balls!

In college, I finished most of my credits by senior year.  I’m not sure why I didn’t just graduate early. (By “I’m not sure” I mean I honestly can’t remember.  Something to do with tequila.)

Anyway, I took Japanese for two semesters, and then took softball as an elective.  How hard could softball be?  All I had to do was ride a bus over to the athletic complex at like 9 am.  I had my magical softball glove (Noah Wylie signed it, dudes) and some boxers and some sneakers.  Good to go, right?

Except the over-zealous fast-pitch-playing badass coach-lady was all, “And then we’ll have a final exam about softball, and you’ll have to catch a fly ball to pass.”

Fuck! Ever since I’ve been nine or ten I’ve had a massive “irrational” fear of catching fly balls.  It’s hard, dudes!  They’re scary!  And if you miss them they might hit you in the nose and kill you.  The fear.  I have it.

We started playing on the second day of class, and many times I ended up being the pitcher based on my short-lived stint as a slow pitch pitcher in seventh grade, and my extremely piss-poor career as the pitcher of our really bad co-ed college slow pitch team, Awesome Grandpa.

One lovely, sunny morning, the gorgeous girl playing shortstop threw the ball to me.  This chick?  We’re talking music-video-star hot.  Totally the kind of chick you look at thinking, ha, that bimbo can’t play softball.  The only balls she has experience with are probably the nutsacks of the frat boys she spends every weekend—

And then she smokes the ball to me at 500 miles an hour like she can read my mind and I’m not even fucking joking she breaks my thumb with the hellfire-speed of her throw.

I try to play it off as it goes all hot-numb-tingly.  I even pitch until the end of the inning.  (All of two or three minutes.)

“Nice arm,” I wheeze to her on the way back to the dugout.

I side up to the coach-lady all, “I think my thumb is broken.”

And she’s like, “I seriously doubt that, but head to the infirmary to get it checked out.”

At the infirmary, which sounds cooler than it is, the doctors eye my thumb and decide it’s not broken, but that to make sure they’ll X-Ray it.

So I get my sad, bruised little thumb X-Ray’d and they come back GIGGLING with the results.  A teeny, tiny hairline fracture.  Just significant enough to require a goofy plastic cast that leaves me perpetually giving thumbs up to everyone I meet like, “Hi! Yep, last time I judge a pretty girl’s softball talent by her looks!”

When I got back to my dorm room that day I sat on the bed sulking and waiting for my boyfriend to comfort me in my time of need. When I held my thumb-cast up he laughed at me.

Asshole.

(It got me out of catching a fly ball though.)

Tagged as: being a girl, dubious injuries, not really sports