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Amador Publishers Anniversary, betting, boys, competition, gambling, games, Harry Willson fiction, keeping score, losing or winning, loyalty, sports, story excerpt, team sports, writing
- Here is an excerpt from the short story Tufts and Wink, from Duke City Tales by Harry Willson, Amador Publishers’ first title released 40 years ago. The collection has been reissued in a fresh new printing in honor of our anniversary.
The headmaster told me the day I was hired that the ideal “master” was the teacher/coach. I didn’t think too much about it at the time. Besides nouns and verbs and wars and presidents and fractions and binary numbers, I also knew a little bit about football and baseball and volleyball and running and boys. Sure, I could handle a daily “P.E.” class.
Before it was over, I was sick of it. Not the fresh air and the running up and down the field blowing a whistle and shouting at the boys. I needed the exercise. It wasn’t that. It was the boys’ attitude.
We determined sides at random at the beginning of each P.E. class. Count off, by twos. “Ones” on one side and “twos” on the other. Simple. When I saw the boys arranging themselves, trying to minimize randomness, I counted by fours—and juggled which two numbers would be on one side and which two would make up the other. That was no problem, really.
It was after the sides were selected that a marvelous thing occurred. A loyalty to the team leaped instantly into play and swept the boys away. Fierce, fighting, raging, slobbering, screaming, bleeding loyalty—to a team which came into being thirty seconds ago on the basis of how Mr. Green counted and called the numbers.
And Mr. Green was the Cosmic Scorekeeper.
“Who’s ahead?”
“You are.”
“What’s the score?”
“Ten to seven.”
The attitude of the boys toward the score did not make for excellence of play. I watched for that. It did not enhance skill. I became convinced that it detracted. “Don’t worry about the score. Play the game! Play as well as you know how. Learn how to play better.”
But, no.
“Who’s ahead?”
“You are.”
“What’s the score?”
“Sixty-five to forty-three.”
Later, “What’s the score now?”
“One hundred twenty-five to six.”
Still later, “Now what’s the score?”
“Five thousand two hundred eighty-three to nothing.”
“Mr. Green, Sir! What’s the score?”
Other events in school seemed to matter much less. Tests, lunch, fights, faintings, spillings, accidental fallings from ladders, broken windows, explosions in labs, female teachers in tight sweaters—nothing else captured the emotional life of the boys the way competitive games did. The scores of the games, that is.
The same spirit invaded the charades we played in my English classes…. I was interested in the words, the sounds, the movement, the acted-out puns. But, no—the boys were primarily interested in, “Who’s ahead, Sir?”
It dawned on me that the boys were learning this strange emphasis from the adults. At a faculty meeting there was a prolonged discussion of a proposal to change the grading system—in some subjects maybe, in the lower grades maybe—from numbers to pass/fail. The upper school English Department wouldn’t hear of it. They knew how to grade essay papers in such a way that there was a clear and demonstrable difference between this boy’s essay, marked “82,” and this other boy’s, marked “83.” I risked trouble by insisting that the difference was unscientific and unreal, artificially contrived by the teacher and existent only in the teacher’s head. But in upper school English, the boys could tell—and even the teachers thought they could tell—who’s ahead. Add up the numbers.
“Name a sport that is graded pass/fail!”
Maybe I was supposed to crumple and acknowledge defeat. Instead, I named some. “Mountain climbing. Tight-rope walking. Alligator wrestling. Channel swimming.” But they didn’t mean that. They meant competitive games….
from “Tufts and Wink” in DUKE CITY TALES © 1986, Harry Willson
[ Find another excerpt from Duke City Tales at http://www.AmadorBooks.com]
40 Years Later: Have you noticed that everything’s a game now, and we get to bet on it too, winning and losing by the minute on the ephemeral future? The middle man has been removed, the team has been removed, and we are playing against ourselves, against every other pawn on the board. No one is watching, and the only measure of success is the score, which is the money in the account. Our own accounts. The price of admission is an open wallet.
Are you a winner or a loser? While the movie star asks, What’s in your wallet? the real question is, Who’s wallet are you in? Because you do realize that every click is a score for our tech overlords, right? We’re not on the team, we’re the football. And although the bookie has been removed from the bet, he’s now standing right in front of your view of the game. Every minute someone is telling you or selling you the odds. The announcers are all shills for a no-there-there “market” and their broadcast is sponsored by drugs, booze, gambling, expensive powerful vehicles, and cheap fatty foods. Oh, and insurance, because what could possibly go wrong on a diet of that stuff?
But I drift. Harry was always so direct and precise in his cultural and political critique. I can hear him now howling in protest at the inhumanity, the sheer stupidity, of U.S. culture in the 2020s. The pitch of his voice would rise with his outrage. He’d lay it on thick, like I imagine he did for the young men at “the boy factory” where he taught – a performance of genuine conviction and cleverness and guts that just might leave a dent in their memory banks along with all those wins and losses.
Genuine heroes, the people we should be cheering on, are those who stand against the pack. Some lead with quiet courage, and some lash and prod. Harry Willson was the latter, a preacher by training and nature. He could sermonize with precision whether you needed five minutes or forty, a few hundred words or a few thousand. For ten years, from the winter of 1999 to practically his dying day, Harry wrote a Rant of the Month for the Amador Publishers website. Sometimes he was so full of outrage, we got a Bonus Rant. Find them at the link above, ad free, tracking free, and offered without prejudice to humans and bots alike – because Harry was always willing to teach those who were willing to learn. ZLG 10/16/26
