Male Bonding

By Tom Matlack

There's a gash under my left eye. My right thumb throbs like a

son-of-a-bitch. I keep seeing stars. My whole body hurts. I have a red

beard—if you can call it that—after a week of uneven growth. On the

plane ride home from Florida to Boston, people look at me like I’m

some kind of pirate and wonder where the patch is for my battered

eye. After all, at 45, I’m too old for this.

I’m thinking back to my college days as a Division III rower. I was

a determined, if not great, athlete. Will, our coach, used punishing

winter training regimens to build boats capable of beating superior

crews on sheer grit and determination. We cut lengths of old pipe,

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painted them black, and sank one end in industrial-sized tomato soup

cans which we had salvaged from the dining hall and filled with

cement. Once it had set properly, we turned it over and sank the other

end into another soup can filled with cement to create a device we

affectionately titled a “bear bar.” On cold winter days, 30 guys would

pile into a dormitory lounge, move the couches out of the way, get out

the bars, and crank up the Rolling Stones full blast.

Will, in cowboy boots, sporting a thick beard and chewing

tobacco, presided over the afternoon ritual with a sickening delight. He

established two simple rules: “The bar never touches the ground” and

“It ain’t over till I say so.” We did a rotation of exercises, fifty seconds

on and then ten seconds off—just enough time to prepare for the next

set. A deep squat to a military press was followed by a triceps curl with

the bar behind the head, a lat pull to the eyeballs, and a jumping lunge

with the bar overhead, getting up high enough in the air to switch legs

forward and backward simultaneously, ideally without crashing over

sideways.

Fifteen minutes in, steam would start to rise off our bodies. A half

an hour and some guys would begin to falter. Will encouraged us to get

in pairs, staring into each other’s eyes for strength. During particularly

grueling workouts, he’d get a bar himself and start doing lunges in his

blue jeans, his piercing blue eyes jumping out of his head as if he were

possessed. When he’d finally call practice, bodies would drop to the

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ground like they’d been shot.

On Saturdays we’d escape the bear bar and head for the

cemetery on the edge of campus. The road through the old

gravestones wound about, flattening out in a false peak, only to reveal

its steepest section just before we reached the top. Will would sit at

the top of the hill, perched on the back of his pickup truck with a

clipboard in his hand, spitting tobacco juice and keeping score.

One Saturday, I had a memorable exchange with a younger

teammate. Snow from a recent storm was piled high on either side of

the road. The day was crisp and clear and the sun shone brightly. The

bitter cold had turned patches of damp pavement into glare ice,

making the final uphill stretch particularly treacherous as lactic acid

and oxygen debt locked our muscles in place, requiring keen mental

focus to command our legs and arms to keep pumping.

I knew that Jon had been out late the night before, but I still

expected him to excel at the hills since he was the best runner on the

team, often beating me at the long runs, which were my specialty. We

battled out the first couple of hills, snorting on the way up and

swearing at the searing pain upon reaching the top, only to blow off

steam and mentally reset for the next one. Then I noticed that he

would stay with me for one hill and even as I sprinted up the next

repetition, he would lag way behind. He was working hard on every

other piece; taking a break while the rest of us pushed through the

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lactic acid build-up. As the captain of the team, I was trying to

reinforce the coach’s demand for consistency of effort and it started to

gall me that Jon appeared to be dogging it; I was busting my ass on

each repetition and he should have been too. On the next hill I finished

first. As I came down, I saw him bringing up the rear of our group.

“What the hell are you doing?” I barked in his face, pushing him

into a snowbank as he tried to complete the hill. He came up swinging,

landing a couple of crisp shots to my jaw before our friends separated

us.

Up on the top of the hill, Will smiled from the back of his pickup

truck. He later told me about the Olympic gold medal crew that had

reached the dock after their victory, and had broken out in a brawl.

The process of developing underlying trust as a team involved spilling

your guts along the way, even showing raw emotion. He had made

clear from the very beginning that the whole process upon which we

had embarked was certainly about rowing, but was really about a lot

more.

Will liked to say that he was really an educator and an artist who

happened to choose boats, oars, and men as his medium. The measure

of his success was how well our crew rowed; but he firmly believed

that excellence on the water had less to do with technique and

strength and more to do with the development of the soul. We worked

hard, not so much to condition our bodies—though that was a

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necessary part of it—but to condition our minds. The payoff was that

this development of the mind could be applied to any situation in life

later on, whether on or off the water. To Will’s way of thinking, the

fight on the hill was a sign of progress—a sign of growing faith in one

another.

More than two decades later, there was something in the baboon

part of my brain, and in the very fibers of my muscles, that

remembered Cemetery Hill. There was no conscious thought, no plan,

no discussion. It just happened. Now, at 45, there's only one person

who could suck me into an all-out war.

Wedged into my seat on my way back to Boston, I try to figure

out how I ended up with a welt on my face and a nearly broken thumb.

Then it comes back to me. I had jammed my thumb badly diving for a

loose ball. Then I had gone up hard for a rebound and had gotten an

elbow in the face, opening a gash on my cheek. I must have screamed

instinctively, though I have no memory of doing so, because two guys

playing tennis nearby ran over to see what had happened. The vision

in my left eye remained blurry even after I got back up. Seamus had

offered to call the game off. I was determined to continue. But the

stakes of this match had just increased significantly.

Seamus and I had played one-on-one basketball all over the

country for years. In Laguna Beach a whale had breached just a few

feet off the shore during one of our first battles. We’d played in Boston,

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Maine, New Jersey, and New York. I think we had even played

somewhere near Yellowstone just after seeing our first moose. But the

games in Florida had taken on a whole new color and texture; this

wasn’t just for fun anymore. This was somehow more important, more

primitive, with far higher stakes.

Halfway through the first game in Key Biscayne, I felt sure that I

was going to have a heart attack. But as I peeled off my sweat-soaked

shirt, I realized that I would have to pace myself. My strategy was to

pick my spots—look for a momentary lull in the defense, and go

kamikaze through that opening before returning to my slumped-over,

hands-on-knees defensive posture. The court was slick after a tropical

shower, making the ball heavy and footing tricky.

Over time we had agreed to complex rules of engagement: two-

out-of-three games to 15 by one point and the loser's out; use of

profanity is a one-point deduction (which unfortunately had cost me

more points than I care to think about); shots made from behind the

arc are worth three if you are down by six, otherwise they are worth

two; I get one time-out per game (which I spend generally lying on my

back with a shirt over my eyes). I still have four inches and 50 pounds

on my opponent, so my strategy is to always go inside as hard as I can.

I am way too right-handed so over time, I have developed a behind-

the-back move to my left. I still can't shoot lefty but if I get a good

enough position going left, I can get the ball to the rack. I've been

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working on a pull-up jumper and reverse layup to the left as well. I

have him worried enough about it that once in a while I can glance left

and burst right for an easy bucket.

At my age, I didn't have the legs to win a three-game match; I

had to win in two or it was lights out for the old man; so I’d always

work hard to win the first game and then settle in for a slugfest in

game two. Those second game scores had typically been 21–19, 18–

16, 24–22. If the score was tied late, I’d launch balls from behind the

arc. More often than not, pure desperation provided the motivation to

deliver the dagger shot.

The end came after I had won the first game 15–13 on a couple

of hard drives right. I was actually ahead in the second game, moving

to the hoop with relative ease. Seamus pushed me in the back once,

and then a second time, as I tried to make my layups.

"Don't do that again," I warned my 13-year-old son, a torrent of

sweat running down the small of my back; his poor sportsmanship a

new development like the unfamiliar deep sound of his voice in our

back hall when he yelled to announce his arrival home from school.

The next time I got the ball, I set up sideways with my left

shoulder forward, dribbling the ball low to the ground in a posture

faintly reminiscent of Magic, a player I am not even sure Seamus would

recognize, at his peak. I glanced left and went right, finding a clear

path ahead.

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 Another push in the back.

I waited until Seamus had the ball. He has a better shot than I,

with ten times the energy—but he still seemed afraid of his old man.

He still doesn't quite know what it means to play hard. Really hard.

When it counts.

I let him go past. As he approached the basket and jumped for

his layup, I pushed him. Hard. Maybe a little too hard. He landed on his

back and I heard the crunch of shorts and sneakers hitting the ground

and then the riiiip of flesh scraping against the pavement.

He bounced up with rage in his eyes. Indignant. If I were anyone

else he would have punched me in the nose. But he didn't. He looked

down and muttered to himself, then called the foul and took the ball.

From there it was like skiing downhill—over quickly. I was unable

to score another basket in game two, despite all those bear bars and

years of running up and down courts. My son had realized that he was

just better than his dad.

Game three was closer. I got a little run going with two short-

range jumpers. But then, instead of hanging back on defense and

letting me dictate my offense to him, he realized that he had the ability

to cover me close on the outside, shadowing my every move, in a way

that prevented me from getting a decent shot off. My guile had lost its

power. He had found a different gear. I couldn't keep up.

At 14-6, he grabbed a rebound, sprinted to take the ball back,

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and pulled up to shoot. I didn’t have the legs to get out and contest his

shot. The net snapped with authority. My run was over. I sat by the

edge of the court with my shirt over my eyes, sucking down the last

drips of my water bottle.

On the walk home we didn't talk. Finally, he noted that I should

expect to get older and fatter every day for the rest of my life while he

expected to get taller and stronger.

I heard him tell people that he had not only beat his dad but had

beat him up. It made me smile, even though it made my face hurt, to

hear my boy swagger. It reminded me of winning rowing race after

rowing race—events so insignificant to the rest of the world that they

wouldn’t even make the local paper—and how my friend Jon, the one

with whom I had done battle on Cemetery Hill, had become my most

loyal supporter. Jon knew what winning had cost us both. And now so

too did Seamus. That night, I fell asleep with renewed love for my

coach, my friend, and my son.