Throwing the Rock

I remember when I first discovered I liked sports. It was baseball season, 1987, and the Phillies had a pretty bad team at the time, with the notable exception of Mike Schmidt, a Philly legend to this day. However, I became obsessed with the pitchers on the team instead. I wanted to be just like them, to throw the ball 90+ mph and have it hit the catcher’s glove exactly when and where I wanted it to. While the pitchers weren’t quite as successful, with the notable exception of Steve Bedrosian, the Phillies closer, it didn’t matter to me. I was determined to work my arm into shape for the major leagues, in the comfort of my own bedroom.

So, I taped a bullseye to my closet wall (you know you did it, too). It had four rings to it, with a small dark circle in the middle, my ultimate aim. Now, you’ll have to know the dimensions of my room first. When we first moved to the house, the previous tenants had been using it for a storage closet, so you know I didn’t have very much distance to my throws, but I figured if I threw hard enough (like Steve Bedrosian) I would still grow my arm strength. Little did I know, but I had fun with it. In that way I would play whole nine-inning games by myself while listening to the Phillies play on the radio (I didn’t have a TV in my room). By the end of the season, my record was somewhere around .500, and I was pleased when my arm would be hurting at night when it was time for bed.

After the baseball season, I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I turned to football, and the hype of the moment in Philly was a quarterback named Randall Cunningham. Because he threw the ball, and throwing was my newfound love, he became my favorite Eagle. It took some adjusting, but I was able to fix my bullseye so it was raised higher on my closet door, and it was expanded to six rings around it. Now, I’ll say that I felt sufficiently chuffed about my amazing skills with paper and tape by that point. I just knew that if Sport magazine was doing spreads on bedroom football ingenuity, they would want to see my room. Yes, I took pictures of the bullseye with my Kodak camera, but of course they got lost throughout the years or I would post one here. I’m sure you can imagine it, but you know. Anyway, I would take my nerf football (recently acquired from the Salvation Army, where my dad worked as a manager), I would take my football stance, and I would throw the ball just like Randall Cunningham, my hero, while, you guessed it, listening to Eagles games on the radio. My record in football wasn’t as dynamic as my baseball record, because I didn’t realize that sometimes throwing harder wasn’t going to make things happen for me.

Now, you’ve realized by now that I was the king of arts and crafts, but around this same time (Christmas of 1987) something arrived at our house that blew it all out of the water. It was an amazing new piece of technology given to us by our uncle, something called a Nintendo, and it came with all kinds of games we could play and sit down while doing it. I, of course, didn’t know it then, but that would lead to the winter of the chubbs, which my sister (affectionately) called it. While I became somewhat of a hero in Tecmo Bowl, and Bases Loaded, it was still not the same, and later on I would realize that was a regret. I always seemed to go all-in on everything I did, and I think if I had thought better of it, I would have adjusted my playing schedule to continue to include my closet door bullseye games.

So you know what I’m going to do this week? Yeah, you know. Get ready, closet door. You ain’t seen nothing yet.

Sam