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you Can taKe tHe Boy out of BrooKlyn
case with rugby as well, at least until the football players who had come from public schools learned the game. While kids whom I knew might have played catch or played with a Frisbee to relax, on maybe the sec- ond day of orientation, the front lawn of Morrow was occupied by guys who had come to college with their own lacrosse sticks and lacrosse balls. Nice-guy jocks also swam, dove, or played basketball, baseball, soccer, tennis, or squash (technically, “squash racquets”). The squash that was played at Amherst, which required not just squash racquets and balls but also a four-wall court, was also a preppy sport. It was decidedly different from the playground version of the sport that was played with tennis equipment and only one wall where I grew up, one wall being all that we could afford in Brooklyn. (See Appendix B.)
There were also people who were on the ski team, but for some reason they were not called jocks. Virtually all of them, however, were called “Chi Psis” because they were blond—or, in any event, seemed blond—and because, obviously, virtually all of them joined Chi Psi. They might not have been called jocks, but to me they were jocks any- way. If you have not already come to realize it, a much higher percentage of the students than I had anticipated were athletes, not athletes in the way that I was an athlete (softball? give me a break), but athletes who didn’t smoke, who trained (another alien concept), and did wind sprints. They were usually big, in shape, and tough. There was in fact a jock culture at Amherst, which was something that I had never experienced before. Jocks were usually leaders or, in any event, role models of a sort. They seemed to get the prettier girls or, at least, the preppier girls, and they often came into Valentine with them when they (the jocks) were on crutches, a condition that was undoubtedly considered sexy. It was said, and I came to believe it, that Amherst spent more dollars per capita on athletics than did any other school. This was probably nonsense, even when you are talking of net revenues only, but it is beside the point. The point is that athletics was a dominating part of the school’s culture, and you learned that within weeks of arriving on campus.
Next, many of the other students were what I thought of as titled. They were a “Jr.” or a “II” (“the Second”). I was proud that I learned the
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