Written by Ben Harris
Out of all the events spanning the two-day sports festival at my school, the scrimmages between the teachers and the students were the most anticipated. People shuffled around listlessly when two classes faced off, but the atmosphere surrounding the teacher-student matches befitted a professional game.
I’d been invited to play in the volleyball game. My co-teacher asked me well in advance, a few times, and I agreed whenever the question came up. When the net was up and the other players were in their positions, a teacher grabbed my hand to lead me to my spot. I became chicken. I pulled away and backed off. It must have seemed sudden, and it was, but although I hadn’t anticipated my own reaction, I wasn’t surprised by it. They found a substitute, another teacher who wasn’t happy to play, but at least he did. I watched the game left out and a little ashamed.
Feeling that I needed to do penance for my cowardice the day before, I agreed when a different teacher asked me to play basketball. Because all Korean high school boys seem to love either soccer, basketball or both, the basketball game was going to be hot. Basketball was the filet mignon to volleyball’s cheese sticks, and nobody was about to miss it. I knew this was the case, and still said I would play; this is how reckless I am. Students rushed in to sit on the stage and in the balcony to watch the teachers warm up. I didn’t warm up. I barely even knew how to play. Just watching them from the sidelines made me sweat.
To celebrate Sports Day, students’ parents brought a buffet of fried chicken, rice cakes and pig’s feet for the teachers to eat in the back room of the gym, and I would have been much better off spending the day there. The truth is that I am as interested in sports as I am in car mechanics or doctor’s office waiting rooms, which is to say: not at all. When another ETA told me that her first impression of me was that I was a sporty guy, I had to laugh. As a child, I was awkward, sniffling and asthmatic. I had nosebleeds and did breathing treatments. My parents never had any hope for me as an athlete. “We knew it wasn’t for you early on,” my mother once told me. “I mean, my God, you couldn’t even throw a football.”
It wasn’t mean-spirited. It was fact. My mom always encouraged my interest in music, and didn’t even want me to play sports because I might get hurt. My dad is so loyal a Detroit Lions fan that he kept faith even when they broke records one season by losing every single game. Yet if he was disappointed that his oldest son was more interested in the piano than in being a quarterback, he never showed it. I finally picked up running after high school, at first as a sometimes-habit, because I felt like I needed to do something. All my friends swam, wrestled, played football or baseball, and all I did was go to school and go home. I asked myself if I wanted to go through life on a rolling chair. I wheezed all the way through my first run with my best friend, who I’d held back so much that he ran another several miles after finishing our route.
I hated it at first, but eventually grew to like it. I like the way I feel after a long run, and how during it I can think clearly. What I don’t care about is proper technique unless it’s something that keeps me from hurting myself, and I don’t care about speed. I’m trying to train for a half-marathon, and I don’t care about my finishing time. Finishing at all is the whole point.
Running does not make me an athlete. Everything I know about true athleticism suggests that it is graceful, competitive, and technically artistic. As a true unathlete, I am far away from all those things. Although sports are everywhere in the United States, they are still easy for me to forget. In a conversation, if someone asks me if I like a certain team or saw a certain game, all I have to do is say no and we change topics. There’s a sports section in every newspaper I read, although to me that article titled “Pistons Score Big Win Over Cavaliers” might as well be called “Better Seed Storage Methods for the Best Yield from Your Summer Garden.” Many people like sports and many people like gardens. In America nobody seems to care that I care about neither.
In Korea, my indifference to organized sports is often met with genuine bafflement. I used to think it was disappointment, but now I’m not so sure. I’ve been told more than a few times that I’m very small, too small, and that I should be lifting weights. People sometimes tell me this with great concern, as if my arms were so small that they were in danger of withering away. I can never resist stealing a look. Really? Are they that puny? Some people seem to think so. They ask me to flex so they can feel my muscles. There’s not much to feel, though. I rarely have to lift anything heavier than a cell phone.
The spring of my freshman year of college, my friends sometimes wasted time on the basketball courts behind our residence hall and every once in a while let me play, too, though they laughed at the way I dribbled. Later, an opportunity for a casual one-off tournament between two or three halls came up, and I must have gotten the wrong idea from their inclusiveness, because I asked the same best friend who took me on my first jog if he wanted me to play. Sheepishly, he told me he’d already dreamt up a team, and I wasn’t on it. I tease him about it now, and even back then I could only pretend to be offended. He knows and I know that I’d have been fooling myself if I didn’t admit he was right.
I hadn’t played basketball since then. I had agreed to play in this teacher-student matchup, remember, because I felt bad, and not because I had a real desire to practice my dribbling, which hadn’t improved in the intervening years. I told the teacher who invited me that he needed to be prepared, because I was really terrible. He told me it was okay. I am now convinced that he either thought I was being modest or that he somehow didn’t comprehend just how irredeemably awful at something someone can be.
What followed for me was what I can reasonably, without exaggeration, rank as one of the most pathetic 30-minute periods of my life. It was here that the completeness of my unathleticism exposed itself. I ran around frantically, understanding none of the moving parts. Perhaps the first moment my team they realized they had a serious problem was when a student got close enough to the net to take a clean shot and score while I stood ahead with my back to him, oblivious. After he scored, there was cheering, so I spun around just in time to see two students moving away from the net, while the PE teacher paused for a second to deal with me, pointing and speaking Korean I didn’t understand. Even though I couldn’t catch his words I understood the point, that it was my fault for leaving him alone back there and his incredulousness suggested that I had just made a pretty rookie mistake. It didn’t stop there. Halfway through the game the PE teacher had to show me that I need to have my arms spread if I’m guarding someone.
After hours of watching my students compete over those two days, I noticed many of them are unathletes, too. On the first serve of the first volleyball game of the day, the team lobbed the ball over the net, where it landed right in the middle of four people, none of whom bothered to move. All that made me wonder if I wasn’t imagining a lot of this pressure. Maybe it wasn’t a big deal after all.
I keep going back and forth about this. Recently, the poetry teacher asked me if I liked baseball and I told him no. When he asked me then which sports did I like, instead of making an excuse or dodging the question, I answered frankly for the first time and that I didn’t like sports. Immediately he said, ‘oh, then do you like to study?’ I said yes. He smiled and gave me a thumbs up.
I felt like I’d made a breakthrough. Were these the magic words that would save me from the strange looks? Would it have been this easy all along had I not danced around the obviousness of my unathleticism? When my friends mocked the way I dribbled, it didn’t hurt my feelings because I don’t wrap my self-worth in the way I handle a basketball. That idea hadn’t been challenged much in America, but in Korea it was like another endurance test. For a long time, I endured that test rather weakly. Then I realized that I had cared about it a lot more than anyone else, in the same way a kid walks into a cafeteria and thinks that all the eyes are on him when really everyone’s looking at their food.
For all the embarrassment that Sports Day basketball game caused me, there was one bright spot. The sheer repetition of running several days every week has improved my lung capacity and made my muscles stronger. Though there was never any hope for my jump shot, I was able to derive a source of pride from my increased endurance. The teacher who asked me to play, the one who wouldn’t believe I was so bad, was himself an impressive basketball player. Both of us ran up and down the court the entire game, and yet when it was finally over, he was visibly worn out. I was ready for more.
Ben Harris is a 2014-2015 ETA at Baeyoung High School in Jeongeup, Jeollabuk-do.