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::Pretty much everyone assumes to a certain extent that Gordon must hate sports, or Gordon must not play sports much. All right, I understand how these assumptions arrive. I'd probably do the same with another person like me. I mean, during my high school career, I spent two hours a day, five days a week, playing competitive sports and intramural sports. That's up to ten hours a week of sports, not including the extra hours of interscholastic competitions (races, meets, games). But hey, the hell with what people's impressions are. So here's my say on sports. I like sports. I want to say that I even love sports because I think my interest in sports is at that level, but since I'm not an ultra hard core athlete (meaning a 24/7 commitment to sports), I'll stick with 'like'. There are plenty of sports that I like, but the number of sports that I actually spend a decent amount of time involvement in is a much smaller number. Anyway, that's my side of the story, whether you want it or not. Here's a little history of my encounters with a number of sports that I passively and actively enjoy.::
Basketball: This is one of the first sports I've encountered. In elementary school, I played b-ball everyday during recess and lunch and all that free time we had to frolic on the cement and asphalt playgrounds. It wasn't the only thing I played, of course, but it was I played the most. Around the third grade, or maybe a little later, Eric, a few friends, and I played all types of b-ball games we knew, from Around-the-World to Horse to our own invented games. My favorite times included making a Horse shot with my back facing the basket, and making a shot from behind the board...especially when I made the shots. Hehe. And then there was the bouncing shot with the ricochet of the ball off the board. I also remember hanging around a girls basketball thinger involving Uncle Ed Lee. It was strange because, well, I was the only boy there, as I remember. It was an all girls thing anyway. But anyway, that whole experience was one that got me started with basketball. Or maybe it was CCS that did it first. I've played basketball for P.E. at Dhahran School too, and I've played a few times on my own with Karen, but the heat is very discouraging. In Pebble Beach at Stevenson School, I'd play some basketball on and off with friends in the gym. But basketball, once THE sport that I played all the time, is now the opposite...a passive sport.
Golf: My earliest memories of my experiences with golf were of those of my being at the Montclair Golf Course in, well, Montclair. One of the main things that brought me there was the free junior golf lessons that they gave us at the driving range. I always loved their driving range because of the two-level platforms and the golf ball gathering machines, which I saw as moving targets for my golf balls. The driving range was lovely, and I learned the techniques during those lessons. And I got my photo in the Montclarion. Heh? Heh? Yeah... Karen also joined the lessons, and so did Brianna and maybe Tania too. That helped make my lessons much more enjoyable. I remember getting yelled at by Karen for not noticing a cat on the driving range. Excuse ME for concentrating on golfing! Jeez. And of course, we'd target the vehicles that gathered balls. I also remember Brianna telling me that an instructor told her to imagine that the ball was the head of somebody she didn't like. Very amusing. I believe there was a guy named Chris behind the counter, and I often spoke to him whenever I passed by. I was kicked out of the driving range for the day when I let my bucket of golf balls spill over the upper driving range level. Eck...so bad... I definitely enjoyed the miniature golf course that they had, while it lasted anyway. And I got a few chances to play on the golf course. Once, on the last hole, I made my first shot onto the green. That was one of my highlights at Montclair. The rest of my golf experiences happened at the golf course in the Dhahran company community we lived in after moving to Saudi Arabia. The entire golf course was sand-colored and brown. The green was not green, but rather a sand color because it was, well, sand. The driving range looks like a rock desert. Not until 2003 did the golf course begin to be green-ized, or whatever you call it. In the 8th grade, Mr. Burg coached the summer golf activity. It wasn't a different experience because we only played at the driving range, which I played at with my family anyway. The golf course, although rather ugly without the green grass, was still much more fun than anything else, and it always had been...especially the golf cart part. I ended up learning to drive golf carts and real cars at about the same time...age 15/16. They're really lax with these driving rules in the compound. So that's golf. My dad, Karen, and I hit balls on the driving range once in a while, but golf is currently still a passive sport for me.
Swimming: My parents seem to prefer backstroke for swimming, so that's what they normally use. Consequently, Karen and I learned backstroke first. My earliest experience with swimming was a terrifying one. I had swimming lessons at Holy Names College, which is a place near my Oakland house and a place that we passed by everyday coming home from CCS. Everything that hinted Holy Names terrified me...the green sign at the offramp saying "Holy Names", the mention of the name in the car... I was very, very young and small then (K? 1st grade?), and at that time I seemed to hate swimming lessons. Thus, I assumed I hated swimming altogether. At the lessons, they made us wear those orange bubble float things around our arms and float around the instructor, who was in the water with us at the side of the pool. We had to learn such things as holding our breaths and ducking our heads underwater. I could never do it. For those of us who could not do it, like moi, we were told that we could merely blow bubbles at the surface of the water. Thus, some of us never brought our heads below the water. There was this one time where I accidentally went to the wrong group (or maybe it was a new instructor for the day), and I wasn't allowed to do the bubble thing on the surface. So my head was dunked underwater when I refused, and I didn't close my eyes or hold my breath. Needless to say, that was a horrible experience for me. There was a final day where we had to demonstrate to an audience of our parents and friends that we could do what we were taught to do, like the heads-underwater part. I was the only one left who still had to blow bubbles, and with everyone watching, I felt like the most incompetent, unqualified person in the world. Okay, so I had a rough start with swimming, but my fear stayed with me. At the Oakland YMCA, Karen and I started a string of swimming lessons. We were both still very young and small, but I don't remember what ages we were. I think that we had our lessons afterschool after CCS. I can't remember for sure. Anyway, my mom swam there too, and she brought us there seemingly daily (maybe literally daily too) so that we could learn how to swim. Through the lessons and observation of our parents, we learned how to do the breaststroke. Then the lessons helped us learn the backstroke and other skills in the water. I think it was in my sixth grade year that Karen and I were beginning to learn freestyle, and in our class of three, all three of us struggled with that stroke and failed. So we ended up being stuck with our guppy status or whatver fish it was. Before we got a chance to give freestyle another try, our lessons stopped. Either that or we moved to Saudi Arabia. Regardless, Dhahran School's excellent P.E. program helped us explore almost every sport I can think of pretty much everyday, and swimming was the first sport for our group. It turned out that I was the only one who did not know the freestyle stroke because everyone else had been taught the stroke in elementary school, the Dhahran Hills School. So I ended up dreading the humiliation during the week, and we had several weeks of swimming for P.E. But amazingly, I picked up freestyle quickly, more quickly than any other stroke in the past, I believe, and I was able to do freestyle by the end of the few weeks. My style still needed smoothing and adjustment, so over the next couple years in Dhahran, I adjusted and refined my style to swim freestyle more efficiently. Dhahran School was also the first place where I saw the 12 foot deep pool and the diving boards. The high diving board, 10 feet? 12 feet high?, was the one I never tried. I'll admit it. I was too scared. In Pebble Beach at RLS, I didn't join the swim team (laziness and conflicts with the tennis season), but I swam from time to time at the pool during my own time. Most of my swimming now, however, is done during the school breaks when I'm in Dhahran with my family. We just go out to pool and swim laps for half an hour or an hour and do it again the next day, or sometime later in the week. So I guess I'd consider swimming a passive sport during most of the year, but a quasi-passive sport during the breaks.
Tennis: I don't remember my first encounter with tennis. I believe that I began playing racquetball before tennis, but I do know that I played tennis in Dhahran school, my middle school. It was required as P.E. But I really started playing a decent amount of tennis during the eighth grade, I think. It was a junior tennis organization within the community organized by people who lived in the community. We had matches and practices, but I didn't take the sport seriously enough. I had lessons from various people, including Mario and Auntie Nancy, and I continued playing and practicing tennis into the ninth grade. I learned how to keep score and how to play doubles for the first time. In the tenth grade, I almost chose tennis as a sport in the spring term, but I was persuaded to switch over to track and field, so I did. Looking back, I wish I had chosen tennis. In fact, I regretted my decision in my junior year already, and I chose tennis as my spring sport for both my junior and senior years. Two hours of tennis afterschool every school day, it was. And I seemed to immediately love tennis. Before Stevenson tennis, I was neutral with tennis, but it became one of my favorite sports, possibly even THE favorite. Boys tennis at RLS was a rather small team, so even though I didn't deserve it, I was varsity because everyone was varsity. I felt overshadowed by those nationally ranked players on our team. My junior year with tennis was one of great self improvement and friendship building. I earned a "most improved" award at the banquet at the end of the tennis season, and I really felt that I was going to miss a lot of the senior team members who were so fun to be around. During my senior year, tennis was still fun to me, but I didn't really like a portion of our team... some of the people. There were a lot of snobby underclassmen I had to hang around, and our team was split into A and B teams. I was split from pretty much all of my friends on the team. So the tennis practices weren't as enjoyable, but I still feel a love for tennis, and I play Karen sometimes.
Cross-Country (Varsity), Track and Field: Cross-Country (Varsity), Track and Field: Well, most of us have been running since before we can remember. One slogan that has stuck with me from cross-country was "We just run.". Yet, many people associate cross-country and track with whatever experiences they've had personally with running in general. Let me tell you...running long distance and/or running for speed is much harder than most people think. I'll get back to this idea in a bit. I can't really start with a beginning, but I'll start with my first mile run, which took place in the sixth grade, I think. We were at the CCS (Chinese Christian Schools) concrete and asphalt playground. We had to run laps around temporary orange cones, and the distance totalled to one mile. Surprisingly, I felt no pain or real exhaustion. I just felt as I would have after a long run. Meanwhile, plenty of other people were looking their worse. I ran an okay time, I guess. Nine minutes, something seconds. At Dhahran School, we spent part of every year doing track on a real track...orange lanes around a lawn. We ran in the winter, which meant that we sometimes ran in the rain. We had to run the mile run multiple times every year throughout junior high. I don't have my exact times anymore, but throughout the seventh grade, eighth grade, and ninth grade, I ran in mid and low eight minute range, and later moved on to the upper seven minute range. I always felt somewhat tired after every mile, but that's normal. I never felt sick though...except...there was this one time when I ate oatmeal the morning I had the mile run. That was the first time I ever felt sick in a run. And I hurled on the grass after that mile run. My P.E. teacher, Mr. Snakenburg thought I had run my best and had run my guts out. That run was actually one my worse ones. But I didn't say anything. The mile runs at Dhahran School were done by splitting the class into two groups that ran in either of the back-to-back mile runs. I hated the mile run. Being in the second group meant that I had 12 minutes to let my adrenaline build up within me, and that's a very uncomfortable experience. I had to learn this the first time, but after that I learned to run first and get it over with. Stevenson School. Not just P.E. there. RLS required all of us to do two hours of team sports or intramural sports every schoolday afterschool. I was originally signed up for weightlifting and conditioning (wtf was i thinking?), but I was living in an extension of a teacher's home (another story), and that teacher, Mr. Thayer, happened to coach cross-country, among other things. He convinced me to switch over to cross-country and to take weightlifting in the winter instead. It sounded reasonable because I could do an indoor sport in the rainy winter season instead. I'll leave out the details. The 3 to 6 miles in practice (not necessarily 6 miles nonstop) was a huge surprise for me. I lagged behind everyone else, partly because I had missed at least a week of practice already. But there was something different about cross-country. We weren't running in circles on boring, oval tracks. We ran over dirt hills and through the forests of Pebble Beach...by a quarry and on trails and roads...along the beaches on the peninsula...Spanish Bay...along beautiful golf courses (and sometimes across parts of them). And we'd run in rain, fog, baking sun... By the end of the season, I had improved my running times in cross-country and had moved near the top of junior varsity. Cross-country quickly became just running, rather than a hardship. It was almost, well, easy. It wasn't until my junior year that cross-country was suddenly really easy. I mean...skipping-along-the-trail easy. Maybe it was the conditioning from track that I had. Oh yes, I forgot to mention track. In the spring of my sophomore year, I joined the track team and raced in the one mile and two mile runs. I was initially motivated to do the two mile run (worse than the 1-mile and x-country 3-mile races) by the bonus points that I'd get towards my varsity letter. Bad reason to do the two mile, yes. But nonetheless, I ran the one mile in the 6 minute range and then the upper 5 minute range. As for the two mile, I ran it within the 13 minute, 12 minute range. I remember my last day track race. The two mile run was left, and I was so tired of running the one mile and two mile runs back-to-back at every track competition. I hated track, yet, just like in all my other races, I ran my hardest, but this time with the motivation of the end of the season at the finish line. And dude, I'd been setting personal records all year in cross-country and track, but this one sure took the cake. Good finish for track. My running shoes were definitely dead. Back to junior year...x-country was easy for me, and I improved a lot...going from top of junior varsity to varsity...number 5, number 4... and I made it to the 2001 Central Coast Section (CCS) championships with my fellow varsity colleagues near Palo Alto. I got the most improved award with my varsity x-country pin to go with my varsity track pin from the previous year, as well as a CCS x-country pin. I felt very tired after three seasons of hard core running seasons and competitions from Soledad to Gonzales to Carmel to Seaside. I wanted to stop, and I decided to take tennis instead of track that spring term, my junior year. I even hinted to my coach that I considered quitting cross-country, and he was surprised, commenting that I was most-improved. Well, after giving it a lot of though, I decided to continue cross-country for the third year, and although I still found cross-country fairly easy to manage, I was out of shape. I could only do top JV. But for some reason, I didn't seem to care. Senior year. I didn't care about working as hard as before. So I got lazy and decided to purposely linger around the top of JV (borderline) so that I wouldn't have to handle the pressures of varsity. And at the end of the season, I pushed myself back into varsity in the last few races and once again competed in the CCS championships, this time year 2002, and at Toro Park, the place where I ran my first x-country race for RLS three years back. Okay, so I was lazy and did just enough hard work to get my second x-country pin and second CCS pin, but hey...I honestly will miss cross-country. I'll also miss track a little bit too, especially because of all the friends I made, but cross-country was one of the best experiences I had. Never before had I seen such great bonding as a team. We were all relaxed friends just running through the beautiful scenery of Pebble Beach and breathing the fresh, cool moist air. Cross-country quote: I watch to see, not who is the fastest, but who has the most guts. We just run, amen. (I don't plan to run in college though. Can't make me. Nah-ah.)
Biking: Once upon a time, there was the tricycle. And yea, Gordon did find that device easily manageable. There's footage to prove it. No memories from Gordon's mind of the tricycle year(s) exist anymore. Then came the red and black bicycle with the plastic training wheels. And become all worn down those red training wheels did become. One day, somebody within the family facilitated the removal of the training wheels, and wobbly the bicycle did become, even with just one training wheel removed. Perhaps that was why it was so unstable. And both training wheels were removed, and ride successfully Gordon did...and ride into the bush he did too. All right, back to first person. Yes, I actually had two balance accidents, both on rocky grounds in our backyard. I still have scars from these incidents, and these scars are actually wonderful symbols of childhood memories. So Karen and I rode our bikes in our backyard A LOT, maybe even daily, although I don't remember enough to support that claim. We had a great view of the East Bay, the Bay, and SF from our backyard, and we'd catch deer eating our garden life whenever we were indoors. But hey, let's focus on the biking part. Karen and I would ride across the lawn and leave deep bike tire marks. Daddy would say, "Stop riding across the lawn." We'd say, "okay", and do it again anyway. Karen and I also rode our bikes to the eastern edge of our backyard and would harass the neighbor's poodle by making sounds. And we'd ride under the deck in wild bike chases and ride over curbs. The reason why we initially started riding bikes only within our backyard was because we lived on a very steep slope, but that didn't stop us, and Karen and I enjoyed the experiences of letting gravity take us down that slope. We used a lot of braking though. With a slope like that, free acceleration would be suicidal. Although the farthest out we ever rode our bikes outside our house was Skyline Market, there was a sense of independence and freedom that the bicycle had. Plus, it was wonderful being able to explore our neighborhood and the nearby neighborhoods on our bikes. Up until near the end of elementary school, I used the same bike that originally came with the training wheels. There were no hand brakes; braking was done by pedaling backwards a bit. Then I got my new red mountain bike with the hand-brakes and the water bottle holder. And I actually only started wearing helmets fairly late in my years of experience with bicycles. So I'd been very lucky. In Dhahran, I rode my bike just as much as I did in Oakland, and I rode much longer distances because the roads were all flat. But into the eighth grade, biking became a passive hobby for me, and it still is today. I love biking, and it's one of the things I look forward to whenever I come back to Dhahran (that's where my bike is all the time).
Roller Blading:
Snake Boarding:
Sunfish Sailing:
Scuba Diving:
Ping Pong:
Badminton:
Racquetball:
Dodgeball:
Lacrosse:
Tag Football:
Capture the Flag:
Four Square and Nine Square:
Jump Roping:
Hop Scotch (covers face in shame):