King of the Mild Frontier: An Ill-Advised Autobiography Read online

  The closer I got to my teenage years, the more I realized that the path to perty girls passed through the locker room. Any way you cut it, jocks got the girls. Cascade sits in the Rocky Mountain range about eighty miles north of Boise on the winding two-lane that connects southern and northern Idaho. I don’t remember a time, then or now, when there were more than a thousand residents. The entire high-school student body numbered barely over a hundred; I graduated with fourteen other students (ten boys and five girls, which may have helped contribute to my social retardation). There was no problem becoming a jock: Everyone was a jock; otherwise there weren’t enough players to fill a roster. If you didn’t show up for football practice on the first day of your freshman year, they simply came and got you. So if you dreamed of something soft and perfumey in your future, you didn’t have the same problem outfitting yourself in athletic gear as you might have had in a school of hundreds. Unfortunately, relativity being what it is, it wasn’t good enough to get yourself into the uniform, you had to play, and it was advantageous if you didn’t embarrass yourself doing it. And therein lay the problem.

  At the beginning of my freshman year in high school I weighed 123 pounds, with all the muscle definition of a chalk outline. I couldn’t complete a push-up. I could run a hundred yards in approximately the amount of time it took me to get a haircut. And I was terrified. My brother, John, was a junior that year, at right around six feet and 230. He started at center on offense and middle linebacker on defense, and he had waited seventeen years to get me into an arena where he and his friends could pummel me without my bawling to my parents. And pummel me they did. I couldn’t have bawled to my parents anyway; to bawl you must breathe.

  By the middle of the season I was certain I would be granted no audience with any present or future cheerleader or Pep Club member due to football prowess and began looking forward to opportunities in upcoming athletic seasons: basketball or track.

  My skills in basketball made me look like Joe Montana in football but the track season brought what turned out to be a defining athletic moment in my tenure as a Cascade Rambler.

  I need to back up to say again that I went to high school from 1960 through 1964, a time when there were exactly zero competitive sports for girls. Because I knew some girls who I thought were pretty good athletes, I asked our high-school principal about that. He placed a hand on my shoulder and said, “Chris, you know girls aren’t emotionally equipped for competitive athletics.” This a day after Jesse Dopler had torn a full set of lockers off the wall because we lost a football game we were supposed to win, Jesse who was emotionally equipped.

  The girls in our league were offered two interscholastic Play Days per year: one a track meet of sorts in the fall, and the other a round-robin spring softball game. They were allowed no more than three organized practices for each, in order that no school get an advantage over another.

  Three track meets into the 1961 season, I have established myself as the only runner in the league who can actually make a track meet longer. Each team is allowed two entries per event with the exception of the mile run, the event in which all “athletes” who don’t qualify for any other event are dumped. I have not received an official time in any of my first three mile runs because by the time I finish the timers have packed up their stop watches and headed for their cars.

  The day my athletic image changes forever, we have just received our new purple-and-gold sweats (gold top, purple pants) and after finishing a set of quarter-mile “sprints” that leave me convulsing on my hands and knees, welcoming an imagined crippling car accident in which I lose my legs and therefore am not required to endure this madness anymore, I pull myself together to stumble for the showers. As I walk over the rise next to the high-school gymnasium, I see the girls in one of their three practices leading to their softball Play Day. At bat is Ellen Breidenbach, a solid, strong girl who appears as if she can hit the ball to Boise. On second base is Paula Whitson, the girl to whom I’ve been silently pledging my love since first grade. In a school with a population of just over a hundred, it’s probably an overstatement to say she doesn’t know I exist, but it’s no overstatement at all to say, from a romantic standpoint, she doesn’t care. As I move closer to the action, I hear Ellen telling the girls she wants to bat but doesn’t want to run the bases, and suddenly I understand the meaning of the word “purpose” in the Christian sense. God has placed me exactly here, exactly now, for a purpose. He wants me to get to second base with Paula Whitson.

  The girls are getting irritated with Ellen because they want to get on with the game, so I step up and volunteer to run for her. All agree my speed creates no advantage for Ellen but demand that I touch home plate before running to first to keep me from jumping the gun.

  I agree, and crouch as close as I dare behind Ellen, a lefty, so I can tag the plate a split second after she hits the ball and be on my way.

  The pitcher tosses the ball; Ellen swings for the imaginary fence as I step forward with stars in my eyes to tag the plate. She misses the ball by at least six inches…fouls me off.

  One of my many missing teeth is stuck in the bat.

  There are those few seconds following a near-death experience when your body hasn’t decided whether or not to send the message of truth to your brain, so it doesn’t hurt yet. As I lie on the ground, my brand-new gold sweatshirt now crimson and gold, fairly certain my face has been knocked off my head, I think, This isn’t so bad. She has to come see how I am. My imagination pictures a fallen warrior. In the absence of heroics, abject pity will do. I still don’t know the extent of the damages, but each girl who leans over to see winces in empathy. In the background Ellen wails, searching desperately for Kleenex. In retrospect, applying Kleenex to what she has done would be like gargling saltwater for a brain tumor.

  I gaze into the circle of faces hovering over me; no Paula Whitson. She must have gone for help. Suddenly the girls’ heads part for Gary Hirai and Julio Bilbao, two upperclassmen, real track guys, who gently lift me to my feet and help me the two blocks to Valley County Hospital. As I glance back, the baseball field is swimming, but I have no problem making out Paula Whitson, slapping her leg with her mitt, waiting for the game to start.

  In the days that follow, the story spreads to every corner of elementary, junior high, and high school. Little girls are playing Ellen Breidenbach like I used to play Roy Rogers, empowering themselves by knocking an imaginary Chris Crutcher (whoever he is) for a loop. The principal, bless his heart, places the bat, my front tooth still stuck in it like a sharp rock, in the trophy case above the caption DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME, next to a picture of what I used to look like. He is forced to call a moratorium on high-school boys calling out “Strike one!” upon seeing Ellen in the halls, then miming a devastating blow to the mouth and falling to the floor, reducing Ellen to tears each and every time. My dreams of Paula Whitson promising herself to me in exchange for the letter sweater I may never earn are reduced to rubble, so I turn to comedy: removing my brand-new plastic clackers in speech class to deliver an informative speech on “Poithonous Thnakes of the American Thouth” and concocting a ventriloquist’s act wherein I place those clackers between slices of a bun and hold a hilarious conversation between Gabby Hayes (Roy Rogers’s toothless sidekick) and the world’s first talking hamburger. Very high comedy, but not exactly the way to get next to something soft and willing.

  In a place like Cascade you simply can’t give up on the jock thing, even after you’ve been reduced to getting ninety percent of your attention with a traveling dental show. The bigger, older guys will finally graduate and you will get your chance. So flash forward to the winter of my junior year. I have grown to nearly six feet. My body no longer resembles a stepped-on marshmallow, but rather a strung-out piece of taffy, though there is the shadow of a bump on each arm that may one day grow into biceps; my number of push-ups is nearing double digits. I have put on enough weight to have lettered in football, though certainly not at one of the skill
positions, and am allowing my imagination to portray me as a deadeye jump shooter once basketball starts.

  Reality, however, says something different. We have thirteen players and twelve uniforms, so I wear JV shorts and a gold T-shirt with the sleeves cut off and the double-0 carefully applied with Magic Marker. If there is a twenty-point differential with less than two minutes remaining in the game, Coach puts me in. Because we have a good team and are never twenty points behind, I always enter a game to wild applause from the home crowd because they know if Coach puts me in, the game is locked. We are exactly halfway through the season—have played each league team once—and I have yet to get a statistic. I do not have a point or a rebound. I do not have an assist. I do not even have a foul. I’m not fast enough to foul.

  I’m moving through the halls one day when my friend Ron Boyd, football quarterback, high-scoring basketball point guard, turns to me. “Crutcher, we gotta get you some press; it’s getting embarrassing to hang around with you.”

  “Hey, man, at least you get to go home at the end of the day. I have to hang around with me all the time.”

  “Yeah, well, we’re going to end all that. We’re at McCall this weekend and they suck. We’ll be thirty points ahead of them when you go in. First out-of-bounds play we get, you haul it down the floor; I’ll fire the ball. They’ll never expect a fast break with us that far ahead. You’ll get two or three shots at the basket before they even know where you are.”

  I am pumped, because though McCall is having a major building year in basketball, they have something any one of us would trade our team for in a heartbeat: Gerry Greene. Gerry Greene is the only girl in the entire league still in the running for the Idaho Junior Miss Pageant. Gerry Greene is tall and dark and heartbreakingly beautiful. If you see Gerry Greene on the streets of McCall, you tell your buddies you had a conversation; if you actually do get close enough to say hi, you tell them you went for a Coke. I know guys with topographical maps of McCall, Idaho, with pushpins stuck in them for Gerry Greene sightings. Gerry Greene is a very big deal. She will be at the game. I am going to score with Gerry Greene.

  The game plays out almost exactly as Boyd predicted. With two minutes to go, Cascade leads by thirty-five points. The other scrubs have been in twice. Coach calls me down from the end of the bench. I sprinkle some of the 7 UP I have been drinking on my forehead to look like sweat and untuck my shirt so it will appear as if I’m going back in, but the Cascade fans are not to be fooled and take it off the applause meter; McCall is an arch rival. I stand next to Coach as he goes through his substitution ritual: arm over the shoulder, leaning in close, giving instruction. He gives me the same instruction he always gives me—“Don’t embarrass yourself”—slaps my butt, and pushes me onto the court.

  A McCall player is at the free-throw line, and Boyd meets me at the out-of-bounds line. “If he makes this,” he whispers, “go. I’ll step out and fire it down. This is your chance.”

  A jackhammer drills against my sternum as the McCall player sinks both ends of a one-and-one, and I am headed downcourt like a runaway train.

  Let it never be said that Chris Crutcher does not listen. My coach’s last words before I stepped onto the court were “Don’t embarrass yourself.” That isn’t always easy. At this point in my life I am a deeply religious person, especially when I want something, and I know the Lord works in strange and mysterious ways that make Him sometimes appear as if He’s not working at all. I also know He helps those who help themselves, and I’m about to do that, because I have a rap sheet on missed opportunities as long as that of a career felon. If I go down the center of the court, Boyd is going to throw that ball over my shoulder, and, remembering football season, I know my chances of hauling it in are about the same as winning the lottery, which hasn’t been invented yet. So I cut down the sideline, thinking I’ll hang a one-eighty at the baseline, giving me the best shot at catching the ball.

  Like many high-school gymnasiums, McCall’s is built at one end of the school, with the inside entrance doors right at the end of that sideline. If I were to keep running straight, I’d run out into the school hall, where the drill team is lined up ready for their postgame performance and where concessions are sold. At least I don’t do that.

  I’m chugging for the baseline, ready to make my cut. I glance at the electronic scoreboard mounted just above the entrance to see I have plenty of time, get ready to make my cut, glance again at the entrance…

  …and through that entrance walks Gerry Greene. She’s carrying a Coke and a hot dog, talking with a friend…looking like Stella Stevens.

  And I stop. This is a sighting.

  My miscue lasts only a few seconds. Somewhere in the back of my consciousness is a roar (which turns out to be the entire Cascade contingent screaming, “Turn around, you jerk!”) and I snap to at the same moment the ball pops! off the back of my head and straight up into the bleachers. My false teeth spurt out of my mouth like a slap shot and skid to a stop at Gerry Greene’s feet. I recognize her expression from back when the Cascade softball players got their first look at my batted-out face. She says, “Ugh” and steps around my teeth. Coach’s hand grips the back of my jersey, and I’m scrambling for my teeth because I know where I’m spending the final minute of this game and do not want to be gumming it.

  If you look through past issues of the school newspaper or the Cascade News, you will find no record of my participation in the 1962–63 basketball season. I finished with no statistics: not a point or a rebound, not an assist or a foul. But I did declare, and publicly insist to this very day, that on the night of the McCall game in January of 1963, I had a Coke and a hot dog with Gerry Greene.

  Of Oysters and Olives and Things That Go Bump in My Shoe

  5

  JUST AFTER CHRISTMAS VACATION of my senior year in high school, Chuck Steensland, my U.S. Government teacher and the senior-class counselor, caught me in the hall. “Crutcher,” he said, “where are you going to school?”

  “I’m in school.”

  “I mean college.”

  “Actually,” I said, “I haven’t thought a lot about it.”

  “No time like the present,” he said.

  I thought I had a lot more time, that you showed up the day college started, like I’d been doing for the past twelve years. I said that.

  Steensland took me by the arm. “Allow me to show you our library,” he said, in obvious reference to the fact I had avoided that particular room for the past four years like a vampire avoids sunlight. Once inside he introduced me to the librarian, which he thought was pretty funny, and led me to a shelf containing a short row of college catalogs.

  “Look through these,” he said. “Maybe you’ll see something interesting. I’ll be over here by the door, to make sure you don’t escape.” Steensland was a first-year assistant football coach, with arms about the size of my head.

  “I’ll be right here if you need me,” I said.

  I noticed most of the catalogs had one thing in common: They were either dark blue and white or black and white. Eastern Washington’s was red and white. So I went there.

  Little did I know that one well-thought-out decision would set me on the path to my athletic apex, where, among other things, I would be crowned a Stotan. I had tried my hand at competitive swimming during a couple of high-school summers, with pretty much the same degree of success I had experienced in other sports. Paula Whitson’s dad had started a small team when someone down in Boise happened to get a look at her almost-perfect stroke and told him she had Olympic potential. When word spread through town that Paula would be swimming, Johnny Weissmuller became my new personal hero and I developed an obsessive crush on the sport. Cascade’s pool, fed by hot springs, was nineteen yards, seven inches long, too shallow at one end to flip a turn (even if any of us had known how) with no black line on the bottom to follow. I did not have Paula Whitson’s perfect stroke (nor much of her attention) and finished far out of contention each time I actually entered a m
eet. But Eastern had a fledgling team with too few bodies to swim two relays, and when one of the team members saw me swim from one end of the pool to the other without stopping, he recruited me. It turned out that, with a little coaching and a lot of yards logged, this was my sport.

  Actually, my Stotan roots run deep. I didn’t even hear the term until I was a junior at Eastern, but when I look back I realize I was chosen from my earliest days.

  A Stotan is a cross between a Stoic and a Spartan: simply put, a tough guy who shows no pain. The term was coined by Australian track coach Percy Cerruty in describing Herb Elliot, the world-record holder in the mile run from the late fifties and early sixties. Percy stated in an article for Sports Illustrated that Herb was the toughest athlete he’d ever coached; that Herb would routinely run the rest of the Australian national track team into the ground, then tear off his clothes and run over sand dune after sand dune in his single-minded quest to become the best miler in the world and dominate his event in the 1960 Olympics. He did just that. Herb Elliot was a madman.

  My college swimming coach happened to pick up that by then ancient Sports Illustrated one afternoon in 1966, and by the time we eight unsuspecting mermen wannabes showed for workout, he had translated the Stotan concept from land to water. From the moment I learned about him, I wanted to poke out Herb Elliot’s eyes with a sharp, smoldering stick.

  We walked onto the pool deck to see, scrawled on the blackboard at the far side of the pool, Looking for a Few Good Men. We pretended not to see, but Coach, the G. Gordon Liddy, the Bobby Knight of swim coaches, directed our attention to the fact that he needed volunteers for Stotan Week. We asked what was Stotan Week, and he said show up the first week of Christmas vacation and we’d find out. Oh, no, we said, we don’t volunteer for something before we know what it is.