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by Lance Mason

The hit came like a bowling ball to the face, like a round flying from a cannon. I had pulled my head from a scrum, looking for the ball, maybe a tackle, when the Welshman plowed his forehead into my nose with a sound like shattering glass.

That’s Welsh rugby, played with pride of purpose, with maximal intent. Kiwis beat you with inbred skill, Australia with speed, South Africa with power — think Gretzky, Butkus, and LeBron. In Wales, though, it’s just Butkus. All business — nasty business. They crack heads and breathe fire, like the Red Dragon on their nation’s flag. Rugby is their crucible of manhood and ancestry, and you are the invader, pillaging their wealth, women, and homeland. The studly prop-forward, in the unambiguous application of his head to my nose, delivered a message on behalf of his countrymen — You don’t belong here, mate, and here’s a little how’s-your-father as a token of our esteem.

The Welsh are a lovely people. Polite, welcoming, and lovely. In the pub. During a singsong. Over a meal and a pint of Brain’s Bitter. You’ll have heartwarming stories to tell — but not from the rugby pitch.

We’d spent the week at the Welsh National Sports Center, suffering under two national coaches, John Morgan and Leighton Williams. Incidentally, the great names in the annals of Welsh rugby are worth a mention. In a monologue of Anglo-Saxon stuttering, they overlap like Lego blocks: Gerald Davies, Carwyn Davies, Carwyn James, Boyo James, Jamie Roberts, Gareth Roberts, Gareth Edwards, Arthur Edwards, Arthur Lewis, Lewis Morgan, Haydn Morgan, Haydn Evans, Ieuan Evans, Denis Evans, Denzil Thomas, Denzil Williams, Shane Williams, Lloyd Williams, Llewellyn Lloyd, Barry Llewellyn, Barry John, John Rees, Clive Rees, Rhys Webb, and Too Many Joneses to Count. Poetic ones also appear: Windsor Major, Aneurin Rees, Bathurst Mann, Ralph Sweet-Escott, Viv Huzzey, and Anthony Wyndham Jones (Wyndham — remember that).

In cryptic contrast to these are Welsh place-names — Aberystwyth, Abergavenny, Merthyr Tydfil, Mynydd Llanllwni, Llanelli, Llanybydder, and, everyone’s favorite, Llanfairpwllgwyngyll — pronounced with your tongue tied by leather shoelace to a passing taxi.

Nomenclature aside, we received selfless, passionate instruction under John and Leighton. They had every reason to be proud rugby men, for this was 1974, the Golden Age of Welsh rugby. The British Lions, a combined team from Scotland, Ireland, England, and Wales, had just completed a 30-match undefeated tour of South Africa, and the Welshmen, in a field of stars, had been phosphorescent. Pride sparkled across Wales’s landscape like the aurora borealis.

Our training, however, was purgatorial — up at 7 a.m., a light breakfast, then two hours of scrum, lineout, and passing drills before morning tea of thin sandwiches with, yes, tea or “orange squash”, Tang’s British cousin. An hour and a half of sled work, tackling, and wind sprints followed, then lunch, a rest, and two more hours of wrestle-and-sprint drills, footwork, play execution, and position technique. By dinnertime, you’d earned every calorie they could throw at you.

The first night, a Monday, four of us returned to our room ragged as jailhouse mops. A forlorn voice moaned, “I need a beer.” Right — we were off to the main gate, where taxis awaited the willing.

“Take us to a bar,” Steve said.

“A pub,” I corrected, feeling superior. Steve, who had only been out of LA to visit Tijuana titty bars, would become one of the great scrumhalves in America, but we like to think he got his start that night.

Before we knew it, we were at the Wyndham Hotel. “Here you go, chaps,” said the driver. “As good as any.”

How little we knew, but were about to find out, as into the Wyndham we strode. To the uninitiated: your public bar, the unrefined in drinking etiquette, is the scene of all good brawls in British movies. Your lounge bar, while a cut above, but not pretentious, is a place to impress (i.e. loosen up) a date before going out on the town. Some premises retain a saloon bar, for spruced-up couples having pre-prandial refreshments, or just keeping clear of the Great Unwashed in “the pub.” This pedantry requires years of studious drinking.

How we avoided the Wyndham public bar remains a happy mystery. Even in the lounge bar, though, in foreign clothes and haircuts, we were the center of edgy attention, as if bearing the Mark of Cain. Beatty, Dan, and I dropped our heads. Two dentists and a doctor, we weren’t looking for trouble. Steve, though, was a lad from the streets, tough as a buck rat. He stared around the room, assaying any challenges, but we got him seated with a round of beers. Barely into them, we realized that two of Steve’s visual targets had joined us. We glanced up warily.

Steve was not big, maybe five-eight, but when you tackled him, he seemed built of rusty cannonballs. Though we were far from his home territory, he radiated danger. To read more…

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Lance Mason was born and raised Oxnard, California, and worked in gas stations, lemon orchards, lima bean plants, a fiberglass shop, hotdog stands, and splicing cable for GTE, where his mother was a union steward. He studied at UCSB, Loyola University, and UCLA for his graduate degree. He has taught at UCLA, the National University in Natal, Brazil, and Otago University in New Zealand. His short pieces have appeared in Upstreet, City Works, The Santa Barbara Independent, Askew, The Packinghouse Review, Newborders, Solo Novo, Sea Spray, Traveler’s Tales, Negative Capability, and several professional journals. Mason has spent 20 years traveling, living, and working overseas, including several round-the-world trips by foot, bicycle, motorcycle, kayak, helicopter, tramp steamer, catamaran, plane, train, and dugout canoe. In 2007, he directed his team to an age-group record in the RAAM coast-to-coast cycling race. He has also performed in a number of live theater productions.

by Caitlynn Martinez-McWhorter	There is no athlete quite like the hockey enforcer, a man and a role viewed alternately as noble and barbaric, necessary and regrettable. –John Branch (The New York Times)
1st Line² – Home My father built a hockey rink in the backyard every winter out of plastic tarps and two-by-fours. I was never a very good skater, and an awkward stick handler. I spent most of my time those winters after school lying on my back on the cold, hard ice, staring up at the sky, daydreaming. I’d lie there for hours, as snow fell upon my hand-me-down coat and snow pants. I often stayed well past the moment at which I could no longer feel my fingers or toes, needing to prove a certain toughness or ruggedness, if only to myself.   2nd Line – Home At the first professional hockey game I ever attended, I witnessed a beautiful brawl. Afterward, the jumbo-tron showed a close up of the worse-for-ware player. He was kneeling on the ice, bent over, spitting into a puddle of bright crimson blood on the pristine, white surface of the ice. He rubbed at his mouth a little, and a few seconds later he spit two teeth into the puddle before picking them up, along with his carelessly tossed gloves, and skating away. I could hear my mother in the seat next to me gag at the image—but I could not take my eyes off of the screen.	1st Line – Visitors My brother Joey and I used to play with my father’s Bobby Hull hockey game from the late 1960’s. Joey eventually lost the pucks, and the game no longer functioned. Even so, I still often took out the game to admire it. I’d place a flat aluminum player in my hands, his sharp edges almost cutting my skin, nearly drawing blood — a child’s toy unsafe for children. Players on this game board, much like a foosball table, were not able to touch one another. By design, they could not fight or check one another into the boards. This disappointed my child-self greatly. I looked begrudgingly toward a future filled with softened edges. 2nd Line – Visitors Fans opposed to this remnant of an older game, disgusted by the unworthy “goons” put on the ice alongside players with quick strides and quicker hands, roar with snarky comments after a muffed play by a player known more for his physicality than his offence. “Woof,” is probably my favorite of their jabs at an enforcer. ³ It is their way of saying these players are no more than fighting dogs. Not men, but beasts. These fans fear for the safety of the players with skill, the ones whose soft and agile hands were made for playmaking—forehand, backhand, pass, shoot — rather than fisticuffs — left hook, left hook, right uppercut.
3rd Line – Home My favorite player takes the ice for warm ups without a helmet. He is young and cocky, thinking himself invincible. He boasts about being 26 years old and still possessing all of his own teeth, a rarity in his profession, and particularly for an enforcer. I’m on edge when he jumps the boards, focusing impatiently on his hands, waiting to see him shake off his gloves, pull up his sleeves, raise his fists, and begin the dance. In these moments, I am deeply attracted to the man on the ice in a way I have not otherwise known. Though handsome, the attraction is not a sexual one. Instead, in those moments, I have the urge to be him. I crave the physicality, but for reasons I cannot explain.  4th Line – Home I’m intrigued by the role of the enforcer, because I understand it. There is a part of me that witnesses an injustice for which, in the heat of the moment, the only response I can comprehend is physical retaliation. There is a very real and very worrisome part of me that wants to bash a skull in, creating shards of bone shaped like the broken fragments of a ceramic coffee mug dropped on the cold kitchen floor. I burry this part deep inside, for it is crazy to acknowledge that we are animals, all of us, and that our bodies desire a fight.	3rd Line – Visitors Derek Boogaard, a former NHL enforcer, died in 2011 before his 29th birthday. It is indisputable that he died of a mixture of prescription drugs and alcohol, but the controversy surrounding his death is that many believe his drug and alcohol use was the result of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. CTE affects individuals with a history of multiple blows to the head, a hazard of the job faced by all hockey players (and numerous other athletes), but most specifically the enforcers like Boogaard. The disease manifests itself in symptoms such as memory loss, aggression, confusion, and depression. Within the four months that followed Boogaard’s death, two other NHL enforcers, Belak and Rypien, died from what were labeled suicides. They were 35 and 27 years old, respectively. 4th Line – Visitors As the game evolved from one where each player did it all—score, hit, fight—to a game where certain star players were more skilled, the role of the enforcer became necessary. Someone needed to protect the teams’ investments. They became the bodyguards of the ice, taking justice into their own hands, deterring the crimes against their teammates more than the fear of the ref’s whistle ever could. But the game is forever fluid, and as it has begun to morph again, this time into one based on speed, the enforcer’s days are numbered.
MAJOR PENALTY. FIGHTING.4 Power Play6 For years, two factions of the hockey world have been facing off. They pose the question: Does fighting still have a place in the game?	MAJOR PENALTY. FIGHTING. MINOR PENALTY. INSTIGATING.5 Penalty Kill7 For me, this is not the important question. Instead, I want to know: Why do we cling so tightly, so automatically, to the violence?

¹ Title borrowed from a Warren Zevon song about a Canadian farm boy turned NHL goon.

² A LINE in hockey is a group of players, consisting of three forwards: a left wing, a right wing, and a center. They are joined on the ice during their shift by a pair of defensemen. A static goalie makes for a sixth player on the ice.

³ An ENFORCER in hockey is often known as the fighter on the team. This is not a position, but an unofficial role that a player of certain character
takes on. He is used to intimidate the other team in order to prevent dirty plays, or to fight in order to offer his team a change in momentum.

⁴ Fighting always draws a MAJOR, as does blood shed. MINORS are less severe penalties. A MAJOR is worth 5 minutes, and a MINOR is worth 2. When two penalties of equal value are awarded at the same time, the teams are allowed to replace the players immediately, rather than both play short handed. If an uneven amount of penalties are awarded, the recipient of the extra penalties will have to go on the PENALTY KILL while the other team goes on the POWER PLAY.

⁵ An INSTIGATING penalty is a MINOR sometimes handed out if one fighter dropped their gloves first, or threw the first punch. Many career enforcers try to exhibit respect to one another, agreeing upon fights prior to them, and attempting to drop their gloves simultaneously so neither suffers this added penalty. It is not out of the ordinary to witness this respectful breed of player give a tap on the back of the head or shoulder of their opponent while referees begin to separate them, as a way of saying “good fight.”

⁶ PP, or POWER PLAY, is a designated amount of time (the length of a penalty) in which one player from the other team has been given a penalty, and a combination line (special team)—five players and a goalie—are put together on the ice to score against the short-handed opposing team.

⁷ PK or PENALTY KILL, is a designated amount of time (the length of a penalty) in which one player from the team has been given a penalty, and a short-handed combination line (special team)—four players and a goalie—are put together on the ice to stop the opponent—who has five players and a goalie—from scoring a goal.

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Caitlynn Martinez-McWhorter holds an MFA in nonfiction from Columbia College Chicago and is an associate lecturer at University of Wisconsin-Waukesha. Her essays have appeared in Barrelhouse, Bird’s Thumb, Animal, Sugar Mule and The North Branch. She can do a one-handed pushup, has potty trained a wombat, is the reigning champion of her fantasy hockey league, and owns over 200 pairs of shoes.

by Michael Konik

After a photo of Larry Tunsil wearing a gas-mask bong surfaced on the Interweb, the consensus #1 player in the 2016 NFL Draft suddenly became the 13^th most appealing choice.

Now someone must explain to casual fans why NFL players — please don’t call them “warriors,” as that would demean our heroic mercenaries in the armed forces — why they should be forbidden from enjoying marijuana. The league is refining its Drug Policy, and they supposedly want some “other points of view,” especially if discussing the NFL’s Drug Policy will distract attention from their brain injury scandal.

Like most American institutions, the National Football League is reflexively anti-pot.

Well, so are we!

I mean, when it comes to football. We’re very anti-pot.

Teams have a vested interest in keeping their players on Human Growth Hormones and off marijuana. Unlike steroids, cannabis isn’t “performance-enhancing.” It can’t make a team’s employees run faster, jump higher, or wound more viciously. It’s of no practical use to winning games, which is probably all the reason you need.

But we’ll go you one better: Marijuana tends to make its users less aggressive, more compassionate, and barely motivated to get up from the couch to change the Miles Davis CD that’s been repeating for the last three hours. They’re not about to attempt to inflict grievous bodily harm on the opposing quarterback.

Marijuana makes you play football with a tremendous lack of commitment to violence. It has no place whatsoever in our favorite televised sport.

Any team (or league) with a passion for winning, for achieving, should keep this pernicious substance far away from their players, just as handlers of fighting cocks shield their roosters from a big meal of corn-pellets-and-Tylenol-with-codeine until after the carnage.

You want to play the PGA Tour stoned? Good luck to you, sir.

You want to hit Major League Baseball pitching high on hash brownies? Time slows down, but the velocity of a 96-mph fastball doesn’t.

You want to compete in virtually any athletic competition stoned? Beside shooting or archery, where the goal is basically to do nothing, marijuana isn’t going to help you to win anything but the title, “Biggest Bum.”

Well, guess what? The bums lost. That war is over. The bums lost. That’s why you don’t see no bums in the NFL, only heroes.

For the sake of the game’s great traditions, particularly the tradition of causing injury to yourself and others (preferably others) the NFL is absolutely right to prohibit their soldiers — sorry, players — from going into battle — sorry, a game — using cannabis. No one wants to watch a bunch of giant men hugging each other and giggling at private jokes. We want blood.

We want collisions and concussions and confrontations. We want yelling and arguing. We want a very big deal made out of very little. We want our guys to go off.

The NFL should discourage their players from smoking pot and encourage them to start drinking. Heavily.

Because being a nasty drunk never violated anyone’s Drug Policy.

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Michael Konik is the best-selling author of many books, including Reefer Gladness: Stories, Essays and Riffs on Marijuana.

SL Essay

by Matt Enuco

“Hey, you could have a real job,” Alan Regier suggested from his pitcher’s mound pulpit. I sat in the crowd of minor leaguers at my first spring training with the Chicago White Sox. Regier’s lesson sounded hollow when I thought back to 30 games in 30 days in the previous season. By the end of that season I had lost 15 pounds, played through a pulled quadriceps muscle and suffered garden variety injuries on a daily basis. I’m not talking about 30 show and goes, or batting practice at 5 p.m. game at 7 p.m. I had the dubious honor of playing with true rookies. This meant report at 11:30 a.m., extra hitting at 12:30, weights at 1:30, orientation and stretch at 3, team defense at 3:45, batting practice at 4:30, find time for dinner at 5:30, starters stretch at 6:30, and play at 7. Rinse and repeat for 68 games in 75 days. Most of us did this in pursuit of a once in a lifetime dream and a slim chance of success. But, make no mistake; I earned every cent of that $1,050 dollar a month salary. I sat underneath a scorching Arizona sun at 6:30 in the morning and dismissed his pedantic words of wisdom.

Ozzie Guillen popped out from behind a fence when Regier finished and offered his words of encouragement. His energy was infectious. He bounced around to illustrate every concept he wanted to express. There wasn’t anything lost with Guillen. He was going to drill home the basic baseball mantra: play hard, respect the game, respect the organization, and never put your pants underneath your cleats. His passion fueled a dimming flame in me to play baseball. I was reminded that it was a gift to be here and they could find a thousand guys working in cube farms that would mortgage their future for the opportunity in front of us. Even still, it felt like work.

Two weeks later I was on a plane heading back to New Jersey.

As spring training report dates roll out and the players migrate to Florida and Arizona for a month, I’m reminded of how lucky I was to have been there. After I decided to end my baseball career I searched for a “real job.” It took me three years to land my second career as a teacher. The entire process was more emotionally grueling than any practice or game. And since being hired I have learned what it means to have a job and go to work.

For many of the athletes I met on my journey to professional baseball the skills came easy. At each level, from college to summer leagues and then professionally, the weaker athletes washed out. At the top rung of this ladder are the athletic phenoms. I met the 18-year-old slugger who deposits balls in the upper deck during batting practice, the million-dollar arm with a two-cent head, the first round pick from LSU and the 29-year-old career minor leaguer. Even though I was a 36th round draft pick, we could all share the experience of being exceptional. We were exceptional.

In college I often wondered what it was like to be a regular student. My teammates and I never knew what it was like to have two or three classes for the day, hammer out some homework and then have complete freedom in front of us. I had to plan a gym session in between class and prepare myself for a six-hour practice later that night. I complained about it then, but I would sell my soul for another shot.

The reality that we came to was that we were different from most people. The kind of person it takes to be a collegiate or professional athlete is different from your average Joe. We practice, tweak, and train. We scrutinize each part of the game ad nauseam. If you ever find yourself at a social gathering with guys who played college ball, they’ll break down a 2-1 change-up to the six hitter in the fifth inning of a three-run ball game. It seems insignificant, but to those guys it could have been the turning point in a season.

All of this cathartic drivel I’ve just given you is the sum of what I once was. I used to be exceptional, but now I’m just a regular guy. And that has been the hardest lesson for me to learn, and most importantly, accept. I’m not used to accepting mediocrity. I assess, revise, train, practice, and improve. For me, accepting mediocrity is the equivalent of accepting failure.

So, to my friends who are still playing, cherish every at bat and soak up every moment sitting in the dugout. Alan Regier was right; you could have a real job. Your exceptionality will run out, and probably sooner than you’re ready to admit. Only the exceptions to the exceptional get to choose when it’s over. Most of us are told when the magic well has dried up.

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Matt Enuco was drafted by the Chicago White Sox in 2006 and spent one season in their minor league system. After leaving baseball, he earned a master’s degree in English and creative writing from the University of Pennsylvania. He now teaches writing at Wilmington University as an adjunct.

SL Essay

by Trapper Haskins

I was a Memphis kid with a Chicago hat. There was nowhere I went that summer that my blonde, unruly locks weren’t covered by the same blue wool and red embroidered “C” that my baseball heroes wore. I was seven years old, and as I sat looking out the window of a CTA train, or rather the “L,” an unfamiliar city passed by in an unrecognizable blur. Riding on rails was a foreign thing to me. The trains I knew carried coal, carried chemicals, but not people. My grandfather, a lifelong Northsider, sat next to me with a Cubs hat of his own — a floppy brimmed bucket hat adorned with buttons and sweat stained from a thousand innings under the sun before the lights brought night baseball to Wrigley.

We rode the Purple Line from Linden Station stopping at Noyes and Dempster, the car getting increasingly full of revelers dressed in blue. At Howard we changed trains for the Red Line and continued toward the ballpark taking on fans at every stop until it seemed unimaginable that the train could hold any more. And yet it did. We passed graffiti-sprayed rooftops, the great and sprawling Graceland Cemetery, and came so frighteningly close to the buildings we passed that I was sure whoever laid the tracks had gotten their math wrong.

The hissing and clanging of the rails quieted, and as we rolled to a stop at the Addison platform Wrigley Field rose into view, the steel framework standing like a cathedral to summer. Or maybe futility. It was a hulking slab of Midwest Americana older than half the teams that visited there. The park had, until then, always seemed to me more a legend than an actual field. A haunted place.

The doors of the train slid open to a scene of roiling humanity below at street level, and the car cleared. Vendors of every type shouted for your dollar with T-shirts, peanuts, and tickets for sale.

Hats. And buttons. And pennants.

Grandpa bought a program and led me through the tangle of people, past the turnstiles, and up to our seats in the bleachers. At first sight I was awestruck by the enormity of the outfield. It was an impossibly broad expanse of green. There was no way only three fielders could cover it even if their names were Mumphrey, Martinez, and Dawson. We saw the Cubs play the Pirates that day. I don’t know who won. It doesn’t matter now. Grandpa taught me how to keep score that afternoon by recording the details in baseball shorthand — a “6-3” ground-out, the backwards “K” for a called third strike, and the penciled in diamonds denoting runs scored. By the bottom of the ninth inning there was the whole game written out like some cryptograph, a coded language for the faithful.

My father taught me to play the game of baseball. My grandfather taught me to love it — its cadence and choreography, its geometry and grace.

In 2003 after their playoff collapse just five outs shy of the World Series I asked my grandfather if he was disappointed, if he was grieved that yet again the luckless Cubs had let redemption slip away.

“No,” he said, “this is the way of things.” Then he added, “Just wait ‘til next year.”

It is a game of small victories where failing as a batter less than 70 percent of the time is a benchmark of success. You learn to make peace with your losses.

My grandfather died the following May at the age of 92. The Cubs were two games out of first. Born in Chicago in 1911, he never saw them win it all. So, when I flew back to Chicago for his funeral I went to the only place I could to be near him. I rode the Purple Line to Howard and changed trains to the Red. I passed the graffitied rooftops and Graceland Cemetery where he would be buried the following day only half a mile from his beloved ballpark. The doors slid open, and I walked down from the platform at Addison and through the tumult and the clamor of wandering hordes and vendors hawking wares.

Hats. And buttons. And pennants.

And there on the corner of Clark and Addison I bought a scalper’s ticket — Section 229, Row 11. Sitting halfway up on the first base side I looked out over that green lawn toward the ivy and the bleachers. Surely someone in those outfield seats was there for the first time, maybe with their own grandfather. I kept score the way mine had shown me one hazy and distant afternoon. We lost. The players’ names were different, but the teams, the game, and the field — that hallowed field — ever the same.

I don’t know my grandfather’s birthday. I’ve never asked. But for me Opening Day is a more fitting time to honor him anyhow. Because we have waited. Because this is next year. And because the promise of October belongs as much to us as anyone.

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Trapper Haskins is a writer, musician, and long-suffering Cubs fan. His writing has appeared in WoodenBoat Magazine and American Songwriter. He lives in Franklin, Tennessee, where he plays vintage (1860s rules) baseball.