Those Sweats

Bison,

The afternoons were darkening by October, the hazy warmth of September giving way to chilly twilight, a world of color slipping into a world of black and white. In the air there was a rising sense of life stripped to its essence, reflecting the pure physicality of distance running, a sport where you put one foot in front of the other, faster than anyone else, and nothing more, all that mattered. We'd gather in the musty basement of Davis Gym, its cement floor, steel lockers, tiled walls, wood benches, and amber light silent intimations of athletes from a century ago, gathering with us, sitting by our sides. We'd put on our gray sweats, misshapen and threadbare, incapable of warmth, remnants of other teams in other times, ancient. Our conversations would be subdued, if we spoke at all, a test coming up, an essay due. The meet or the workout would be on our minds, preoccupying us, as if we were running it already, there rather than here.

As a freshman in the fall of 1973, I was stunned at first by the sweats when Charlie, the grouchy gear dispenser in the Davis Gym cage, tossed them over the counter in my general direction, growling without looking at me. I was even more stunned by the sweats than I was by Charlie, inconceivable as that distinction might be. They were thin, worn, shabby, and, well, disappointing. In high school I wore sweats emblazoned with the name of my school and my team, not sweats randomly stamped with the initials of my school and the size of the sweats, BU M, or with the even more humiliating X, suggesting I was somehow wrong, simply for being. In high school I wore sweats that actually kept me warm, not sweats requiring a few layers underneath to serve their purpose. In my first few weeks at Bucknell, a seventeen-year-old trying to understand a place as different from my Long Island home as imaginable, I was thrilled to be away, and I was curious about what was to come. But I found it difficult to look past sweats that seemed like hand-me-downs from Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary.

Over the first few weeks, I breathed in a different perspective of the sweats. In the first few workouts, the first few conversations, the first few glimpses of a landscape that seemed in its pastoral humility to want to hold me in its arms--especially that wondrously austere view of the valley as we turned off Furnace Road on Old Farmer's--I breathed in the perspective of my older teammates. They were proud of the sweats, proud because they knew no other team would be proud of them. The counterintuitive epiphany came to me swiftly, clearly, and surely. What I'd found disappointing, they found affirming. What I'd found deflating, they found emboldening. I realized what this team didn't have expressed what this team did have, a commitment to running itself, to the elemental challenge of putting one foot in front of the other, faster than anyone else, and nothing more, all that mattered.

I knew those sweats were born of necessity, of a team being created from scratch, by a twenty-eight-year-old coach making do with what little he had, holding practices for anyone interested. But having little was the point. There was an ethic in the asceticism of those sweats. It was the ethic of a sport in which you put one foot in front of the other, faster than anyone else, and nothing more, all that mattered. But it was also the ethic of our response to the time, which is why the sweats resonated as statements and not just what we wore in meets and workouts. They were our response to the tumult in which we lived, countering what the world had become, a response like October, stripping life to its essence and focusing on what mattered. We sought simplicity in a world of complexity, necessity in a world of excess, order in a world of chaos, clarity in a world of ambiguity, truth in a world of deceit. We sought a world in which an eighteen-year-old could vote on a war in which he could be killed. "Who are those guys?" was the question we wanted mocking teams to ask, as it affirmed not only the act of beating them, but the ethic of beating them, an ethic of what mattered, an ethic we'd carry from our sport into our lives.

That ethic, and this team, began with those sweats.

--Bob