Friday, June 19, 2009

Catcher's Cup. A Painful Lesson in Safety.


When I got to little league age (which was 9 years old) Dad said "Well, are you going to tryout for little league this year?" Dad always wanted me to play sports. Every sport. All of the time, all year long. The more contact the better. Mom wanted us to take lessons. Skiing lessons, swimming lessons, tennis lessons. Dad on the other hand wanted to raise sports-stars, and I was his first attempt.


"Naw... I want to play another year of PeeWee."


The PeeWee rules let you play until your tenth birthday, Little league lets kids start after their ninth birthday. I chose to play with my 3-year teammates for another challenging year on the "Fred’s Market Cougars."


I think I really hurt his feelings by not being ready to take on that challenge. Hell, I hadn't wanted to play ball in the first place, but Dad pressured me into it. In retrospect I'm glad he did. But at 9 there wasn't that much "retro" in my "spect." All I knew was that some of the guys in my class had skipped their last year of PeeWee to "go up" to little league. These guys were already a year older than me, and had skipped their last year, so some of them had been playing in the "bigs" for two years. All I knew was that they routinely kicked my ass in recess, and that no one routinely kicked my ass in PeeWee. Plus, there were little-kid scare stories of hazing (which wasn't in my vocabulary until MUCH later. I preferred the term "initiation") which was legendary among the wide eyed ranks of soon to be little leaguers like me. No thanks Dad o’ mine... I’m stayin' in PeeWee.


I don't even remember what happened that year in PeeWee. I vaguely recall that my 3-year teammates all went to Little-league without me.


I DO however recall my first year of Little league. I was the 38th string catcher, and I still believe that, the coach put me in the 38th string as a favor to Dad. You see, Dad had signed on as assistant-assistant-assistant coach. Sports careers are built on relationships. My first year of Little League was no different. Since I was a catcher, the Coach took me aside and asked if I'd ever caught before? I had, and I told him so. Then he asked "So you’ve got a cup?"


Well this confused me, because cups are pretty common...even in a small town. But while my family had LOTS of cups in the kitchen, none of them were uniquely mine, and what does this have to do with baseball anyway?


So I said "well, we have lots of cups at home."


"No, a CATCHER'S CUP."


I'm sure he read my blank look at this time. I’ll just bet that I looked like a confused dog... Head tilted to the right, ears up, eyes wide, brain working overtime, no results."


Look son, a catcher needs protection...uh, you know?"


Still blank. I'm lost in the kaleidoscopic array of predictable directions that this conversation has NOT gone. So I guess the answer to THAT question was "no."


The coach, again, correctly read that situation and drove the point home.


"A catcher needs a CUP. It's a protective device that fits inside a jock. It protects your testicles. You get the picture?"


Understanding was beginning to rear its ugly head. I think the Coach sensed this, but forged ahead anyway. Neither my ignorance, nor the coach’s obvious discomfort with this discussion was going to stop such a monumental safety issue from being resolved.


"Before you catch on this team again, I want you to have a cup. A young man could really get hurt out here, and I don’t want that happening to my players. One good foul-tip and you might never be able to have children."


I don’t know whether he was actually concerned, or whether he distrusted my skill at stopping pitched baseballs prior to contact with my crotch. "OK coach. Where do you get one of these.... cups?"


"I think that one of the stores downtown will have them. You just have to shop around ‘til you find one. Let me know when you buy one so I’ll know I can let you catch again."


"What do they look like?"


"Just ask the saleslady in the store... She’ll help you out."


Well, asking a sales lady for a "catcher’s cup" was absolutely the LAST thing on earth that I was ever going to do. I had a premonition of telling an ADULT that I needed a cup to put in my balls in, and getting called names like "dirty" until my parents arrived to cart me to the orphanage.


I examined my options: I couldn’t go back to PeeWee... Too old. I could quit baseball... Dad was one of my coaches though, so that’ll never happen. Thoughts of asking a blue-dye-rinse fat woman to help me with a catcher’s cup shot through my head. There’s only one thing to do. Ask Mom to go buy one.


That evening I did just that. I told Mom I needed a catcher’s cup. She looked at me like I was crazy, then laughed at me. I had to convince her to ask Dad. All this ended with Mom buying me a strange, decidedly non-cup-looking-thing and my first jock strap. Of course, it was Mom's first jock strap too, and she got the wrong kind.


For those of you who are testicularly-challenged, there are special jocks made for catcher's cups. They have a pouch sewn into the front of the nad-pouch. My jock was the everyday economy version with just the web-pouch for my nads. Neither Mom nor I knew this, nor would we figure it out for a year or two.


Ever the trouper, I went upstairs, stripped off my shorts and put on my brand-new-what-the-hell-is-this-for jock. Then I stuffed the it-doesn’t-even-look-like-a-cup into the pouch. I let the wide elastic snap into place with a flourish, then immediately regretted it.


Now, for those of you who've never seen a catcher's cup, they are roughly the shape of the front half of a french bikini (yes, I know that I'm mixing gender stuff here...just stay with me) They are made out of some sort of nearly bulletproof plastic with foam rubber padding around the edge (which doesn't help). The whole thing is a neutral grey color with ventilator holes drilled through the front, sort of reminiscent of the holes you poke in the metal lid of a jar when you catch grasshoppers.


Those ventilator holes were the worst torture known to man... Or boy. Of course, had I been wearing the proper style of jock, I never would have noticed this. But I was blessed with a non-catcher’s-cup-wearing mom, so I discovered pain. And that pain was that special type of pain that lasted as long as I wore that cup. Worse yet, I knew what my baseball schedule was, so I had plenty of warning, and therefore anxiety in anticipation of having to wear that cup. I would rather have just been hit by a couple of foul-tips and had it over with, lack of future children notwithstanding.


Back during my Little League years (I don't mind saying) my pecker wasn't much in the size department. But just about all of the nerve endings in the world were packed into that little sucker. And, as physics would have it, my pecker had more strength than mass, so it sorta stuck out straight.


Straight into one of those sharp edged ventilator holes. So, If I wore my cup (which I'd just learned about yesterday) in a jock (which wasn’t made for the job) to avoid injury (which never happened in PeeWee) my pecker felt like someone was trying to split it like string-cheese.


OK...I'll buy that. All of those adults can't be wrong.


I wore it all that year.

1 comment:

  1. Karl, that's a great story. I'm still giggling. Thanks for sharing.

    Laurie Hughes

    ReplyDelete