Monday, May 31, 2010

the jocks in the family

(memorial day, 2010)

spent a good part of the afternoon going through a box of old pictures and scanning them in to my computer. fun. found turbo's puppy pictures. random shots of some of our trips to the beaches in mexico. rocky point, el golfo. fun times. then found some stuff that i thought maybe i could write about. namely, the athleticism of the nix boys. i'll start with me. (and here's a picture of me in second grade - about the time i started playing baseball in earnest.)




i played little league baseball from the time i was 8 years old, i believe. thru what was then called minor league, then little league, ultimately babe ruth league - which sort of overlapped high school baseball. beyond high school, or during high school, it was called, hmmm, it escapes me. but some of us traveled from buckeye around to the neighboring towns playing baseball. i remember playing in laveen one night. baseball field down by the river. mosquitoes had a lot more fun than the players. drat.

i switched to softball, and in buckeye, kearny, yuma, played for another 20 years. love the game. love playing it. just lost my speed. and a good bit of my ability. i understand why the pros reach a point when they have to retire. and i was far from pro.

so, here's a picture i found from my initial little league team, the orioles. i was maybe between 6th and 7th grades.




so when i quit baseball, i needed some sort of jockdom outlet. and found it in stock car racing. i really didn't want to do it. but after a night of drinking way too much beer a friend talked me into driving his car the following weekend as he was going to be out of town. i spent the next week trying to maintain some semblance of manhood while backing out of the driving commitment at the same time. couldn't make it work. ended up driving. and, after a pretty big crash, which gave me cause to quit for the night, well, i couldn't as my buddies fixed my flat tire, bent up radiator and sent me back out to finish the race. i did, and i was hooked.

i raced a bit more that season - 85. then the entire 86 season, where i won a couple times and also won rookie of the year honors.

and then i quit. while i was ahead. and here's a picture of number 212, the pucker brothers racing special. first race for the car. first race of the 86 season. no dents, no dings. in the beginning, anyhow. didn't look anything like this at the end of the season.




following in my footsteps, scooter also played little league ball. but by then they had t-ball, minor b, minor a, major little league, senior league, and finally high school ball. followed later each year by fall ball. they spent more time playing organized ball than we did. but we played sandlot ball nearly year round. i think we had more fun. me, billy, schroeder, andrade, the baker boys, several others. ahhh, the times we had. oops, i digress. here are some pictures of scooter in competitive mode, along with one of he and his mentor.



so, now waiting for the next generation to kick in. rooster played some level of baseball this summer. but no games on the weekends when we were there. always next year i suppose. guess he's carrying the family jockey strap into the future.

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