What are your phobias?
Do you fear flying, with or without a plane?
Do you fear snakes, the dark, meteors falling from the sky?
Everybody has a weak spot.
I know I had to grab a couple of ounces of grit before I touched a snake for the first time. Still don't like them.
When you are young, all kinds of foreboding items can come into your life. In Grade 9, mine was the gauntlet.
I would have to run the gauntlet if I was going to have any chance of making our high school football team.
It was a proud team with several provincial championships in the background.
The gauntlet was pretty well what you might expect. All rookies ran it.
The senior members, usually 20 or 30 of them lined up and formed an alley, one on each side. The rookie was handed a football and told to run through them, one at a time, not around them through them.
I lost a lot of sleep worrying about that gauntlet, but I also wasn't going to be denied my chance to make the team. I would have to suck up my fears and prepare to get smashed and bashed by older and tougher guys.
The procedure was to run at the first guy, get tackled, blocked or thrown away, pick yourself up, tuck the ball and run smack into tackler No. 2. Repeat procedure until you arrived at the end of the line.
It was a brutal ritual, but in many respects, a good test. The team didn't have any stupid humiliating hazing rituals for the newbies, there was just the gauntlet. It was the test and a potential welcome to the team. You still had to make the team after the gauntlet, but at least you provided evidence you really wanted to be there.
A couple of lucky dogs got to run before me. One didn't make it. He quit after being tackled for the seventh or eighth time hard. That didn't help me at all.
When my turn came, I think I closed my eyes just before getting slam dunked by the first senior. I picked up my sprightly l40 pound frame and took a run at tackler No. 2. I hit the turf like a bag of rejected Redi-Mix. No. 3, I checked my pulse and limbs. Still intact. No visible signs of blood, good to go. By No. 8 or 9 I was pretty well numb and also by that time, I was perhaps gaining some respect because Bill Nolan, simply gave me a slap on the hip and a push forward with a word of encouragement. I could now see the end of the ordeal just a couple of giant bodies ahead. I clutched the ball and let out a giddy laugh of triumph. I was going to make it through. I was going to live!
Laughing and lugging the football, I ran forward and did a half-cartwheel when I blindly blundered into one of the best clothesline tackles ever witnessed in the annals of high school football. I landed on my head where my feet had been a half-second earlier, with the echo of a warning coming from the mouth of the 12th nemesis of my trial run, Lorne Butchko, "Shut up rook," he advised me.
I obeyed, mostly because I had the wind knocked out of me anyway and emitting anything other than a sucking sound was impossible.
I eventually, waddled toward the final tackle, utterly humbled, but oddly elated because I had made it through the gauntlet while learning one of life's basic lessons:
Respect your elders, even if they are only 17 years old.
