there and I knew it. A trip to a specialist, one set of X-rays, and I was permanently benched for severe arthritis and bone spurs by a doctor with the bedside manner of Vince Lombardi.
He told me I would need knee joint replacement surgery in both legs. You don't want to have this operation too soon, because then you will have to have it a second time, given your life expectancy, he said.
Life expectancy? Oh, how the mighty have fallen! Just a few short decades ago, I was the kid who jumped and wouldn't come down. Now my knees had led me to my own mortality.
TWO weeks ago, a broken shell of a man, I joined a fitness center. Going out to play has been replaced by going in to play.
But it's not play. I jog on a machine that goes nowhere and flashes cryptic red messages to me about "watts" and "mets." I wrestle with people-eating machines that graphically show me which atrophied muscle I am hopelessly trying to resuscitate.
I'm surrounded by self-absorbed narcissists wearing spandex and head sets who actually seem to relate to all this equipment and sports science, as opposed to each other. And, oh yeah, I'm the fattest guy in the place.
One of the lessons the sandlot taught me is that when your equipment fails, you make adjustments. So off I go to play inside and work on my quads, delts and lats. I'm cool because I just bought a sports headset. And 20 pounds from now, I will be eligible for something in shiny blue spandex. Oh, glory.
Chuck Freedman is vice president of corporate relations
for Hawaiian Electric Co.