Rant #2,674: Bowling Green

I have always loved sports.
 
Even though I was never much of an athlete, I played everything as a kid, and I looked forward to getting onto the field, whether it was for stickball, baseball, softball … whatever it was, I just loved to compete.
 
I remember that I so looked forward to playing in our organized league each and every week, whether it was for baseball, softball or bowling.
 
My father often was my coach, and he got into it the same way I did, from his own perspective.
 
As an adult, I have carried that feeling that he engrained in me over to my own relationship with my own son.
 
He loves sports too, and I was his coach early on when he played in the Little League.
 
Now, he plays basketball and he bowls, and I could not be more proud of his progress.
 
You see, unlike my experience simply as a poor athlete, my son has had many more hurdles to scale, and he has done just that.
 
And that is why I am so proud of him, and his team, in his bowling league, which ended its 2020-2021 season this past Saturday.

 
I put this message up on Facebook, but it really is much more involved than what I wrote, but here is the message:
 
“My son's bowling league ended its season today.
His team ended up in third place and his average went up about seven pins to 130, so he had a great season.
I want to thank all the participants for a fantastic season, and I also want to thank the Nassau County Police Athletic League and its Special Needs Unit for coming through--through thick and thin--in getting the league going again after COVID hit.”
 
Short, simple, to the point, but there is really so much to say about this.
 
The participants in this league—both young men and women—were all born with developmental difficulties of one level or another. Some are worse off than others, but all the participants, like my son, have scaled certain hurdles put before them and are able to do things that no one thought that they could do.
 
I was speaking to another parent, and as I saw my son pretty much close out his bowling on Saturday—getting a spare in the 10thh frame and then a strike to close things out—I reminisced about my son, who my wife and I were told—in terms that were even antiquated 20 years ago—that our son would amount to pretty much nothing, that we could not count on him to be anything more than a vegetable.
 
This diagnosis came from a doctor that was recommended by our school district, and my wife and I were aghast at what the doctor said--and did not believe it for one minute, telling the doctor that she was wrong.

She pointed to her degrees on the wall, and said that she was correct, since she had been doing this for decades, and that the five-minute test she performed on our son--which involved bouncing a ball to him and having him catch it--was foolproof.

Yup, her test was suspect from the get go, and my wife and knew it.
 
And our son has proven us to be right from that day, as he has progressed to the point that he participates in athletics, he works at a job, and he does things that this doctor said he would never do, and he does them at his own pace.
 
After telling the other parent this story, she agreed, stating that in her son’s instance, a doctor said that he should be institutionalized.
 
Maybe it has to do with a combination of good parenting and a determination by the individual himself that he can do what others say he can’t, but the participants in this league demonstrate year in and year out that what was thought to be impossible can be achieved, and achieved in a big way.

 
This is an extremely competitive league, and my son was one of I think three or four participants who bowled each and every week of the league, which began in earnest in October after COVID destroyed the previous season.
 
This season had its own COVID interruption, but it played out steady for the past several months, which gave my son and the other participants something to look forward to each and every week.
 
2020 was a horrid year for everyone, but for my son, I think it was even worse.
 
He not only was furloughed from a job that he loved for seven months, and then left high and dry by the company he worked for as they never called him back, but he also had to contend with the fact that I was out of work, too, with no hope of getting a new job.
 
And what’s worse, he lost his two grandfathers over the span of a little more than three months, which made things that much worse.
 
But when the bowling league started again, followed by his basketball league, things started to look up.
 
I retired but got a remote job, my son got another job, and he finally had something to look forward to each week.
 
I am sure the same can be said for the other league participants, who all had similar stories.
 
My wife and I are just so proud of our son and his accomplishments, all done against incredible odds.
 
His basketball league continues for two more weeks, and then he is on his own until the bowling league begins again in mid-September.
 
Yes, things are crawling back to normal …and my wife and I look forward to the further hurdles our son will scale next season, and in general, through his life.
 
One thing we taught him is to never say “can’t.”
 
Our son was relegated to the trash heap by someone with a vaunted degree and a huge ego. I do believe that the doctor herself would be surprised at how wrong she was about him.
 
How many others did this fool misdiagnose, through the auspices of the school district?
 
I shudder to even think about it.