The Way of a Gardener. Des Kennedy

me around, without ever showing even a hint of irritation over my having trailed after him there.

      We were close to two hundred seminarians at the time, divided into six classes covering four years of high school and two years of junior college. “Fraternization” between the two levels was not allowed. An imposing Boston Irishman named Father Brendan Breen was our director of students, and two other priests served as his assistant directors. The entire community composed of priests, brothers, and seminarians was under the guidance of the rector, a dauntingly cerebral character named Augustine Paul Hennessey. It was widely whispered that he could think in Latin, which seemed to us the zenith of intellectual attainment. The seminary atmosphere was one of strict discipline, certainly, but not of oppression or meanness of spirit.

      Two momentous events dominated all others in that autumn of 1960. The Pittsburgh Pirates were, against all odds, heading into the World Series against the mighty Yankees. A disproportionate number of our student body came from Pittsburgh, because of the Passionists’ long and respected presence in that city. When the second baseman Bill Mazeroski hit his legendary home run in the bottom of the ninth inning of the seventh game to clinch the Pirates’ Series victory, an unearthly jubilation erupted in the student body. Shortly afterward, Americans went to the polls to choose between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon for president. Seeking to become the first Catholic ever to hold the post, and familiar to some Passionists from their monastery in Boston, Kennedy was the house favorite. The evening before the election, we knelt in chapel while the rector bid us pray that the outcome of the vote would be whatever might best advance God’s purposes for the nation. This we understood to be a nonpartisan suggestion that we implore divine intercession in having our good Catholic candidate give Nixon the thumping he deserved. Which of course he did, in large part due to the machinations of another good Catholic, Chicago’s mayor, Richard J. Daley. Long before recognizing that mainstream politics and professional sport are cut from the same entertainment cloth, I sensed the symmetry of Mazeroski’s homer and Kennedy’s election.

      The seminary was a sports-mad place. Here you had two hundred young men, deprived of any contact with females, spending most of their time in earnest study or prayer, but periodically released onto the sprawling seminary grounds that held two softball diamonds, a football field, handball and tennis courts, and a basketball gym. For many of us, sports provided a necessary diversion from the pressures of piety, purity, and silence. The three years I spent there marked the apotheosis of my sporting life. We’d have a track-and-field meet every spring at which I specialized in the one-hundred-yard dash, the long jump, and the one-mile run. On days when nothing else was happening, several of us would do a mile run around the grounds. I established myself as pitcher for our class softball team. But in autumn, as is true in high schools across America, football ruled. Back in Toronto I’d spent time tossing a football around with pals and had dutifully followed the exploits of my beloved Toronto Argonauts—the magnificent Dick Shatto, kooky Cookie Gilchrist, and all the rest—but I’d never really played the game.

      At Dunkirk every student, whether willingly or not, was drafted into a team and regular games were scheduled. Although fully equipped with helmets and shoulder pads, we were confined to playing touch football in order to keep injuries to a minimum, but still we played with a bumptiousness not perhaps expected in divinity students. I took to the game like a maggot to rotting meat. Blessed with speed and size, I played wide receiver on offense, but playing defense was what I loved best, busting up opponents’ plays by superior strategy. Every year we put together a school team to play against another nearby seminary. Disturbingly reminiscent of religious warfare, these games were bloodier than anything likely seen on the genteel fields of Eton. No game of the year was more important than the annual Mud Bowl played on Thanksgiving Day, in which the oldest students—first- and second-year college—did battle for overall school supremacy. It was an iconic event, with stories passed down through the years of particularly epic clashes, sometimes involving students who had become the priests now teaching us. Throughout this storied history there was an unquestioned belief that playing football, indeed all sports, was beneficial to both mind and body—mens sana in corpore sano—helping foster physical and mental toughness, a healthy competitiveness, and the cooperative skills required for community living. We suffered no delicate misgivings about football being a violent game of dominance and territorial conquest.

      The best games of all occurred after a heavy snowfall. The southern shoreline of Lake Erie was occasionally buffeted by a winter storm that might dump two or three feet of snow, and if the snowfall coincided with a free afternoon, the most fanatical among us would bundle up and race out for a game of tackle football. This was brilliant, floundering through deep snow, piling into the mass of players, chasing the icy ball when it squirted loose from snow-caked mittens, not really caring who won or lost. We were playing a game in its purest sense, enjoying huge good fun and laughing companionship.

      All this roaring around with sports eventually resulted in my first published writing. I was given a column in the school newspaper, a glossy little tabloid produced, I think, four times a year and distributed to parents and other friends of the seminary. My column was, rather unpromisingly, called “The Pogo Stick,” the idea being that I should hop from topic to topic in a breezy and entertaining manner, like a sporty Walter Winchell. I suspect my offerings were quite dreadful, but they launched my career in print, and so I shan’t disown them.