The Competition 1 comments

By Lindsey Crittenden

Growing up, I loathed team sports—dreaded them, despised them, avoided them at all costs. Turning bars I could do; hopscotch I managed; elaborate make-believe involving creatures living under the redwoods in the corner of the lower school playground I excelled at.

But the games—Steal the Bacon, Red Rover, Nation Ball—filled me with existential dread. I hid in the library and feigned stomach aches. I hated the balance beam (fear of heights); threw like a girl (the logic on this one escaped me); was afraid of the ball. I scored a point once in soccer—for the opposite team. During flag football, a neighborhood dog peed on my jacket, which I’d left on the grass just outline the spray-painted white line. My freshman year in college, I had to ask what a down was. I once made a reference to the “seventy-yard line.”

I never, ever thought of myself as competitive.

And then I started swimming.

The day I first made it twenty laps without stopping, I soared with endorphins and confidence. I’d found my sport—solitary, meditative, and (surprise, surprise) competitive.

At the YMCA, pool protocol operated on the circle lane system, in which up to four people shared two lanes, in circle formation (up on the right, back on the left). Lanes were segregated by speed, and I chose Medium. Reasonable, balanced, middle-of-the-road.

But oh, how annoyed I got when some slowpoke ahead of me did not stop at the end to let me pass! How I rolled my eyes at the speed demon tapping the sole of my foot if I dared use the kickboard! I passed slower swimmers, who paused at the wall, with a curt “thanks” and a triumphant little Gotcha! kick.

I envied one swimmer’s form, criticized another’s floppy arm. That woman in the next lane with the green cap? She was in the pool before me, so I had to wait until she got out before I finished. The guy two lanes over took a stretching break every ten lengths, so I could too. When my friend Michael and I met at the pool, I swam a little more quickly and pushed myself an extra ten laps.

As my swimming habit developed, so did my life as a writer. I applied to grad school; I moved back to California; I submitted stories to magazines and contests; I keep swimming. I got published and kept track of colleagues’ appearances in Poets and Writers, tallying my own accomplishments and rejections next to theirs. I discovered, to my surprise (and vaguely disturbing pleasure) that I could be almost cut-throat.

Had my experiences in the pool facilitated my ambitions at the keyboard? Had I tapped into some latent streak, frustrated in those long-ago elementary school humiliations? At a conference dinner for a literary award, I told the winner in poetry (I’d won in fiction) that I was hungry for recognition, for publication. He nodded; “that’s good.”

Of course, keeping track could swing the other way, too: At residencies, I chose to sit with the visual artists and the poets to avoid the fiction table one-upmanship about agents and pages written.

In light of my writerly ambitiousness, I re-examined my childhood love of board games. Next to Nation Ball, a board game is tame—perhaps. But oh the glee of sending one’s brother back to Home; the thrill at plunking a hotel down on Park Place and collecting rent from Dad. I recalled dinner-table debates, quick-witted word games my aunt taught me over the turkey and to which my uncle never, ever caught on. Competition could happen while sitting down, and often did.

A few weeks ago, I gave my boyfriend a Parcheesi game for his birthday; he’d mentioned how much he enjoyed playing the game as a boy, with his grandmother. His sister gave him Scrabble—which prompted my nephew to ask, “Is this what happens when you get older? You get the gifts you wanted as a child?”

C laughed and said, “As a child, I didn’t want board games.” He would have wanted a Louisville slugger or a ticket to a Giants game.

Yes, I am in love with a team sports player. After growing up with a father who spent his weekends not in front of a game but out in the garden, mulching his roses, I have fallen in love with someone who played football and baseball and ran Track in high school. C quotes RBIs and every detail you can imagine about Willie Mays.

One recent Saturday as we walked through the UC Berkeley campus, C stopped in his tracks at a loud, sharp cracking sound. He grinned. “Baseball!”

What could I do?

I took his hand, walked with him to the field, where the Golden Bears were hosting Arizona State. Top of the seventh. We sat in the sun cheering our alma mater and watched the rest of the game.