It's Never Too Late to Suck

Okay, so I am the worst woman on my frisbee team. There are men of all shapes playing in our league, but practically all the women are lean. I'm the slowest. I have the least skills. Players from the other team start to coach me during the game, I'm so obviously clueless. Yet, I'm totally engaged when I play.

Chances are I will never be great, and it will probably take a long time before I am even decent. (It's a bit hard to practice throwing a disc by myself between games. I guess I'd better work on finding a partner.) I would be embarrassed if I weren't trying so hard and my teammates weren't so cool.

Sometimes the hardest thing to remember is that I should always try hard. There are moments when my body kind of stops out of habit (sometimes fatigue, but more out of a habit) and I think, damn it, why am I slowing down? It's just that extra few seconds of effort that could make a difference. A few more inches and I could have scored.

It's fine to discover a talent and develop it, but there's something to be said for developing a non-talent. I'm learning so much more from this frisbee nonsense that I have from my other useless activity, improv. I'm not some great comedian, but improv came almost effortlessly to me when I first tried it as a teen. It's almost about not trying. Sports did not come so easily. And it wasn't because of my body. I'm tall and naturally muscular (underneath it all) and somewhat coordinated. I was all because of my mind.

Here I must do a little retrospective discussion of gender and my upbringing in sports. I kept playing sports until high school because I was okay enough. My dad would even coach my teams sometimes. Still, I have to say I wish I'd been pushed as hard as my brother was, and if I'd been a boy--and big and strapping as I am as opposed to my mid-sized sibling--I believe things would have been different. Perhaps I was a bit more willful than my brother. Anyway, after a game, he was never allowed to say I can't or to whine. If I whined, I got let off the hook. "You don't want to chase the tennis balls that you missed? You don't like being put in the outfield? Fine then, quit." This improved my whining skills, but little else. I really needed to learn how to suck. To stink up the place, at least for a while, until I got better. To stick it out on the off chance that I might turn things around.

Thank goodness it's never to late to suck.