Readers and writers blog

When I was in high school, I used to look at alumni with bemusement, trying to imagine them walking through the halls where I walked, sitting in classes where I sat. I couldn’t do it. They looked too old.

Now I’ve had a chance to be on the other side of that looking glass.

I was a high school football star, you know — co-captain, all-state selection, in the large-school category, no less. Now before you start going woo-woo (or boooo), I will tell you that a large school in a small state is still a small school, where to be a star lineman sometimes required only reaching near adult size in the eighth grade — in those days, 6-feet, 190 pounds — and being even moderately coordinated, all of which would get you on the varsity team in your freshman year. And that my stardom ended with my senior year because I never got bigger and certainly never was fast enough to play in college. And so I’ve always had a sense of reality about my “stardom,” even then. Yes, we were undefeated state champions, but we played only eight games, all against schools not much bigger than us. My advice to an average-size frog: Get into a small pond. You will be big. Then let some time pass. You will be even bigger. Over the years, I’ve been amused at how much better that team and I get each year in the retelling. Hell, we’re legendary by now.

Well, it reached an apex on Friday. After decades of students passing by our old-fashioned trophies and yellowing photographs in hallway display cases, the school’s athletic department and the football booster club invited our team to reunite Friday for a homecoming dinner followed by a football game at which we would be presented to the hometown crowd.

My initial response to the invitation was, naw, I haven’t lived there for a long time, and at the few class reunions I’ve attended, I’ve traded the same football stories too many times with my old classmates. But then I got to thinking about it.

It has been 50 years, after all, and that’s one of the class reunions I’m definitely attending next summer. And I have to admit, I liked the idea of going out on that same field again. Or as I told my sister, who still lives in that area, in an email: “Who could pass up a chance to trot out on the field amid polite applause from a bunch of drunken fans who never heard of us geezers?” (Of course, it’s been a long time since I’ve trotted. Although I stretch and walk a treadmill nearly every day, my joints creak too much for running.)

So I went. My wife couldn’t go because she had to work (nearing retirement, you know), so I drove the five hours from New York to southern New Hampshire, and I went.

It was, in a word, great. The weather was cool and wet, just like many of the games in the old days, and the field smelled fresh and grassy, just as it did then. The hometown crowd was relatively sober — and still they cheered when we walked (some trotted, you showoffs) to the 50-yard line to be introduced at halftime. And it wasn’t tiresome to trade those old stories with just those classmates who were on the team (and to remember those, too many of those, who had died).

Our coach, now in his 70s and living on Long Island, couldn’t get to the reunion, and I missed him. But I got a chance again to read an homage I wrote about him (and us) when he was inducted into the local sports hall of fame 18 years ago. (That little speech later was incorporated into a book I wrote, “Adrift in America,” which is out of print but is posted in its entirety as a public service, mostly to me, in this weblog’s nonfiction section. If you care to read that passage, here’s the link.)

Those kids who are now at the school and on the team were, well, also great. Respectful, even reverential. And I kept my promise to myself not to tell them any good-old-days stories. They’ve got their own memories to build and watch grow.

I wonder if those alumni I remember seeing in high school thought the same way about us.

– Sid Leavitt

p.s. Sincere thanks to Denise Chick, Cindy Fowler and other volunteers from the Spaulding High Red Raiders Football Booster Club and to athletic director Dave Colson and his staff — and to the hometown crowd in Rochester, N.H. — for making us feel so welcome.