Reply to "The Jersy Game" in the Jan 2 New Yorker · Saturday January 28, 2012 by Julie
Danglin’ Don, a junior at Our Lady of Painful Salvation and Number 8 on his team, trotted onto the field, pumping his right fist as he came. Even before the game started, under his helmet he was sweating and, due to practice scrimmage injuries to his acromioclavicular (shoulder) joint, his left arm hung just a tad unnaturally.
The cheers didn’t die as his teammates joined him. If anything, they rose in volume. “Go-nads! Which team is baddest? We’re the go-naddest!” Danglin’s parents and eight siblings, dressed rather cornily to look like the team mascot, waved giant foam gonads and shouted themselves hoarse. “We’ve been pumpin’ for Danglin’ since he was four,” says his father Bob Finchley, a torts lawyer who practices in Manhattan. “Reading aloud from Procopius, Adelard of Bath, all of the Italian theologians.”
“By the time he was seven,” says his mother Eileen, also a torts lawyer, “he’d memorized the Song of Roland in the original Old French, and we knew we had somebody special.”
The road to stardom was not an easy one. Plagued by a series of injuries that would have felled a lesser competitor (Danglin’s pinkies have been broken a total of seven times apiece, he’s pulled his right hip flexors countless times, and, according to Dr. Adamantine, the team physician, “he will never again be able to use his patellas as God intended them to be used”), Danglin’ has rebounded with amazing speed and determination every time. “He just don’t know what the word “quit” means,” says Coach Toedle. “He’s a phenomenon!”
But it’s not just Danglin’s natural abilities that make the Gonads the top-ranked team in the MHL. “Total” Toedle begins training scrimmages in late August, despite the risk of heat prostration and concussion. “If they want to be champions,” he says, “they got to act like champions.”
With full-face reciting sessions, Gregorian marathons, and even the controversial lute strumming scrimmages (banned in every other state except Texas), Toedle has built team spirit as well as endurance and versatility. “We’re unstoppable!” he has said, more than once.
Today was no exception. The Erections, a team out of Kansas City from Upper St. Dick Preparatory School, and the top-seeded in the Midwestern Division, was already off their feed due to the exceptionally hostile reception they had been given at the airport. Looking a little droopy, the Erections walked on-field to boos and catcalls.
After the usual cheerleader-led yells (this time in an obscure version of Welch Gaelic), the first quarter began with a rapid-fire exchange of Dominican prayers, a series of ontological arguments for the existence of God, and all the usual high-energy in-your-face early-game events. Suddenly, in a prepared move that drew gasps from the crowd, Danglin’ Don surged into the lead with a ringing rendition of a piyyut from one of the early Italian paytanim, Shephatiah. As the Hebrew prayer rang out, it was already clear that the Erections were completely unprepared. “They don’t warm up right, they don’t score,” said Toedle, shrugging his shoulders as two of the away team’s members were carried off in stretchers. Cries of “Foul!” were booed down, and, after that early drubbing, the Erections finished the game with a limp 3 – 88, and a very expensive medical bill indeed.
After the game, we were finally able to interview Danglin’ Dan himself. Flushed with success, he snapped his fingers and bounced on his toes as he threw mock punches at us. “Yup, yup, yup,” he said. “I’m going to get a free ride in college. I’ve totally been offered a bunch of scholarships to a bunch of places. Places that I can’t tell you about yet.”
“Don’t you think it’s unethical to go to college not intending to study at all?” we asked, somewhat timidly.
“Hey,” said Danglin’, “Get real. College is about making your way in the world. I continue my ace performance in college, I get recruited by the major Medieval History League teams, and boom! I’m set for life.”
One only hopes that injuries don’t nip this ambitious young man’s plans in the bud, so to speak.
