Finishing My Speech

It was a full day. The regional championships were draining of body and mind. After finishing fifth and realizing that our season was over, there was only one thing left to do before we clambered into vans and sat, cramped and sore, for the several hours required to make it home. We took our cleats off, letting swollen and blistered toes swim in the cool grass, and sat in a circle preparing to digest the season and look forward to the next one. I told my teammates that I wanted to speak last, because I had been spinning and playing with my speech for a week and I knew it would take me a while to say what I intended to. We went around the circle, speaking on that weekend and all of the other weekends and nights we had sacrificed together. We talked about winning and losing, joys and disappointments, pride and desire. We talked about practice, we talked about games. Then it came to me. It was a speech I had been considering for a while now, and the time was upon me faster than I had wanted.

During the drive from Corvallis to Walla Walla I contemplated what I would say. I knew that this season decompression was coming and I wanted to be prepared, but I wasn’t ready. Regardless I had to try. So I spoke of my friend Topher, a teammate who had died a year before. Toph was a left-handed ruckus on the field, and an incredibly kind and friendly person in life. I never partied, but Topher was the soul of any party he walked into. And even though we differed in many ways, he was always accepting and nice. He was quick to smile and quicker to make you smile. No matter what, he just wanted to laugh and make the people around him happy. He was a warm soul, that radiated to all those around him. I told my team my story of Topher: how I heard of an enigmatic dynamo abroad in France, whose return would bolster our team with deft throws and shocking athleticism. I was shocked when I saw the short and stout figure of this legend. I was shocked when I saw him play and he exceeded expectations. When he died, I realized that to me how good of a player he was, wasn’t important. It was his character that I cared about. He was smart, kind, funny, and wonderful in so many ways. Mostly he was unique, and he was my friend. And that is why I play ultimate. When scores and calls and rules and plays fade away, the reason that I play ultimate is the people that I meet. I play for the opportunity to find and grow with new friends.

I told this to my teammates. My teammates who I had been with for hundreds of hours, in rain and mud and wind and heat, late nights of homework after practice, painfully early Sunday mornings, and everything else we shared. For me what was important was each other and the bonds that we made. That was what I told them on those grassy fields. That was the story I spoke, but it was incomplete. It was only half of the story that I wanted to tell. I had put forward what was important to me, but the why, that I had kept to myself. I didn’t told them why. Maybe I had failed do this because I tend to bumble and ramble though speeches. Because I need time and paper and ink to find my words. That might be why I held back; because I wasn’t prepared enough, I hadn’t picked through the alphabet soup of my brain for long enough to make the right words. The hours in the van silently tumbling the speech through my head hadn’t been long enough. Or maybe I wasn’t ready to tell anyone yet. Maybe I needed to stew emotionally. Regardless, I only gave them half of the story.

The second half of that story begins in fall of that year. The Freshmen were fresh, practice numbers were huge, our bodies hummed with anticipation for a new season, and my Mom had cancer.

It sucks finding lung cancer in the leg, it sucks finding lung cancer at all, it sucks that my Mom wasn’t even a smoker, and it sucks that terminal became necessary vocabulary for our reality. The hope five years was better than nothing, but no amount of time could be enough. The cold and uncaring fact of cancer hit me, but it didn’t pierce me immediately. I remember sadness, but I also remember wondering why I wasn’t devastated. It’s because the news wasn’t real yet. It was just a sadness, not yet something I had to tell and trust to someone else yet. As long as I didn’t tell anyone it wasn’t real enough to truly hurt me. But that couldn’t last long. Eventually I told my girlfriend and I cried. I trembled and sobbed as the pain became immediate and impossible to avoid. It was a good thing though, because when I verbalized the truth I let myself feel, and while I felt fear and doubt, I also felt warmth and happiness in my girlfriend’s arms. She held me as I cried and I knew that pain and sorrow could be conquered. She was the release for me. Even though my closest friends had told me that I could talk to them about anything, I didn’t. I couldn’t talk to anyone else about cancer because it was too hard. Even though I knew that other people were there for me, being vulnerable and sad is difficult; except with her it was easy. It was easy to trust, it was easy to be vulnerable, it was easy to cry with her. And that’s what I did. For months, I took the easy choice and cried with her. It was so good to have someone to unburden my sorrow with.

But there is no cosmic sense of fair. Things just happen, and they don’t wait for the right timing or your readiness. When we started to break up, I wanted to think it wasn’t fair. Retrospectively I know it wasn’t fair of me to put that pressure on her. Even though at the time I was arguing with myself about what was fair, my arguments never stopped the world from spinning, and in Spring I was alone, with no one to give my trust and pain. I had my friends still, and they meant to help; but I couldn’t bring myself to be my weakest in front of them. I was in a hell, crying every night by myself and struggling to keep composed through even an hour long class. I needed a way out of this hell, and in the saddest months of my life, practice was a holy respite.

Almost none of my teammates knew about my problems. They weren’t my Virgil, and I didn’t need them to be. I had to lead myself out of the hell I was in, but while I was struggling to cope with my emotions I needed relief. Practice was two hours of heaven three nights a week. It was a place where I could go and release all of my negative feelings into exercise. It was a place where my friends laughed and smiled. It was a place that reminded me of all the good things that I love about life. It was a place where cancer and break ups didn’t exist. My teammates never knew it, but they gave me respite from the evils of life. My teammates pulled me up from hell every practice, showing me what in life is worth loving: friendship, laughter, comradery, kindness, respect, joy, caring. It wasn’t a perfect place, there was still frustration, anger, sadness, and everything else that can hurt us; but it was a human place. A place that I needed to have, and what was most important was that this was a place I could depend on. I was a part of the team, and the team existed for every individual that made it. I didn’t need to ask them to be there for me, or explain how I needed them; when I was low my team raised me up without even trying.

With counseling, my Mother’s inspiring strength, and the heaven that my teammates gave me, I was able to work through a most painful part of life. That spring I learned why I played ultimate. I played for the people that I met, and the bonds that I formed. That was what I told my teammates at the regional championships. Telling them about Topher and how he was important to my life was easy, and that the reason that I played were people like him and my teammates; telling them all of that was easy. Telling them, that each and every one of them had saved me from a hell, telling the why of it all, the fact that I had so recently been (and still partly was) in such a dark place, that was too difficult. I owe them an apology for taking so long to explain my appreciation. I shouldn’t have kept the second half of this story to myself. But I need time and paper and ink to speak. So here it is. This is an apology and my appreciation. My teammates were and will always be saviors for me.