THE PENALTY BOX
Mark Dwortzan |
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AGAINST THE BOYS IN THE FIFTH-GRADE CLASS AT WASHINGTON ELEMENTARY, Jonathan Bowman had committed two capital offenses. For the first - his 3.8 grade-point average - they were willing to let him walk. After all, Jonathan had deliberately botched some recent math and science tests in an effort to fit in. But the scrawny 11-year-old's second crime - his record-low career softball batting and fielding averages - was downright unforgivable. That chilly Buffalo afternoon in the spring of 2008, as softball team captains Bill Davenport and Alex Romberg chose sides for the fifth-grade season opener, Jonathan steeled himself for the cruel and usual punishment.
The process amounted to an abbreviated version of death by 1,000 cuts. The first came down from Davenport, a tall, sinewy redhead whose lips seemed locked in a permanent snarl. "Buchanan," he barked after scanning the crowd for talent.
The second cut issued from Romberg. Beaming above prematurely broad shoulders and ample pecs, he appeared to savor his executive powers. After a prolonged search he countered, "I'll take Gonzales."
With each successive name, Jonathan's heart pounded a notch faster. About 150 heartbeats later his athletic superiors - 27 boys out of 32 in attendance - filed in behind Davenport and Romberg along the first base line. Arms folded against a biting March wind, they watched as the other five - Bowman, Deutsch, Draper, Rogers, Warmflash - remained on display next to home plate, like reluctant finalists in an Ugly Miss America pageant. As the countdown accelerated and the insults mounted, Jonathan cringed at the sight of his fellow rejects putting forward their best defenses.
As always, the fourth runner-up, Alan Draper, relied on his prominent nose. Ironically, that nose came in handy when his selection by Romberg provoked giddy chants of "Pinocchio!" None of which reached the ears of Coach Frucci, who, to Jonathan's chagrin, spent much of the hour-long gym period clearing fallen branches in centerfield. Left to his own devices, Draper blew his perpetually runny proboscis like a ram's horn, drowning out all incoming taunts.
The third runner-up, Jack Warmflash, played dead. When Davenport shouted, "Hey, Warmfat, get over here," as if addressing a wayward puppy, the big kid snapped into inaction. Eyes glazed, shoulders slumped, and feet dragging against the first base line, Warmflash sleepwalked his way to Davenport's side amid a volley of mean-spirited salvos.
While marveling at Draper's and Warmflash's ingenuity, Jonathan doubted that their defenses prevented all barbs from reaching their intended targets. But he wondered if the same could be said about the second runner-up, Tim "the mouse" Rogers, whose compact frame, supersized ears, and squeaky voice had earned him the nickname. As in most countdowns, Rogers hummed a mantra that sounded like ommm and maintained a constant, low-grade smile. Now, when Romberg muttered, "I guess I'll take Rogers," the boy ommmed and smiled like a young Buddha. But when the captain added, "Over here, peewee!" Rogers cut off the hum, arched his shoulders, and looked Romberg in the eye. Still smiling, he then did the unthinkable.
"Hey, Romberg, what's with the name-calling?" demanded "the mouse" in a high-pitched but steady tone. "I know you flunked Duffy's math test, but that's no reason to take it out on me." Then, smile intact and ommm resumed, Rogers strolled over to Romberg's team.
Jonathan gasped. Throughout his elementary school career, not one of his fellow athletically challenged colleagues had ever dared stand up to a superior. Romberg, eying his next pick, seemed to ignore the entire rebuke, but Jonathan savored every word. Where did Rogers get the nerve? he wondered. He had always admired "the mouse" for his apparently inborn ability to project confidence, from telling captivating stories at second grade show-and-tell to outselling the competition every year at his neighborhood lemonade stand. But to confront Romberg like that took more than confidence; it took guts. Where did Rogers get the nerve?
This was no time to speculate. All eyes focused on Davenport as the count held at two: Bowman and Deutsch. Two frail, ball-bobbling boys shivering in the bone-quaking cold. Kicking the dirt beneath his flat feet, rubbing his palms together to the beat of his still-quickening pulse, oozing sweat inside his gray, hooded sweatshirt despite the wind chill, Jonathan awaited final judgment.
Davenport sneered at Deutsch and Bowman, then flashed a smile at Romberg. "Great choice, huh?" he quipped, punching his glove. "The faggot versus the geek."
"I'd go for the geek - with his brain power, you can't lose!" Jonathan blurted out.
Davenport narrowed his unblinking blue eyes, which now appeared to Jonathan like twin daggers aimed at his throbbing chest. "You talking to me, Dilbert?" he said, reverting to his default snarl.
"Oh, no, I'm actually talking to myself. No one else will, so I figured I might as well talk to me." Good save, Jonathan assured himself as sweat pooled on the cleft of his upper lip. In this game, he knew all too well, every line counted.
Davenport bristled. "You a wise-ass?"
"As it turns out, my brilliance does extend down to my hindquarters. Thanks for noticing, Bill."
"Geek."
"A fine name," said Jonathan, tugging at the strings of his soaked hood, "but I much prefer Dilbert. That's what I go by at home."
His father, a prominent TV comedy writer, had spent countless hours teaching him how to defend himself without raising a fist. But despite his best efforts, Jonathan found that no amount of laugh lines could fend off the paralyzing fear of getting picked last. As the countdown held at two, he wondered if his stomach had begun to implode.
"I'll take Deutsch," said Davenport, his snarl morphing into a devilish smirk as he delivered the final cut. "You get Bowman."
The three words rumbled like an earthquake down Jonathan's spine, dispatching aftershocks throughout his delicate limbs. "You get Bowman" infiltrated his every cell as he raced to redeem himself. "Actually, nobody really gets me, Davenport," he declared in a Rodney Dangerfield accent. "Even my mom don't understand me."
With his mind working overtime, Jonathan's body lagged behind when his team took the field. Only after Davenport bellowed, "Get moving, uncoordo, you're on Romberg's side!" did he begin his slow march toward rightfield.
As he crossed the second base line, still working on his material, Jonathan wished he could be more like "the mouse" - so confident and composed. But he could barely contain his tears. Even though this was the 17th straight time that he had gotten picked last in a team sport. And the zillionth time that Coach Frucci had looked the other way as the Final Five got lacerated. There has to be a better way, he mused.
. . .
In the year 2027, Jonathan, now 30, taught American history at Studio City Middle School, north of Hollywood. In a perfect world Jonathan would have been left alone to teach his students about the Declaration of Independence, the Emancipation Proclamation, and other liberating achievements throughout the nation's history. But Studio City needed him to help out in another department: Athletics.
That's because gym teachers had gotten too expensive. Revered at the time by the media and an increasingly sports-minded public, athletics instructors had become some of the wealthiest public servants in America. Unable to afford more than two professional coaches, Studio City now required several academic teachers to run one 75-minute gym class per day.
Forced to coach seventh-grade baseball that spring, Jonathan followed tradition at the season opener: He picked two buff 13-year-olds to captain opposing teams. That drizzly March afternoon, as he watched 24 boys start lining up beneath the school's brand-new weatherproof backstop, Jonathan noticed the downcast eyes of Shepherd, a short, rotund, freckle-faced kid who frequently tripped over his laces. Fixated on those sad brown eyes, he recalled indelible images of himself paralyzed at home plate as the countdown neared zero. When the current countdown reached seven, he feared for Shepherd's soul. And wished he could do something to put the boy out of his misery.
"Hold the count!" Jonathan shouted from home plate. As all eyes focused on him expectantly, he considered canceling the game and delivering a spontaneous lecture on the history of baseball. Seconds later, however, another idea came to mind, one he recently discovered in a reprinted Ann Landers advice column.
"All right, you guys," Jonathan announced in a shaky voice. "Just for grins, we're going to start choosing teams again." Most of the boys groaned at the coach's sudden intervention. He noticed Shepherd groaning as well but suspected the boy of playing along.
"I know, I know, it's the end of the world," Jonathan quipped. "So we might as well try changing the rules. Now I want everyone whose last name begins with the letters A through M to form a team to my left, and everyone else to form a team to my right. If the teams end up lopsided, I'll even you out myself." In the competitive culture of Studio City, this was an audacious move.
As he lay awake in bed that night, in his bookcase-lined North Hollywood studio apartment, Jonathan congratulated himself for having saved Shepherd's neck. But then he wondered: What if he got sick and a substitute teacher reverted to tradition? And what about all the other Shepherds in cutthroat schoolyards across the country? Who would be there to save them? Jonathan then reflected on the revolutionary impact of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862. It was high time, he decided, to ignite a revolution of his own.
The following week, in collaboration with Ellen Anderson, the high school's multimedia specialist, Jonathan developed a computer program called "The Captain." The program scanned a small database of student names, photos, and gym class attendance lists and randomly generated teams, fielding positions, and batting lineups. By clicking on an icon labeled "Choose Teams," a laptop-bearing coach could generate a split screen, divided by team. Each half-screen window displayed names and photos of randomly selected players in their assigned fielding positions, along with a number signifying their batting order. Athletically challenged students could choose to bar themselves from selected field positions.
That April Jonathan ran The Captain every time he coached softball, and word of the new invention spread fast. Within two months, Studio City's principal deployed it at every grade level and ordered Anderson to expand the program to include other team sports. Local and national news media outlets picked up the story in short order, and five years later the U.S. Department of Education established computerized, randomized team selection as a national athletic standard.
Despite these achievements and the riches that followed, Jonathan often lamented that he may not have gone far enough with The Captain. Especially when he and his wife played catch with their two-year-old son in the spacious backyard of their new house in Laurel Canyon. It bothered him that even after he introduced his face-saving invention, Shepherd and his fellow rejects continued to appear grief-stricken until the final out of each ballgame. And downright mortified whenever a fly ball came their way. So had the 11-year-old Jonathan and his ball-bobbling peers in their day. Except, that is, for Tim "the mouse" Rogers, who often would smile before and after dropping a fly ball. Even in his thirties, Jonathan wished he knew what made that kid tick.
. . .
In 2038, more than a decade after the debut of Jonathan's breakthrough invention, on a brilliant spring morning at the Joe DiMaggio Boys School in Tarzana, California, fifth-grader and confirmed klutz David Joplin became an indirect beneficiary. Thanks to Team Up, the latest audio version of The Captain - which called out players' names in their own, speech-synthesized voices and assigned 18 unique numbers and team logos to be displayed on their digital jerseys - the wafer-thin math whiz found himself standing unscathed in centerfield. Cognizant of the old manual approach from a fourth-grade sports history lecture, David idolized this automated, talent-blind system.
Halfway through the 90-minute gym period that balmy morning, he felt relieved that no balls had yet reached his patch of artificial turf. But he feared that would soon change when lanky Alan Green approached the plate. "Batting average: .425," he reported to himself as he rubbed his sour stomach.
After taking three pitches Green lobbed a high fly ball in David's direction. Having never caught a fly ball in the outfield, David now felt his stomach twisting into a Gordian knot. Allowing for a five-percent margin of error, he gave himself a 1-in-20 chance of making the catch. Moving backward to align with the arc of the ball, David mumbled to himself in a hypnotic monotone, "Eye on ball...eye on ball..." As the all-important orb descended and loomed larger against the pastel-blue sky, David extended his glove. Seconds later he felt the ball careen into the glove's netting. He clamped down on it with both hands.
"Awright, Joplin!" yelled second baseman Jimmy "Lightning" Lazarus, the fleet-footed winner of the fourth-grade Most Valuable Player awards in softball, football, and soccer.
"Nice catch, Joplin!" screamed shortstop Damon Wilson, whose fielding average had never sunk below the .900 mark.
"Way to go!" boomed leftfielder Bruce Calvin, an accomplished junior boxer who, for kicks, once knocked the wind out of David with a single, well-placed punch.
Coming from three athletic superstars, these cheers sparked a broad smile across David's face, a gleam in his eyes, and a rise in his usually limp posture. Savoring the rarefied air, he looked on nonchalantly as Leroy Williams stepped up to the plate, sporting black shorts and a black tank top. Without missing a beat, the stocky .366 power hitter belted the first pitch toward the same stretch of artificial turf in centerfield. Operating on automatic, David returned to the exact same position, holding up his glove to reproduce his rendezvous with greatness.
This time, however, the ball bounced off the tip of his glove and lurched toward the leftfield fence. David raced after the ball, grabbed it, and flung it toward Lazarus at second base. Missing the target by a long shot, the ball ended up at first base. Williams crossed home plate standing.
"What a spazzz!" yelled Lazarus, his head lurching backward like a marionette.
"Joplin blew it again!" Wilson screamed.
"You stink!!!" boomed Calvin. Eyes ablaze, he pounded his forehead with his right fist.
While Coach Lopez, lounging on a metallic bench in the stands, fielded a cell phone call about a real estate investment, Bruce Calvin's "You stink!!!" ricocheted within David's brain and bombarded his slender frame like a jackhammer. To stabilize, he recalculated his fielding average. And dreamed of the day when a boy could drop a fly ball without causing a stir.
. . .
Like plastics in the 1960s and software in the '90s, sports was the hot field of the mid-21st century. Anxious to cash in, David Joplin enrolled in UCLA's graduate program in sports statistics in the fall of 2050. Concentrating on ice hockey stats and their cultural implications, he studied hard on weekdays and hit the ubiquitous sports bars (formerly cineplexes) on weekends. In a single evening session at one of these multiscreen spectator centers, David could root with like-minded fans for the UCLA football team, submit an e-vote for Major League Baseball commissioner, and watch live feed from a lunar golf tournament.
The following summer he earned his keep as a camp counselor for 18 middle school boys whose parents worked at UCLA. One overcast morning, on one of dozens of immaculate, green athletic fields now dominating the Westwood campus, he found himself coaching a two-hour-long baseball game. The game marked his first appearance on a baseball diamond since high school.
After picking teams via the wireless Captain 5.0, David watched the batting team score a run off a double and single. Then Zach Bronson, a burly power hitter with matching baseball tattoos on his arms, came up to bat. All outfielders moved back. After three pitches Bronson jettisoned the ball on an elliptical trajectory toward leftfield. Precisely where Tommy Granger, a Lilliputian, pimple-faced, young theologian, now stood.
For most anyone in Granger's position, this would be an easy catch. But as the ball arced toward the boy's glove, David froze. Perched on a bench behind the first base line, he couldn't help but recall the countless "easy catches" he had somehow managed to blow in his day. When the ball bounced behind Granger, David heard shortstop Joe Polumbo, a wiry, wild-eyed kid with a blond ponytail, scream, "Granger, you stink! "
The barb set off a tidal wave of painful childhood memories. To suppress them, he pictured a scoreboard displaying Granger's current fielding average (.000) beside Bronson's new batting average (1.000). But as Polumbo continued to slice into Granger, David could no longer contain himself with statistical distractions. Suddenly, an image of a hockey rink penalty box bubbled up from memory, an image he had viewed countless times at the sports bars. He then wondered: Why couldn't baseball have a penalty box for verbal offenders, just as hockey did for physical ones?
David leaped to his feet and approached the first base line. "Okay, Joe," David shouted as Bronson barreled across home plate. "If I hear one more insult out of you, I'm putting you in the penalty box!"
"Hunh?" Polumbo grunted, narrowing his gaze.
"You see that old, rusty, green dumpster behind the backstop?" said David, pointing to the spot with his handheld communicator. "Well, the next time I hear you putting anyone down, Joe, you're going to spend an inning in that box. When your time is up, you can rejoin your team; but if you spout off any more insults, you're out of the game. The same goes for all you guys!"
Polumbo shrugged his shoulders and twirled his ponytail. "Come on, Mr. Joplin; Granger totally screwed up! What'd you expect me to do, man, just stand there?"
"Joe, I'm warning you."
"Why are you standing up for that wuss anyway?" Gesturing with an index finger, Polumbo glared at the coach with Bruce Calvin eyes, eyes that reduced him to a hapless 11-year-old.
David shuddered. "All right, that's enough, Joe - get into the box, now!"
As Polumbo skipped over to the big green dumpster, three of his teammates joined in a spirited chorus of "Granger sucks! Granger sucks!" David dispatched them to the box as well, boosting its population to four. He then moved close to the inmates to stand guard. The five players who remained on the field quickly redeployed to minimize the damage. The score was now 5-4, in favor of Granger's team.
Forty minutes, one inning, and six runs later, Granger dropped another fly ball in left field, maintaining his perfect .000 fielding average. But his just-released teammates, now back on the field, kept quiet. Down 10-5, they couldn't afford to let off steam against a fellow teammate. When David witnessed the fruit of his snap decision, he realized he was on to something. As his charges departed the field, he took pause to behold the first penalty box of its kind.
Little did he know what he was looking at. This was not just an abandoned, dilapidated garbage dump, but a vibrant compost heap containing the detritus of the past (Jonathan Bowman's invention of The Captain [2027]... Bruce Calvin's "You stink!" [2038]...) and the seeds of the future (...Joplin's best-seller The Penalty Box: From Peer Abuse to Mutual Support [2052]... U.S. Dept. of Athletics' adaptation of the penalty box system as national standard [2058]...).
At that moment, however, as he gazed at the empty dumpster, David worried about the effectiveness of his new invention: He assessed a 10-percent probability that the penalty box would outlast that summer.
. . .
On a brisk morning in late November 2065, inside Mickey Mantle Superdome at Babe Ruth Elementary in Buffalo, a panel of four experts convened the closing session of the Tenth Annual Conference on Sports Innovation. Seated at a folding table perched on a makeshift stage between the pitcher's mound and second base, the panel reported on emerging coaching technologies to an enthusiastic grandstand audience of 25,000. Most came to see the two presenters at opposite ends of the table: Panel moderator Jonathan Bowman, inventor of The Captain, and keynote speaker David Joplin, penalty box inventor and founder and CEO of Penalty, Inc. Both sported red-and-white pinstriped Babe Ruth Elementary softball uniforms.
"Our clients love Penalty 2060's two-way digital displays that show everyone in and out of the box the exact half-inning when penalized players can return to active play," said David at the close of his talk. "The 2060 has upped our profits by 18.9 percent, but the only bottom line I care about is its impact in the field. I sleep better at night knowing our product enables millions of kids across the globe to play ball without having to dodge hurtful insults. Thank you, all!"
After a boisterous round of applause, Jonathan asked questioners to form a queue from home plate to the pitcher's mound, where a high-amp microphone was stationed. After waiting through 11 softball questions that amounted to a penalty box lovefest, the last questioner, a sprightly white-haired man in a navy business suit and red tie, took the mound and seized the mike.
"Hey, can we talk straight for a minute?" asked the man in a high-pitched, ebullient tone as he looked the moderator in the eye.
"Yes?" said Jonathan, smiling in anticipation of further pleasantries.
"With all due respect, coaching devices like the penalty box and The Captain are well-intended. But let's face it: They're far from foolproof."
Upon hearing the second "f" in "foolproof," Jonathan's heart started pounding. "Would you care to prove it, my dear fool?" he cracked, sparking some polite laughter in the stands.
"I'll give you a quick example," said the man, waving off the quip. "Yesterday I watched my grandson Rich, a fifth-grader, playing softball on this very field. When he dropped a line drive at second base, his entire team pelted him with insults. Then the batting team joined in, calling him everything from 'spazzo' to 'dufus dumbhead.' The coach, Jim Jackson, who also happens to be the principal, tried to squeeze everyone but my Rich - that's seventeen boys - into that penalty box behind the third base line. But because penalty boxes fit only nine, he had to cancel the game."
"You raise an important point," said David Joplin. "Clearly, we need to build larger boxes."
"Or smaller kids," added Jonathan, wiping his moist forehead with a tissue as 25,000 looked on. He wondered why, at the age of 68, on a field that had been upgraded countless times since his youth, he still felt like the 11-year-old version of himself facing down Bill Davenport.
The questioner grabbed the mike. "You could redesign the box, but you'd be barking up the wrong tree."
The words "wrong tree" bombarded David's narrow frame like a jackhammer, just as Bruce Calvin's "You stink!!!" had 27 years earlier. Feeling his stomach knot up, he asked, "W-what makes you say that?" He tried to console himself by noting that 92 percent of the feedback from the mound that morning had been positive.
"I say this because nothing can absolutely prevent kids from picking on each other. For almost forty years these coaching devices have only put a band-aid on the problem. The ultimate solution is not an outside job, my friend, but an inside job."
David shuddered. "With all due respect, sir, studies in the Journal of Sports Technology show that, in schools that deploy both technologies, the on-field insult rate decreases by ninety-five percent."
"True, but you're ignoring several follow-up studies in that same publication indicating that, in those same schools, the insult rate skyrocketed off the field. The kids who avoid insults on the ball field end up getting pummeled by verbal assaults in classrooms, hallways, and cafeterias."
As he scanned the unusually quiet ballpark crowd, David felt an ulcer coming on. "Well, there's only so much a penalty box can do."
The man rolled his eyes. "I'll say. Studies in the Journal of Sports Psychology show that even on the field, kids who bobble balls or strike out are getting bombarded by dirty looks. These are visual insults, my friend, and for kids without thick skins, they hurt just as much as the verbal ones. Like I said earlier, the ultimate solution is an inside job."
David drew a deep breath. "And I suppose you have the ultimate solution?"
"I do," said the man, now beaming. "In my seminars, I empower sensitive kids to feel so good about themselves that they lose all fear of getting picked last - or picked on. I also get bullies so jazzed about life that they lose all desire to put down other kids on the baseball diamond and beyond."
"And what makes you such an expert?" asked David, caressing his sour stomach and speculating on the guy's "batting average" with his young customers.
"Glad you asked!" The man rubbed his hands together with gusto. "When I grew up in this city, kids called me lots of names, from pip-squeak to zit-face. I didn't understand it then, but because my folks showed me how to feel good about myself - and I mean really good - those names rolled off my back like raindrops on duck feathers." The crowd roared.
"No quacking?" said Jonathan, eying the digital clock sticker on his bit-down thumbnail. "Look, sir, we're running out of time. Would you please make your point?"
"Okay, fast-forward to 2062. I retired from my software sales business and finally had the time to watch my grandkids play ball. And get treated like roadkill whenever they screwed up. Despite The Captain and Penalty 2060. It then struck me that I could offer the schools a much more powerful technology: What I call 'Three Steps to High Self-Esteem.'"
"Which are?" asked Jonathan, now clinging to every word.
"Well, you could ask my grandson, who dropped that line drive. Did you know he bobbled that ball on purpose, just for grins? You - or anyone in this fine audience - might also sign up for one of our introductory seminars at Esteem3.com. Or simply purchase our latest audio collection, I'm Wonderful! in three easy installments. Here's a sampler."
As the man raced from the pitcher's mound to the podium and offered the panel five introductory NanoDisks from his suit pocket, Jonathan wondered, Where did this guy get the nerve? Staring blankly ahead, he plucked an ND from the salesman's weathered hand. When his eyes fell on the ND cover image of a big-eared boy selling lemonade, he gasped. And then raced to his car to pop in that ND. At long last, he told himself as he crossed home plate, he would have his answer.
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