FEATURE
PICKED LAST BY MARC BRULÉ
O
“
h, okay. We’ll take Marc.” I often heard that statement, with a sigh attached, when we were picking teams to play baseball or hockey in my childhood. Meet the geek. I wasn’t good at sports. I didn’t know the hockey players like my friends did. I was scrawny and uncoordinated. We often played hockey on the street, in which case I was most often put in net, where stick handling was not really necessary. But here’s the real kicker—when we played hockey on the local frozen park pond, what position was I chosen to play? Referee! Yep, let’s let Marc watch the game with skates on so he can feel like he’s involved. It’s quite laughable now, but it wasn’t at the time. I did have things working against me. My skates were always hand-me-downs from my neighbour. By then, there was little support in the ankles, and they didn’t always fit. I don’t want to sound like I’m crying the blues. What I can say is that those events had an effect on my selfperception. I had a definite sense of inferiority since all my friends were athletic, and I wasn’t. There was an expected norm—and I was the Frenchman that didn’t like hockey! We live in a world filled with expectations. In sport, we place expectations on ourselves and others. The team expects everyone to do their best and perform well. The coach expects the individual to train and be prepared. Parents want their child to be the next pro athlete in the sport. We all want to win.
18 SEVEN SPRING 2020
But what happens when expectations are not met? What happens when expectations are not realistic? We can be hard on ourselves and others. More than that, we can begin to determine our value based on our performance. I had one good experience in sports growing up. My grade seven and eight Phys Ed teacher was Mr. Lemer (pronounced Lemay). He put me on the basketball team in grade eight, which was a shock to me and likely to most of the other players as well. I was thrilled. Me… Marc Brule... on a basketball team. Amazing! I spent most of that season keeping the bench warm for other players. But I was still on the team! However, I had one of the most embarrassing experiences on that team. We were in a tournament and it was the beginning of the third quarter. I had not played yet, so the coach put me on for a shift. Unfortunately, I had forgotten we switched ends, so when the ball was passed to me, I began running toward our own basket and was stopped by a whistle blow. All the grade eight girls watching laughed, and I returned to the bench feeling totally embarrassed. And so ended my basketball career. Funny thing is, being on that team is a highlight to this very day. Why? The coach communicated to me that he saw more than the awkward kid who wasn’t any good at the game. He saw someone who had value and needed encouragement. I bumped into him forty years later, and we talked about it. He said he wanted to build me up in some way. We both knew I was not good at basketball. Yet
