I’ve been playing soccer recreationally for almost 30 years now and, while I was never good enough to compete at the professional level, I don’t see why that should stop me from telling my children that I did.
My mediocre skills aside, there remains one thing I regularly do on the soccer field with every bit as much flair and creativity as the very top professionals: get injured. The catalog of injuries I’ve sustained over the years is lengthy, some involving body parts I’d never even heard of until the doctor pointed them out on my X-ray, often while saying something like, “But with the proper rehabilitation regimen, you should eventually be able to pee on your own again.”
My other primary talent involves pinpointing precisely where to apportion blame for the injuries I sustain, whether on overly aggressive opponents, inattentive teammates, a small pit in the field, an underinflated ball, the sun in my eye, Middle East violence — pretty much anyone or anything but me.
My most recent injury was no different. As soon as I felt the pain radiating down my leg I knew, even before I hit the ground, exactly why I’d gotten injured: scare tactics.
Now by “scare tactics,” I mean the way authority figures frequently will exaggerate dangers in an effort to discourage young people from certain behaviors. The best-known example would probably be all the hysterical warnings teenagers hear about drugs.
The problem is that these scare tactics don’t work because, despite what recent testing suggests, kids aren’t stupid. I distinctly recall a high school assistant vice principal who visited my class to explain how drugs would ruin our lives. But it wasn’t lost on me that, compared to this guy with his bad comb-over, cheap cologne and ill-fitting leisure suit, the kids who were doing drugs appeared to be enjoying their lives a lot more — a hypothesis I confirmed by observing the pothead couple in the class busily making out in the back row.
My point is not to defend teenage drug use (so please send your irate e-mails to someone else), but merely to illustrate that similar scare tactics were at the root of my recent injury. That’s because when I was in school, the gym teachers always emphasized the importance of stretching properly before engaging in typical schoolyard athletic activities like running, jumping or stuffing a nerd into a locker. Otherwise, they said, we risked serious muscle strains — or worse.
Naturally, we kids ignored this warning, assuming that much like climbing rope and dodge ball, stretching was a pointless activity gym teachers dreamed up just to keep us busy while they cut out for a cigarette.
And for the most part, we were right. Truthfully, young muscles don’t need much warming up. The average teenager could sit for an hour straight and then jump up and sprint 100 yards, no problem. Even the ones who aren’t on Ritalin.
We older folks (by which I mean anyone who remembers how to use a rotary telephone), however, tend to lose elasticity in our muscles, making stretching before exercising imperative.
The lesson I’ve learned, thanks to this recent injury, is that at my age I can’t just run onto the field with no warm-up the way I did in my youth. So these days I do everything in my power to avoid injury. I always drink lots of water, arrive at the field at least 30 minutes before game time, stretch thoroughly for 15 minutes and jog around the entire field a few times until I’m sure my muscles are loose.
And then I get in my car and go home.
Some readers have suggested that this column is proof that Examiner columnist Malcolm Fleschner is on drugs — or should be.
