HOLY SHIT I didn't know you were THAT good

I was really good at soccer when I was a kid. I played it a lot. Two seasons a year for seven years from the age of 4 to 11. Fluke injury to break a rib and then score with non-dominant foot later in the same game good or "stop scoring, you're making the other team feel bad" good.

Well, shit happens and after a certain point I didn't play much sports anymore. However, every now and then I would wind up playing soccer again. Maybe at a summer camp event day or randomly with other people here and there. And every time, like clockwork, it would surprise the shit out of people when I would kick a ball into the upper corner of the net from a distance or dribble past a defender or whatever else. It's been years now, but I suspect with a little practice a lot of it would come back to me. Me and soccer just work well together.

I have fond memories of soccer camps growing up, learning all sorts of really cool and useful things about the sport. Hard hard work, but fun.

 

I was extremely sick when I was a child, spending ages 6-9 in and out of hospital on a fairly regular basis. I once spent so much time in hospital for an extended period of time that I even had to learn to walk again. Because of this, it meant that I didn't start playing any sports until I was about 10 years old. I had no learning experiences, training, coaching or anything. The only reason I really decided to play, apart from the obvious desire to be outside and running around, was that my friends were all involved, and I was socially missing out.

That being said, I was naturally extremely good at T-Ball (then Softball) straight away. In our local division, we had the one side that was clearly superior to the others (had all the experienced good players, better club, better equipment, coach etc), and 3 other sides that would basically compete for the right to make the other finals position. My very first game I was terrible, and I clearly remember getting the "sympathy Man of the Match" award, to make myself feel better. After a couple more games, once I understood the rules, I was clearly the best player, not only in my own side, but also compared to the other teams, including the dominate one. Once the season finished, after which we lost the Final, albeit in a extremely close game, the other side asked me to join their team instead. I refused, as I wanted to play with my friends and have fun, and continued to play onto Softball for a couple more seasons.

Once representative teams started to become a serious option, my desire to play softball/baseball diminished*, as not being an overly popular sport in Australia, more and more of my friends were playing Cricket instead, and as they were both played on Saturdays, I changed sports. Being arguably a more complex sport (despite the obvious "hit the ball as hard as you can" aspect) at a young age, I still managed to pick up the basic fundamentals of the sport rather quickly, again without previous coaching or training. I dabbled in and out of representative teams for a couple of seasons, playing with more experienced players that were training 3-4 times a week, but for me sport was more about the social side of things, so that sort of stuff didn't really appeal to me too much. I guess surprise was just extended to my parents more than anything, who were told at one stage I wouldn't be able to walk, and that my hand-eye coordination would be poor for the rest of my life because of my sickness, to excelling at sports that required these exact skills, straight away.

Also, I'm probably not the only person that can attest to this, and it's hardly a sport anyway, but my friends are constantly surprised (infuriated) by how much my Pool game improves the more I drink. I'm generally good anyway, but I'll beat them by even more while I otherwise can't keep myself from falling over or slurring through incoherent sentences.


* I'm actually playing baseball this summer with some friends once I get home from my European holiday. I'm hoping I can pick it up straight away again. It should be interesting.

 

I played just about everything growing up, but my favorite was bowling. To this day, I can maintain a 190 average.

Oh, wait. You meant real sports...

 

I'm good at hockey. I've been playing it ever since I grew up and played at the DII level in college. I've always been drawn to the game and am lucky enough to have some talent.

Currently I play in beer leagues and for the most part am a massive sandbagger. Its surprisingly hard to find a team to play for in a good beer league in Florida/San Diego.

 

My skill in all sports, or other endeavours requiring skill, ranges from holding my own to absolute suckage.

I picked the wrong time to go on a tear when I was shooting pool with a buddy in a dive bar known for its shady clientele. I somehow beat my friend, then beat a seedy looking dude who slapped four quarters on the table. I tried to leave the table, but he insisted on another chance to beat me. He got angry, and decided that I was fucking with him after, plainly lacking any kind of skill, I won not once, not twice, but three more times.

About that time I "heard my mother calling me" and we got the fuck out of Dodge before I got beaten senseless.

 

I'm a pretty damn good swimmer, and you probably wouldn't guess it by looking at me. I'm short and kind of stalky - I probably look like a wrestler more than anything else. But, I swam for 9 years in a swim club until grade 12, and for the last 6-8 months I've been swimming regularly.

Now, it's all relative, of course. I really doubt I could make it on a university team or anything like that (and even if I did make it, I would be shitty)... But unless you're a high-ish level competitive swimmer, you'd have a tough time beating me at sprint butterfly.

 

I am miserably bad (I'm talking don't throw footballs in public bad) at basically any sport involving a ball. Give me a baseball, football, volleyball, basketball and whatever other balls you can think off and I will inevitably be awful. Fortunately, the only sport I ever gave a shit about was Hockey. I was pretty good, won a few league championships, got a nice plaque for being the highest scoring player in the league one year, made the California State Semi's with the travel team I played on.

It wasn't the achievements in Hockey that were the best part for me though. My best friend and I played on a team together, he was good but I was quite a bit better. Anyways, he never got to see his Dad much after his parents split up. At the time, his Dad was an NHL agent and spent 95% of his time in Russia with his new girlfriend. His Dad, who had never come to see his son play before, somehow winds up making to our Semi-Finals playoff game. We're down by 1, I catch a breakaway and score with 2 minutes left to tie it. My favorite play I ever made was a minute later when I set my friend up and he scored the game winner to put us in the finals. His Dad went CRAZY. My friends Dad died in a car accident in Russia a few months later.

Stupid thread is making me want to hit the ice realllll bad.

 

I have always bern able to jump through the roof. I could dunk when I was a 5'9" freshman. Unfortunately, I couldn't dribble or shoot, so basketball was never in the cards. I joined the track team my sophomore year and found my calling in high jump. By the time I was a senior, I was 6'0" tall and I could clear 6'8".

I won a number of my track meets with only having to jump one time. I would literally sit and watch the entire meet and when the last guy would miss his third attempt, I would tell them to raise the bar an inch or two, clear it on the first try, and pack my bag.

 

I have mentioned that I used to wrestle in high school, and college. I picked up two team national titles, and two team all Americans, all in freestyle. And two more team all Americans in Greco-Roman. And I won two individual All Americans.

The match that really let me know that I was actually pretty damned decent was my senior year. I was wrestling the number one kid in the country. I honestly didn't expect to win, because he hadn't lost a match since his 7th grade year in the high school state tournament. Now normally kids in 7th grade in Oklahoma wrestle in the Jr. High state tournament. So the fact that this guy hadn't lost since the finals of a tournament he shouldn't have even been in suggest that he was pretty decent.

In fact my head coach didn't even watch the match because everyone (me included) just kind of assumed I was going to lose. Well six minutes one really big lat throw, and a whole bunch of tempo control later I pulled out 6-2 win.

As sad as it is to say the crowd roar after that win is still one of the biggest moments of my life.

I only played varsity football my senior year. I did however lead Oklahoma in sacks so I guess I was O.K. (See what I did there?)

 

I grew playing tennis a lot with my pop as he was a very good player himself. That's nothing special though because I played for so long it would be kind of ridiculous if I wasn't good at it. But whenever I played with my dad, we would basically just hit around for 45 mins or so and then wind down with serving to each other for a while. This was always my favorite part for some reason. I just loved cranking the ball as hard as I could and despite my small stature was able to put a very good amount of speed on it. In high school I decided to give baseball a try since our tennis team was an absolute joke. Lo and behold I had one hell of a fastball that I could locate well too, probably because of all those years of service practice. What sucked was I couldn't throw anything that required spin, and anything that involved a strange grip I couldn't control at all. Further, because all I practiced with my dad was serving as hard as I could while keeping it in, I had no second serve, so I wasn't much of a competitive tennis player either. I could hit around for hours, was great at volleying, and my first serve was terrific, but without a second serve your game will hit a plateau pretty damn quick.

In retrospect, my dad really chose a pretty stupid way of honing my skills at the sport.

 

I used to do a lot of College Sailing competing for the school. We traveled around to schools from Kingston Ontario all the way down to William and Mary University. To say I was uncompetitive is an understatement. While I'm a great sailor, a competitive 2 person boat would have a combined weight of 240 pounds. COMBINED. My boat? We weighed in at around 450 pounds (mostly me). But I enjoyed the hell out of it and the booze rained down from the sky and all was good.

At one of my regattas my father just happened to be in the neighborhood so he stopped by to take a look. I'm doing my usual Middle to Back of the pack routine. One race however I caught a gust and clear air and I'm out there kicking ass. The boat in second place is about 2-3 minutes behind me.

I'm working so hard at staying in the lead that I lose sight of the turn buoy. I do a quick scan and see a buoy, realize I can sail right at it and maintain my lead. So I execute a perfect tack and am kicking ass still. After a minute or so I realize that no one is following me. Confused I look around and realize that I had sighted the wrong turn buoy and went way off course. In about 4 minutes time I went from first, to dead last. With my father watching on shore.


To this day some 6 years later I still hear about it.

 

Thumb wrestling. No, really.

 

I'm quite skinny but very agile. I generally take to any sport and I played many growing up (hockey, lacrosse, football and yes, even soccer). My biggest downfall is definitely a lack of foot speed, but my hands are really good. I remember my sister getting pissed off one day when she wanted to practice her setting in volleyball and I could do it better than she could, even though it was my first time and she'd been playing for like six years.

The sport I'm best at, and love, is hockey. I say "best" only for someone who never made it past Junior B (only played a couple games). I've always felt that if I was about two inches shorter and 30 pounds heavier I could have played Junior A, and maybe some level a bit past that. Had a bit of a resurgence in confidence this summer when I played a higher division that included some AHL players. They obviously took it as a light summer work out, but the level of hockey was still good, and I dominated, at least defensively. Oh and we won the championship!

For me, the main measure of my skill has always come from where I place on outdoor rinks. One of the many awesome things about hockey is that in outdoor scrimmages, everyone can play, regardless of age or skill level, you just don't attack opposing players who are weaker than you. So like, when a little kid gets the puck, you let the little kid on your team go after him, and it goes like that up to the adults. I remember when I was the little kid I couldn't wait to handle the puck more. At this point, because outdoor is slower than real hockey, I can dominate with my hands, but I pass the puck instead of going for the goal at least 80% of the time. There are many guys who would beat me in a race, but it's been years since I've played outdoor and haven't been one of the top players on the ice.

 

I'm a pretty darn good dancer. Yeah yeah dancing's not a sport, whatever, I suck at sports so this is the closest I've got. To be clear, I was never going to cut it as a professional, but to this day I have solid ballet technique and can go take an intermediate hip hop class with no problem.

In college, I was in a student dance company. We were quite good if I do say so myself - I was actually one of the worst dancers in the group. We had a problem, though: we were all-female. You'd think that there'd be a high demand for fit, flexible girls wearing tight/little clothing on stage, but unfortunately we were competing with two equally talented co-ed groups that basically filled theaters by simulating sex on stage in a variety of new and interesting ways. Thus, we spent the weeks before every show begging our friends to buy tickets and to tell anyone, everyone, to come see us.

You could tell this was not top of our friends' agendas, and I can't blame them. We stank of desperation.

Finally, the group I lived with sophomore year rallied for one of our shows and came out in full force. They were rowdy after pieces, yelled our names, all that good stuff. After the show, I ran out to thank them for coming. This girl who I was not super close with but was in our group grabbed my arm and told me, with audible shock in her voice, "Wow, you guys are actually good!"

Backhanded compliment of the century, but I'll take it!

 

I was a terrific basketball player in middle and high school. Not quite good enough to make the varsity squad (plus I'm only 5' 6" so there's that.)

Flash forward to my early 40's. I'm a partner in a big lawfirm and we have an annual summer event (for the summer associates) at one of my partner's house. Mexican theme, in his backyard (very nice Santa Monica home), lots of very high-end tequilla. The event usually turned into a shot fest and, since my wife and I had a hotel nearby, I joined in. Near the end of the evening (after I'd had at least 12 shots) someone wheels out a basketball hoop.

People start shooting around and someone tosses me a ball. I drain a 20 footer with perfect Jerry West form. Heads turn. "Do that again." I do. Over and over.

People were still talking about my prowess the next day. It was actually kinda fun.

 

While I was never a great golfer, for just playing casually I was "not bad." For my friends birthday, we all went to a fairly nice course (The Falls, out past Chilliwack for any Lower Mainlanders). I hadn't golfed in over a year, and this was the particular year that all my friends decided to take up golf on a regular basis. All of their skill levels had increased drastically, while I assumed mine had plummeted.

We split up into two foursomes and I end up in the first group. Being a Saturday at 12 am, there's one or two other groups already behind us waiting to tee off. Everyone's shooting the shit and talking shit about how they're gonna beat everyone else. I bring up the fact that it's been over 12 months since I've played an actual course, and not just hit balls at the range. Between this and my rented clubs (like I said, hadn't played for a while), everyone was grinding my gears pretty good.

The first hole is only a short little par 3, and the first three guys hit their shots. One comes up well short, the other two are about 15 yards from the green. I line my shot up and everyone turns to watch my flub it into the ladies tee box.

I end up putting it 10 feet from the pin.

All my friends and the other groups were pretty impressed. Luckily only the three I was playing with noticed my 3 putt. Of course it was all down hill from there. Though shooting under 110 for my first time in over a year was something I was still fairly proud of.

 

I play baseball and I'm pretty good, but I can't run as fast I used to.

I'm decent (but not "good") at golf and I enjoy it (mostly for the beer and driving the little bumper cart). I always shoot under 100 but I don't play very often lately.

I tried boxing with my roommate who is exceptional at it, which were basically half hour sessions of him cutting me to pieces while laughing.

I can't play any contact sports anymore because of my head injury, so hockey and wrestling, which I was both good at (despite I was small) are gone from my life. I got third in my city, 9th in Ontario my senior year of wrestling.

I still play road hockey, though. It's the one sport I can turn any of my friends inside-out in.

I couldn't beat a retarded one-eyed gnome balancing on a stepladder at basketball. If you want to see some demented fuckery, sit back, crack a beer and watch me shoot hoops. I get an "A" for effort, and Beleive me I gave this sport the college try, but I just fucking SUCK at it.

I rock the shit on PogoBalls.

 

I'm really good at a video game. I won a trip to Singapore last year to play at a LAN there, and if all goes well, I'll be going to both California and Sweden this year.

I quarterbacked my pop warner team to the state finals though. Lost by an extra point :\.

 

I tend to always surprise the people that don't know me when it comes to sports. I'm a 6'3'' 165 pound white guy, who wears skinny jeans, so people don't expect much. Little do they know I captained my high school soccer team and University Ultimate team (despite its rap, real ultimate frisbee is some tough stuff), and can play nearly every sport at above a rec league level.

One of my fondest memories is of flag football this year. I showed up on my bike in jeans and a tshirt without a change of clothes to the first game of the season because I had nearly forgotten about it. I barely knew the guys on my team, and the other team was openly calling me out for playing in jeans. My team hadn't decided on who was playing QB yet, so I offered to take that up. They looked at me with looks of disdain, and one of the guys handed me a football and said to hit him as he ran a streak. 40 yards and a perfect throw later I'm QB. We won that game 8-3. The look on the other teams face afterwards gave me a chuckle or three.

Also, I played competitive DotA and TF2 for awhile, but gave up on competitive video games after I realized how much time I put into them, only to not make it to the finals in any of the events. Other people play video games for life, and I only played them for fun/adrenaline rushes. I can still pick up a Madden controller and beast anyone though. Give me one game to warm up.

I'm so out of shape now that I doubt I could run a mile without stopping, but I've been meaning to get around to that. (Read: It won't happen.) So until then I will keep playing for intramural teams and winning small bets.