Opening Day, Sandlot life and Good Bad News.

Once a Bear, always a Bear.

In case you missed it, I wrote a few months ago about the way in which western wear has shown up as almost an embodied character in my life since I was young. 

There’s one other cultural uniform that has informed my personal aesthetic- another costume that subtly infiltrated my pre-adolescent psyche and has remained a teather I tug to pull me back towards center ever since.  

I was ten or thereabouts when I was assigned my first softball jersey. My coach Victor, who (though he had no children of his own and appeared to have never engaged personally in any form of athletics) embodied the rarified air of a man eager to mentor and playfully engage with a gaggle of pre-teen girls- without even a whiff of lecherous creepiness. A strange adult-cocktail of a coach we took entirely for granted as 70’s era free-range children, but now, as a parent, would be likely to raise a glaring red flag. 

We’d been attending practices for a few weeks before the jerseys arrived, so team dynamics were establishing themselves and beginning to settle into a comfortable rhythmic pattern. We’d begun to build a still-fragile but increasingly reliable membrane around ourselves that defined the ecosystem of us- a team! The Bears. And yes- because we knew we’d be saddled with the moniker anyway, we opted to proactively take ownership of calling ourselves, with pride- the Bad News Bears. 

And, as often is the case, we lived into our label, leaning into our self-diagnosed underdog scrappiness. Compared to our competitors' burly, loud-spoken, frustrated-ex-college-ball-playing-dad-cum-girl’s-softball-coaches, we fully embraced our quiet, supportive, very embarrassing dungeon-master with a heart of gold Victor. And Linda- his wife and coaching assistant, who laughed a lot and was equally as quiet, nurturing and strange.

Sitting here at age 51 I have so many questions for Victor and Linda. But I digress.

I so clearly remember what would now be referred to as the “unboxing” of the uniforms. Victor passed out our hats- all the same, yellow and blue with sponsor Kidwell Paints emblazoned on the front-facing foam panel. That satisfying rapid-fire POP POP POP of resizing the back plastic interlocking tab to properly fit one’s head size, the several attempts to get the fit just right- the bending of the bill just so. 

The jerseys each had their own number, of course- so the question of who would be assigned which number began to circulate. I don’t recall much about the determination of anyone else’s number- I only remember the first jersey out of the box was handed to me. 

Number 1. 

After a flush of pride and the sacred and instantaneous emergence of my nacent identity as Bad News Bear Number One- sweet Victor let the rest of the team know I’d been given the number, and thereby the jersey, because it was the smallest garment in the collection, and I was the smallest Bear of us all. 

I was momentarily deflated- my entire childhood was, as far as I can tell, defined by my diminutive stature. After years of feeling laughed at for my size, this moment- among MY COACH and MY TEAM, felt like a new found opportunity to flip the narrative and employ maximum laughing-with energy. 

It worked, and it stuck- mostly. (Beware the Bear with two strikes against her, however. But that’s a story for another day.)

The season that followed offered a myriad of opportunity to flex this newfound self-irreverent muscle and practice the art of small ego deaths in safe places.

For example-

Picture this: the smallest player on the team (in the league?).

Position: Catcher.

Now envision this tiny body cloaked in enough size-small-but-not-nearly-small-enough catchers gear to turn her from a ball-player into E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.

Hilarious. Ridiculous. If you’re not laughing with them friends, you’re in trouble. (Embracing this particular humiliation may have been eased by the fact that E.T. also went on to catch for the district all star team, but who’s keeping track? Ahem.)

There were many jerseys in my life after this one. But my No.1 Bear jersey?

It’s never come off.