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| Two Tales of Tennis Friends and Booze
by lloydich at 2/13/2008 3:04:59 PM
(1)
High School...
In my junior year in high school, I was number two on the tennis team and a senior named Bill Bailey was number four. It was a military high school in San Antonio, Texas, and at the beginning of the year Bill had been favorite to make battalion commander, highest-ranking student officer. But the military passed Bill Bailey by, basically for excessive individuality and strangeness. In reaction Bill grew his left thumbnail the rest of the year.
In the spring, the team's coach and first four players all drove down to south Texas for a statewide schools tournament. Bill played his first match Saturday morning and won. Then in the afternoon in his second match Bill got mad about something and wouldn't stop arguing, so his opponent called over a tournament official. The ensuing intense discussion between Bill and the official ended when Bill proposed the official perform the famous physical impossibility, turned, and stomped off toward the baseline to resume play. By about the third stomp, our team was disqualified from the tournament.
Since there wasn't time to drive back to San Antonio before dark, the coach decided we'd spend the night as planned. Late in the afternoon, Bill and I and a third player from the team got together for sympathy over beers with some players from the local high school hosting the tournament. Afterwards the three of us ate woozy suppers at the homes where we were staying. Then we met up again with the local guys for more beers and some Saturday night pool-shooting. Two or three hours later, we were cruising town and feeling much better about everything. To arrive by fate in front of the host high school's deserted and dark main building. There we parked drinking, clowning, casing the situation. Until unnoticed by anyone, our anger and self-pity had dissipated in a haze of besotted well-being. I lobbed my empty beer can at the flag pole in front of the school. Clanking on the concrete walkway, it fell about twenty feet short. We drove off.
We'd been back at school in San Antonio for a couple of days when the four of us who'd gone to the tournament were called into the headmaster's office. No one was very apprehensive. Bill didn't seem much concerned -- more like, by now he expected to be punished for following his own honorable code of behavior. The rest of us of course were just innocent victims. Innocent, and if we'd had time to think about it, a little curious. What were we there for? Certainly not to be vindicated by witnessing the inquisition. But anyway, I figured, it was a team thing. After some preliminaries, the headmaster asked Bill his version of the incident. Doubtless Bill's version was factually virtually identical to the tournament official's. The headmaster having heard him out asked, simply, "Why, Bill?" Bill helpfully provided the usual military explanation – "No excuse, Sir." After which, a silence. Then the headmaster said, "OK, Bill." And he asked all of us, "So who threw the beer can into the school yard?"
The thing about our school at just that time was that after years of trying, it had almost succeeded in re-creating itself. A military correctional facility for well-off delinquents was being reborn as an academically respectable, college preparatory school. And in fact out of the thirty-five students in my senior class the next year, six were admitted to Ivy League colleges, probably not a great many fewer than in the school's preceding fifty-year history: one to Harvard, one to Columbia, one to Yale, two to Princeton, and one to Dartmouth. I was the one to Harvard....as a result, I think, of the fact that in total disregard of the school's least flexible and most draconian disciplinary policy – regarding students and alcohol -- no official punishment whatsoever befell me as a result of my tossed beer can.
I took the game and changed courts without a thought. Worse, it was years before it occurred to me that the match was even close, and that if Bill Bailey had thrown the beer can – and his family hadn’t reputedly owned half of West Texas – he likely would have been expelled.
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