When I was in first grade my parents bought me a Road Runner windbreaker that I loved and wore as much as I possibly could. I thought it meant I could run faster than anyone. As a result, I ran a lot. I ran all the time. I could outrun any other kid on the playground. We had gym. It was fun.
In third grade I transferred to the local parochial school, St. Stephen's-St. Edward's, and my first gym teacher was great. Then she went and got pregnant and never came back.
In her place this demon spawn in polyester pants made my life a living hell: Stella Smith.
Stella was a repressed lesbian. I know that now, but didn't when I was a kid. She wore men's clothing for gym class and decided that military calisthenics were what we should be doing, not playing ball or having fun with tunnels and parachutes. For whatever reason, she took an immediate dislike to me. Maybe her gaydar was going off, I don't know. She perpetually criticized everything I did, punished me for imaginary infractions, and when SHE would pick teams, she'd leave me to last. Every year I hoped she would get replaced but she never did, and her hatred of me increased as time passed. This didn't surprise me because her best friend in school was another repressed lesbian nun who hated me even more. In our last three years she focused exclusively on having us do military marching. We'd line-up in rows and march in place, march in formation, march to Sousa music. It was about as bizarre and twisted as I could imagine. By eighth grade she had beaten any enthusiasm for physical activity right out of me. When the time came to do our, "Drill," for parents. She had the cruelty to announce that everyone whose name she said would be in the drill and to go stand over by the wall. Well, she named everyone except me and then went on to congratulate everyone. I spent the rest of the class on the sidelines watching everyone and THEN had the balls to try to suspend me after class for not participating when she herself barred me from doing so. My mother was shocked but, as usual, did nothing about it; more upset she had to leave work to go to school and meet with her and be inconvenienced then about how I was treated. Always it was a litany of, "Well you must have done SOMETHING to deserve what happened!"
When my sister started the same school and received the same treatment from that gorgon fucker (among others), FINALLY my parents woke-up to the fact that maybe I was actually telling the truth about the kind of horrors that went on there and they pulled my sister out after only one year.
Stella Smith was a fist class cunt. She is one of the few people I hate beyond any measure and if I ever find that evil thing's grave I will spit on it and damn her to an eternity of pain.
When I went to boarding school I was so averse to PE of any sort, so convinced I was unathletic, pathetic, and so terrified of similar abuse that my first term there I chose to do inedpendent PE which basically consisted of doing nothing other than hanging out and occasionally playing ball with other kids who took the same elective. That wasn't a total loss however because it was during that time when I nearly had the dorm to myself, that I and one of my other classmates discovered the joys of the male body with each other :naughty:.
I never really got over it and to this day I shrink at team sports or anything that involves physical competition. I've had some fun times playing basketball, and had one great squash match with my best friend who empowered me to play as best as I could through encouragement, but on the whole, it's tough. Otherwise I always was the team manager or played thirds. I still hated it.
One other aspect that bothered me was the whole gang showers thing. In my first two dorms we had individual stalls, but in my last two years the only showers were the gang showers. They terrified me and I had avoided the gym because of them and had always showered in the dorms even though it wasn't allowed. Now I had no choice. I had to use gang showers no matter where I went. I bit my lip and just did it, praying nobody would say anything about how poorly I was hung. For nearly two years nobody did until just before graduation when our class had these joke awards which were a tradition and I received, "The Smallest Dick in School" award. As they explained, only one kid in school was smaller than I was but that was only because he was a freshman who hadn't started puberty and so it wouldn't be fair to include him. I pretended it didn't bother me even though it did. I made some jokes and let it go at that.
So between the sports themselves, the douchebag jocks (which I didn't encounter until I went to a college that was just like the high schools I went to boarding school to get away from), and the ghastly gang showers, which I now handle without any problem (go me!), my idea of sports is something close to a concentration camp of insecurities.
