By Ron Bishop
No Corvette for me - my mid-life crisis has consisted thus far of tracking down old friends and acquaintances, primarily to make sure that they're still alive.
So it was in the fall of 2005, when after months of emails to old friends, countless visits to the message board at the website that publicizes goings on in my hometown in northern New Jersey, and some poorly organized web searches, I finally found Bobby Zipse.
Now a John Deere sales manager living in Canada with his wife and five kids, Bobby was, during the 1970s and early 1980s at least, the person in the world I most admired – mainly because he taught me how to play, or to improve my performance in, a laundry list of sports.
We started with football when I was 10 or 11 (and he was 12 or 13), worked our way through various track and field events (the evergreen hedge in our front yard never grew higher than four feet after I knocked off its crown using it for a practice hurdle), and ended up, right before I went away to college in 1979, with lacrosse. For the record, I still can throw a tight spiral 50 yards – exactly once without crumbling to the ground in pain.
If Bobby was outside on our tree-lined suburban street, playing something with his friends, he would almost always let my friends and I join in. On many occasions, what appeared to be his democratic nature would lead to everyone in the neighborhood joining for a massive, sprawling game of baseball, touch football, or lacrosse.
There was an implied pecking order – he and his friends were more skilled than we were, and they would often make that point abundantly clear, at times keeping the ball away from us with consummate skill and checking or tackling us with extra gusto. But if we hung in there, and tried to improve, they eventually would compliment us.
Professional sports never had a better ambassador – or a better salesperson. The interest in sports stoked by Bobby repeatedly led me to ask my parents to help me buy (or buy outright) what I needed to play. Mitts, soccer balls, lacrosse sticks, my first pair of Nikes – all were bought, partially at Bobby’s urging, but mostly because I needed them in order to learn how to play properly.
Still, Bobby had a tangible impact on the fiscal health of the area’s sporting goods stores, the biggest of which at the time was the now defunct Herman’s World of Sporting Goods.
In the winter, we would wait for passing cars to compress the snow, and then play hockey. Plastic blades, purchased at the aforementioned Herman’s, or the more local Masco Sports in nearby South Orange, New Jersey, would be attached with nails, or with screws, to shafts of broken hockey sticks.
Eventually, I tired of how much the blades would wiggle, and moved on to a “real” hockey stick, as befitted my imagined status as our league’s leading scorer. I favored the Sher-Wood 5500 for its stiffness and the curve of its blade, which allowed me to crank up a nasty wrist shot.
When the snow was particularly smooth, we would approximate skating in our sneakers – no boots; too much tread. We would slowly shuffle the net (mentioned in the introduction) from the garage up our short and bumpy driveway to a spot directly in front of my house. We first tried to use an official NHL puck; after discovering that it wouldn’t travel with requisite speed, we moved on to a convex (on both sides) Mylec street hockey puck, which skittered quickly along the pseudo-ice.
But it was the Mylec warm-weather street hockey ball (the orange one, not the cold-weather yellow ball) that produced the most speed – and the most erratic shots, more than one of which ended up going through nearby windows.
In the summer, we would play some form of baseball, doing our best to get around the “hump” in our street. A telephone pole in front of the Krayers’ house served as first base; the oil in the wood often left a sticky, dark residue on our hands.
The concrete slab that marked the intersection of our next-door neighbor’s walk and sidewalk was third base – you had to navigate the hump and go over the curb to get there. Second base was usually a mitt, a flat stone, piece of wood, an errant leaf, or a hubcap – whatever we could lay our hands on. But it had to be flat – we preferred not to move the base just because a car came by.
Our left field fence – until we got a little older – was a row of hedges bordering the DiLorenzo’s front yard, which was situated beyond Lincoln Place, the street perpendicular to ours. By the time I was 12, and had grown to 5-9 and 220 pounds, it had become my “short porch” – actually, it became everyone’s short porch.
We soon stationed a fielder behind the fence. The position required agility – the player would not want to risk getting caught standing in the yard by Mr. DiLorenzo. Outfielders started in the street in front of their house, and then dashed over at the crack of the bat.
I broke at least one window in their house, and struck the side of the house countless times, as I still like to tell people today.
At first, we used tennis balls – they made an almost breathy, but resonant thump when struck by a bat. On summer days and nights when we felt particularly adventurous, we’d use baseballs. By now, we were pitching overhand to each other. Our struggle with the new style sent many of the tennis balls and baseballs foul into Mrs. Savidis’ thriving pack o’ sandra – their version of Charlie Brown’s kite-eating tree.
At least 20 balls and pucks would vanish there every summer, never to be seen again – that is, until we got up the nerve to creep into the yard to gently – and sometimes not so gently – pick and paw through the pack o’sandra with our sticks and bats.
Until he went away to college, Bobby was our ringleader – our negotiator with angry neighbors whose hedges had just been compromised or their early evening post-dinner calm shattered by our raucous play, our agent, our lawyer, our teacher.
I can’t be sure if he truly loved having to hang around with younger kids, or if he ever became frustrated at having to repeatedly teach us the finer points of play. He never expected anything in return, and seemed to derive a great deal of satisfaction from seeing one of us properly execute a pitching motion, cradle a lacrosse ball, or punt with ample hang time.
And, even though we all dreamed – OK, I still dream – about playing a sport professionally, there was a sense of realism in the group that, barring a miracle more stupendous than the U.S. hockey team’s win over the Russians during the 1980 Winter Olympics, loving a sport was as far as we would go.
We learned how to play from each other – from Bobby, mostly. We’d try something new. We sucked. We probably could have benefited from taking part in an organized league, or trying out for a school team, but we improved nonetheless. We broke windows, crashed into each other, never kept score, hit cars, improved our physical condition, got faster, stronger, hit and threw further – all on our own.
In my case, I still love most of the sports we played – and my brother, whom I had to literally drag outside to play with us, now reports that he is a diehard New York Mets fan. Go figure. We had no goals, and our ambitions, such as they were, were in other areas. We argued, fought, checked illegally, and sometimes threw at each other’s heads. We had fun – and we didn’t have fun.
We had also formed a community of sorts – we didn’t know it, of course. It was largely temporary – there were lasting friendships that existed apart from the games. Taking part in our ad hoc community required little emotional investment.
Our exploits on Kensington Terrace are an extended example of what scholar Eric Eisenberg would call “jamming,” or “personally involving, minimally disclosive exchanges between individuals." We didn’t play baseball, pepper our goalie with ten-foot slap-shots and dodge the “hump” as part of a broader strategy to get to know each other.
Conversations that took place during our games were limited to school, baseball players and other athletes we liked, girls we didn’t have the nerve to talk to, and the creation of the games themselves – along with a liberal sprinkling of profanity. We didn’t share a lot about ourselves – our hopes, our dreams, our relationships with our parents – with one another.
And for all of the time we spent together, I knew only a little about Bobby Zipse. Likewise, he probably knew very little about me. I knew that he was the first adolescent person on our block to own a mini-bike (which he let me ride by myself without any cajoling), that he had three sisters (the oldest a nurse) and a brother, a pilot who flew for United Airlines, and that his mother put up the same lights, in the same configuration, around their front door every Christmas, but that was about it.
We were not close – but it didn’t matter when he was teaching me, or one of my friends, how to flick a wrist shot, or when he was slapping a tag on me during a rousing game of “running bases.” When we played on the street, my close friends were often there (including one who most of my friends and students refuse to believe is named Joe Kuhl), but we wanted to play, not reflect or share ideas about the state of our 1970s world.
Eisenberg argues that despite this lack of closeness, these experiences are significant, especially today, when we seem to be interacting less frequently with folks with whom we are not intimately connected, and more frequently, but with less depth, with the people to whom technology so readily connects us.
If the mass media are any guide, we think we are intimate with many people. We have become quite skilled – and quite ready – to reveal, to share. We reflect at the drop of a hat – to each other, to our therapists, to Dr. Phil and Oprah. This is all well and good, but Eisenberg reminds us that encounters with people we are not close to can also play a significant role in shaping the self.
Our tendency to shy away from contact with casual acquaintances is caused partially by our belief that these interactions are “phony, staged, and unfulfilling in comparison with `deeper’ relationships," Eisenberg contends.
As a result, we spend more time judging each other on the basis of “the desirability of their personalities or motives” than on the “results of their actions.” Think about our criteria for electing a President, or even a state senator: we prefer good-looking people who entertain us, and who don’t bore us with reams of information about major issues.
Much of this occurs, Eisenberg contends, thanks to what we will for the moment call the “privatization of meaning.” The individual experiences people, places, and events, and then constructs and nurtures meaning about them. You develop and “own” the meaning you hold, say, for your grandmother, or your first kiss. Another group of scholars, including the celebrated theorist and writer Mikhail Bakhtin, argues that we actually “rent” meaning, which gives it more of a community flavor.
You, or a friend, might choose to share stories about your grandmothers, and then make a connection through the similarities (and differences) in your experiences. The social aspects of communication are more important than what you intended when you send a letter or an IM to someone. Knowledge, claims scholar Kenneth Gergen, is not “something people possess in their heads, but rather, something people do together (author’s emphasis).” Thus, it is more illustrative to explore the meanings that emerge from interaction rather than those that reside solely in the head of an individual.
Even with the immense popularity of websites like Myspace.com, and in the face of the fear-mongering coming from our elected leaders, we still feel that we truly need to get to know someone before we can move down the road to a more intimate connection, or to the formation of a community. Ironically, we spend so much time talking about ourselves that we damage our ability to, in the words of John Lennon, come together. We get so caught up in self-revelation that we forget why we’ve come together in the first place, as the write Richard Sennett might argue.
Instead of exploring the origin of our feelings, Sennett contends, we spend too much time explaining our feelings to other people. Our capacity for public expression actually suffers as we continue on our “search for a selfhood." We have, Eisenberg argues, lost our “appreciation for the emotional rewards of public life." We are left isolated and unable to interact productively. As a result, we embrace group situations where “homogeneity of values” is a good thing – where dissenting ideas are squelched, and where differences in personality are submerged.
As described by the folks who contributed stories for this book, pick-up games provided us with the chance to balance “autonomy and interdependence,” as Eisenberg writes. Too much interdependence can stifle the creativity of a group’s members, while too much autonomy can lead to anarchy, or, at the very least, seemingly endless personality-driven battles, and to the group accomplishing little.
Led by Bobby, we experienced what has been called “a sense of mutual presence.” We didn’t always like the people we played with out on Kensington Terrace; our games saw their share of what sportscasters call “chin music” and mini-brawls. We fought, got over it, and continued to play. We were, to borrow Eisenberg’s word, “compatible.” That was enough. No exaggerated, fawning overinvolvement in each other’s business for us.
We agreed to comply with some arcane rules (a fly ball that dropped untouched on to the manhole cover at the intersection of Kensington Terrace and Lincoln Place was automatically a home run), even if we believed that the author of those rules was out to lunch.
We had no goals, other than to play without getting injured and to avoid damaging property. Values were not freely expressed, and did not evolve all that much. Little time was spent discussing fair play. And although I was convinced at age 14 that I might have a small amount of real talent for baseball, I did not have, to use a term popular with politicians, an agenda.
It was enough to just play. We came together around the games. My closest friends – Joe Kuhl and Chris Tanner – were rarely involved in these games. Only Bobby had extensive experience in organized sports. Yet when the games took place, we forgot our individual trajectories. As Eisenberg notes, “this perception of unity facilitates the smooth coordination of action."
While I harbored my Major League delusions, my younger brother was trying to figure out how to hit the most cars on the block with a single hit. But, largely thanks to Bobby, we played on.
