Ultimate Sports (20 page)

In 1977 Mr. Dygard published his first work of fiction, a novel about a football quarterback with a strong fear of being
injured, appropriately titled
Running Scared
. Writing fiction on weekends, usually in the mornings, Mr. Dygard produced more than a dozen sports novels before he retired from the AP in 1993. The most popular of these books are
Halfback Tough
and
Quarterback Walk-On
. His most recent novels are
The Re-bounder
, a story about an outstanding high-school basketball player who injures another player and the difficulties he faces as a result, and
Infield Hit
, a story about the problems a high-school baseball player encounters in comparing himself with the father he hardly knows, who was a major-league star.

The event depicted in “Just Once” is based on an incident described to Mr. Dygard by a lineman friend, who told him how scary it was to have everyone on the field trying to knock him down.

The
whole adventure began as a diversion, a simple intermission between high school and college. My dad asked me to take a scuba diving class with him. It was the first novel thing that had come along in quite a while. For a couple of years I’d thought about going to medical school, either that or doing physics research, but all those plans had begun to look like an awful lot of effort. Coming very close to the end of high school, I was having senior burnout. I’d already been accepted at the university, with a pretty big scholarship, so my next four years were planned. Scuba looked like a wonderful interruption.

As it turned out, there was far more to it than that.

February was nothing but rain and snow and slush, cars needing jump starts in the morning, people out of the office
with the flu. The exercise bike wasn’t as much fun as it had been when I bought it. I needed something different, and scuba diving caught my attention one day, in a window display I saw from the bus, which I was riding because the car had been buried by the snowplow. The display had colorful fish like in a Jacques Cousteau film, and a scuba diving guy and girl with bubbles coming up from them. The sign said,
SCUBA DIVING
—
THE ANSWER TO THE WINTER BLAHS
!!!

I signed up as soon as I could, and the woman in the store asked me if I’d be bringing my own buddy to the classes at the Y. My wife, Susannah, wasn’t especially interested, and Sandy’s only eleven. My older daughter, Patrice, would be the perfect buddy, I said to myself. She’s strong and agile, and she’s a science nut, which I figured would be helpful in scuba. And frankly, she looked like she could use a break from her studies. About the time the fourth storm of the season put a foot of clean snow on top of two feet of dirty, the idea seemed better every day.

With the entire night shift at the hospital ready to quit if the policy didn’t change immediately, I was in no position to do anything as frivolous as go underwater and breathe from a tank. It was a perfect time for Patrice to take classes with her dad before going off to college next year.

I wish it had been me. I’m old enough in my mind, just not in their rules. They wouldn’t know I was only eleven if my dad didn’t tell them.

With three essays due by the end of March and the physics tutorial I ran twice a week and the knowledge that I was setting myself up for another decade of study after high school—I was ready for a change. Nothing at school was very exciting. My friends and I had agreed that the boys in our class were too immature even to bother dating anymore. Worse still, our bunch of girls was beginning to be tired of each other.

Shifting my schedule around gave me eight Wednesday nights free to meet my dad at the Y and learn to dive.

Jim and Patrice began to approach Wednesday evenings like a couple of children who’d formed a new club.

The first time we were supposed to clear our masks underwater I did it, and the self-confidence felt great. Add to that the familiarity of Boyle’s law, Charles’s law, Dalton’s law, and Henry’s law—which are pretty basic physics
stuff—and Wednesday nights were pure fun. Even in the pool at the Y, where the underwater sights are extremely dull.

The self-contained underwater breathing apparatus, or scuba, pioneered by Jacques Cousteau himself, is one of those simple-but-complex things that make the difference between what human beings can do by themselves and what they can do with an imaginative device. The tank and regulator make breathing underwater as comfortable as breathing in air. Fins provide sleek mobility, the snorkel and the buoyancy compensator (BC) are there for safety, and with some knowledge of the hazards and of how to keep from dying of air embolism and other terrible things, off you go.

In fact, the course was mainly a set of lessons in safety. Kind of like driver’s ed. Getting in a car and starting it are pretty simple things; the crucial part is knowing what to do with all that power.

Well, on Saturday mornings I started hanging around the dive shop where I’d first seen the window display. I’d go in there and plan which regulator I’d buy, and I’d read diving magazines, and I’d compare different kinds of BCs, and I’d talk with the divers. I was learning the lingo: “First rule of diving: Never, never, never hold your breath.” “Plan your dive and dive your plan.” “There are old divers and there are bold divers. But there ain’t no old, bold divers.” “S A.F.E. means Slowly Ascend From Every dive.” They tell you to ascend sixty feet per minute to keep your lungs from exploding. I even filled out a
ticket to win a diving trip to the Caribbean and dropped it in the little treasure trunk sitting there on the counter. I began to daydream about going to a tropical island. Me, who’d never been to one.

For my dad, converting Fahrenheit to Centigrade and vice versa was a little bit tricky, but what really stumped him was the gas laws. He understood the nitrogen-oxygen-carbon dioxide relationships, but I had to keep reminding him of the decreased volume-increased density connection. I gave him sample exercises to do after class, as we sat at the kitchen table drinking the banana milk shakes I had been making all winter long. He passed every one of the quizzes. We were good diving buddies; the water exercises were designed to equip us to cope with various kinds of emergencies, and we learned buddy breathing and BC use and decompression rates.

The phone call came while Jim and Patrice were away for an entire Saturday doing their open-water checkout dive. Neither Sandy nor I had any idea that Jim had even
tried
to win a trip to the Caribbean, let alone filled out the lucky ticket. We had six hours to plan, to get the suitcases out and put them in the dining room, to go out and buy ourselves snorkels and fins, and to decide just exactly how we’d announce it when they got home.

The bay was cold and murky. We wore full wet suits with hoods, we could barely see our diving instructor, and the old cans, rusty anchor chains, and mossy boat hulls were genuinely disappointing. For this I spent eight Wednesday nights of my life?

We passed the open-water checkout dive, Patrice and me, and we came out with our certification cards. It wasn’t the kind of diving I’d been reading about in the magazines at the shop, but we were in the water and we were breathing, and we checked out. We walked in the door ready to show our brand-new cards and take Susannah and Sandy out for pizza.

I got to watch for them out the window and call Mommy when I saw the car. We had our bathing suits on under our clothes and we stripped off our clothes fast and put on our snorkels and fins and stood in the dining room shivering when they walked in the door. Mommy pretended to sound mad. She said, “Jim, something has happened. We’ve had to change our plans. Something has come up.” She was trying to go on like this, all upset, and Daddy and Patrice were holding little cards in the air and looking shocked at how Mommy and I were all undressed for the beach in the dining room, and
Mommy’s upset voice collapsed and she started laughing and we both told.

“First time I ever won anything in my life! This is not a dream! We are going to the tropics to dive the reef!” Daddy was so excited he was like a kid and I was like the parent because I knew hours before he did and I wasn’t all bug-eyed in surprise.

We made our plans for the girls’ spring break. I took one of the several weeks of vacation time I had coming. Let the nursing staff tend to their own unrest without my coddling them and soothing their feelings for a week. I was off to the Caribbean. Just like that.

Jim’s boyishness has given me a lot of treats over the years, I’ll admit. I was overjoyed to think about a week of snorkeling and reading and resting in the shade of a palm tree.

From senior burnout to a week in the tropics was an easy switch to make. I put my schoolbooks and winter clothes out of my mind. Sandy and I bought new bathing suits in the Cruise Department. We each tried on about a dozen suits and came home giddy in the pouring rain, wearing our new sunglasses and smiling at everybody on the slushy street.

My friends were delirious with envy, of course. I promised to send postcards.

At the dive shop where I went with my dad they said there would be plenty enough to sec with snorkel and fins, and Daddy bought me a plastic fishwatching book. It has pictures of hundreds of colorful reef fish in it, and it’s waterproof so it can go underwater. I would get to be the one to hold the book when we would go out in the boat to the reef and Daddy and Patrice would go diving down deep. At the store the man showed me in the book twenty different fish I’d be able to see just with a snorkel if I could hold my breath pretty long. I proved to him I could hold it a long time.

Looking out the window of the airplane, I understood the word “aquamarine.” The Caribbean is aquamarine. The most placid shade imaginable—and yet so exciting. Real scuba diving in real water in the real world.

The hibiscus were wonderful, big and rich in the tropical sun. And the coconuts. And the sea grape trees. And the water! I never was in such water in my life. Clear, warm, gentle, buoyant, with black, spiny urchins and glowing, pink conchs close to shore, and an entire school of squid that lived just under the dock of the hotel.

I went down there and had to laugh at what we’d had for our checkout dive. Here, the visibility was forty, fifty feet in front of us, with sunlight. And the varieties offish and other wildlife were too many to count, all swimming back and forth right in front of our eyes.

As we went around down there I got to thinking about my life. I spent my childhood walking to the outhouse and back. When the car broke down we walked till we could afford to get it fixed. I saw a lot of the side of the road. It was a world with rules, and I learned how they worked. The big guys ate the little guys, and if you were a little guy you hustled to try to keep ahead of the big guys. I never went outside the county I was born in till I was eighteen, and then I joined up. And I saw that world too, and it has its rules and I know how they work. The big guys eat the little guys and the little guys hustle. When I got out, I went to work, and it was the same thing.

On the outside, if you’re just looking in, it all looks pretty. Underneath, there’s all that eating and hustling going on.

And that’s the way it is down under the water in the tropics. It’s beautiful, I’ll say that for it. It takes your breath away. It lets you be a little kid, wandering around staring and playing. You can gawk all day long at this peaceful-looking scene. It’s a panorama, that’s what it is. You have to look close to notice the predators and the prey, but they’re right in front of you.

It was heaven. From my first sight of a three-inch purple and orange fairy basslet slipping in and out of lacy little coral windows, I was hooked.

A young yellowtail damselfish with jewels for spots on its electric blue sides hovered in front of me; I went close up, staring through my mask, and the fish slid past my face, a silky breeze of fins—a miracle of a meeting in the bright sunlit Caribbean afternoon.

Jellyfish. Some are built like bells and maybe they even ring, in voices only they can hear. When they lose pieces of themselves, they replace them. Their cells can reconstitute a whole new body amazingly fast. Researchers use hydra and hydroid jellyfish to study growth and regeneration.

Even the sponges. They grow on the reef in forms like vases, urns, bowls. And the tubeworms. Just to look at them living on the coral is better than any of the museum trips my art class ever took. These amazing pieces of life have formed themselves—are forming themselves—and we can just lie suspended in the water and watch them at it. We can touch them, feel their textures. Some of them have heads like morning glories.

Underwater, the entire system is in a graceful, continually evolving equilibrium. The reef itself is a live thing, being built constantly by the coral polyps. They’re tiny animals that build limestone cups to live in, the limestone itself coming directly from the water.

Our native diving guide, Sydney, has been in the water since he was a child. He wears shiny jewelry and speaks in rolling melodies. “Watch the sea fens waving—they will show you how the current is going.” “Will you be pleased
to go to another part of the reef tomorrow, Miss Patrice? Mr. Jim? There I can show you some more different corals, and you will like it, I think.”

Yes, yes, and yes. Sydney the Black Beauty can take me to any part of the reef he wants. I’ll just go finning along beside him, feeling graceful, noticing how elegant the world is in its intricate details. It’s the closest I’ve ever come to pure, uncomplicated happiness.