Page 210 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
not it was a conscious issue, I believe that my relative lack of maturity, in part the result of my having skipped eighth grade, ultimately had its impact in both arenas.
Next, there were the jocks, one of whom I was not. Sports, not just spectator sports, were a dominant part of the early conversations, at least after the various forms of “Where’re you from?” were exhausted and before classes started in earnest. Thus, one of my other major dis- coveries out of the gate was that there was a huge emphasis on sports at Amherst, and that the jocks comprised a definite new subgroup to become aware of. Not all jocks were WASPs or preppies, but a fair per- centage of them were. It occurred to me early on that many students were admitted because of their athletic performance in a particular sport in secondary school, a fact that—I hasten to add—did not mean that they could not compete intellectually.
I knew nothing about jocks or the jock culture prior to going to this “intellectual” school. It seemed that there were nice-guy jocks, who ultimately joined Theta Delta Xi (Mark Perry, for example) or Alpha Delta Phi, or my house, Phi Gam (in which the jocks tended to play soc- cer, run, or swim and, therefore, did not qualify as true jocks), and there were also just plain old, tougher jocks, who joined Beta or Delta Upsilon or some of the other houses. Jocks who joined Beta or DU were not bad people at all; it’s just that they were not generally known as nice-guy jocks. Most of the Betas were football players—predominantly linemen, it seemed. They also played rugby. Jocks were some of the most active (read wildest) people on campus when their sport’s season was over and they no longer were in training, but they by no means held a monopoly on drinking, “booting,” or “mooning.”
I don’t exactly recall what football position or sports that DU guys seemed to play, or why they weren’t considered nice-guy jocks. Nice- guy jocks were more apt to play end, quarterback, running back, or a sport other than football or rugby. They also played another sport that was absolutely new to me: lacrosse (which could be a rough sport, but not as rough as football or rugby). Except in Pennsylvania and Mary- land, lacrosse was played virtually exclusively by preppies, as was the
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