My brother and I are completely different people.
For one, I don’t stop talking, whether or not I have anything to say. Having a conversation with him is like trying to pull teeth from Siegfried and Roy’s Bengal tiger—it’s both impossible and dangerous. I’m also the more ambitious one in the family. The most effort my brother puts into his day is to make sure he catches Seinfeld reruns on TBS every night.
Yet there is one thing that has connected us over the years: sports.
I can’t make a joke about my brother’s athletic ability, though—he’s always been more talented in that realm.
I was on one of the best basketball teams in New Jersey—the Christian Brothers Academy (CBA) Colts—for my four years of high school. The reason I don’t say I played basketball there is because, well, I didn’t. I was the glorified walk-on who scored a whopping 29 career points at the varsity level. My last name became synonymous with “Rudy,” so much so that during my senior year, my friends got the entire cheering section—the Colt Crazies—to sit down and chant my name for the entire fourth quarter during a blowout until my coach put me in the game.
Truth is, I wasn’t a bench-warmer because my coach didn’t like me. I just wasn’t good enough. In fact, I was slow, awkward, and un-athletic.
For the starting lineups of every game, I would stand at the end of the human tunnel formed by the rest of my team and bump chests with the starters. I decided to really give our starting center a good bump at the beginning of this particular game; he had the same idea. We both jumped, and his stocky 6’5” frame overpowered my wiry 5’11” body and sent me sliding across the gym floor to the delight of my teammates and the Crazies. The only noise that could be heard during the ensuing National Anthem was the howling laughter of everyone in the gym (including my mother).
That was one of my career highlights.
My brother, on the hand, has always been a bit more suave when it comes to athletic events—especially in his main sport, baseball. He’s three years younger than I am and has been competing with me in sports for as long as I can remember. I grew up in a neighborhood with two other boys, and all we did was play basketball and baseball. By virtue of numbers, my brother was forced to play with the older kids. He didn’t seem to mind; he was better than most of us anyway.
But despite his athletic prowess, bad things just seem to happen to him more often then they happen to me. My brother entered CBA last year, when I was a senior, and had high hopes of making the baseball team and becoming one of the school’s star players. Unfortunately, the coaches didn’t have the same idea, and cut him after the first round of tryouts.
Now, more than often, my brother is pretty apathetic, but for once, to my great surprise, he actually showed some emotion. My mother forced me to pick him up from tryouts that day, and to my dismay I drove home the world’s unhappiest kid.
Then, about a week later, a strange thing happened. My brother showed he had a work ethic that was beyond what I thought possible for him. He was determined to go through the same process the next year and make the team.
Then another strange thing happened. I started caring more about his quest to make the team the next year more than I ever cared about my own athletic pursuits. And that’s the beauty of sports; it allows people to become engrossed in another person’s peaks and troughs more than their own. It has the power to engage the observer as much as it does the participant.
And that’s what I have loved about sports for so long. It’s given me a chance to care more about my quiet, disinterested brother than is possible through, say, conversation. Plus, it’s refreshing to care more about someone else than yourself every once in a while. Try it sometime.
