ATHLETICS

We were required to attend synagogue twice a day, half a day on Saturdays, and for longer periods on religious holidays. We did so because we had no choice. Few of us were truly inducted by these experiences into the ritual and mysticism of the Jewish religion. For most of us, athletics became our true religion. We were its novitiates and acolytes; our coaches were its high priests.

The pursuit of athletic perfection became our institutional quest for the Holy Grail. The perfectly executed somersault or handstand, the strike-out pitch and the clearly observed home-run hit, the skilled basketball-handling around and through opponents which culminated in graceful placement of the ball through the hoop and a winning game, holding the lead mile after mile in the city-wide school boy races, the smooth transfer of the baton to the next relay runner, the football victories over teams with better equipment and ballfields on which to practice—— these were transcendent acts which lifted us into a world of personal and group ecstasy . The infusion of self-respect, pride of accomplishment, and self-actualization by coaches like Chick Baker brought us closer to a sense of ethics, fair play, the capacity to endure and persist much more than anything provided by the rabbis and the after-school Hebrew classes the boys were required to attend.

Our basketball jerseys with the letters HNOH on the front chest and the Star of David beneath marked us individually and collectively as team-mates in the pursuit of Excellence. Of course, we didn’t think about it in just that way, but we lived for, were affected by, and defined ourselves by the athletic achievements of individual boys and by our team championships even when we were not athletes ourselves. Our athletic achievements were assertions of our existence, of our competence to do and achieve, and a counter to all the implications of our description in the New York City Social Workers Handbook which described us as “. . . orphans, half-orphans, neglected and destitute children.” And in the 50’s, when Roosevelt High School’s Joe Seidel became our coach, individual and team city championships were added to our list of accomplishments.

Let us remember.