The Ego as Wide Receiver

The Ego as Wide Receiver

In an intramural touch football game forty-five years ago I caught a pass for a touchdown. The ball was well away from my body and below my knees; I took it from the air with hands that until that moment had helped me mostly to run cross-country without losing my balance. I was slender and bookish, on the edge of being a nerd, and I drank in my teammates' applause like nourishment, like a tonic.

A play in an informal pick-up game, no matter how agile, carries zero currency, none, in the way of adult bragging rights. And yet this moment changed my relationship with my body and contributed to the formation of a more enterprising public self. However improbably and absurdly, it helped me feel less inadequate, feel as manly as classmates who were physically stronger, more confidently virile. In this way it reduced my need to make jokes at the expense of better athletes, my need to see varsity football players, say, as intellectually undernourished. It peeled a layer from the self-protective lens through which I viewed the world. Others remained.