I decided to preach when I was 17, but I didn’t become a mental 50 year old just because I decided I would be a preacher. I was still a teenager, and I was pretty much interested in all the things that teenagers are interested in. One of those was sports. Actually I’ve never outgrown my love for sports, but as a teenager I actually entertained the dream of being an athlete.
Many males seem to think they have to prove themselves on an athletic field to prove they have a reason to exist in the world. I was one of those. Unfortunately I wasn’t gifted with an athletic body. As I look back on it, I think it wouldn’t have been a good thing had I succeeded in sport. Many years later I got acquainted with retired professional football player. He was a likable guy, but the only discipline he ever displayed in his life was in what happened on the football field, and he didn’t know what to do with himself when his career was over. He made a mess of domestic relationships, and tragically he died while he was in his forties. Had I been a star athlete, his story might have been mine.
But you couldn’t have convinced me of that when I was a teenager. I sat on the bench for most of my football career. I got cut when I went out for basketball. I was too scared of a fast ball to make a serious effort to play baseball, but then there was track. I wasn’t fast, but I didn’t think you had to be if you ran the mile. So that’s what I went after. I wanted to succeed so badly that I pushed my body to the limits of endurance. I did everything the coaches told me to do. Somehow they had the idea that I could improve my endurance if I would drink milkshakes with a raw egg mixed up in them. I did that. I don’t know that it helped. I also was told that on meet days, my diet was to consist of soup and hot tea. I did that too, and I don’t think it helped. Somehow I got the idea on my own that eating bananas would help, so I always ate a banana on track meet days. I liked the banana and it didn’t hurt my performance.
Nobody expected me to do anything, but I won the district championship two out of the three years I participated in track. My real claim to fame came in a meet in which I finished in third place. It was the regional meet, and it was held at Brownwood. I had qualified for regional by coming in second in the district meet. A boy named Charles Barnard from Cross Plains, beat me in district that year. The regional meet was run in heats against time.
Like my 4-H enemies from Fisher County, Charles became my personal enemy. He was the original trash talker, and worked his mouth pretty hard to convince me that I couldn’t beat him. But there were a couple of other guys who provided even stronger competition. In my heat, I led the race until the last step. A boy named Caton, from Wylie passed me at the finish line. His time was good enough for second, and I won third. Caton got to go to the state meet in Austin, and I didn’t even though me beat me by only a tenth of a second. I was a little bit gratified when I realized Barnard had finished fourth.
The next day the picture of Caton and me crossing the finish line appeared in the Abilene paper. All of a sudden I became an instant celebrity at school. I had a degree of respect that I had never experienced before. Coming in third won me a lot more notoriety than winning would have. I won the district meet the next year, but I didn’t do as well in regionals. It was a little funny that year. On the first day of track practice, at least a half a dozen boys announced that they intended to try out for the mile. I guess they thought that it would be easy if I could do it. They didn’t know I had been training since the end of football season. Within a week they had all given up their quest. Maybe they found out that it wasn’t quite as easy as they had thought.
And then there was Charles Barnard. In the summer following my graduation from high school I attended a Sunday afternoon singing at a rural church. Guess who the song leaders were? One was Charles Barnard. The other one was me. I had to stop thinking of him as an enemy. Somehow the thought had never cross my mind that we might be spiritual brothers. Later we attended Abilene Christian together, but he never became a close friend.
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