Remember the Titan

Mr. Titan was insanely large and muscular, the man was a machine. My mental image is somewhat like Schwarzenegger. In my twelve year old memory he was tall and huge, with the most muscles I had ever seen in a human. He was a competitive body builder and didn't exactly have the best people skills, especially with kids. How people like that can ever become teachers is beyond me, but one thing is for sure, there was certainly no childhood obesity problem with this guy around.

Gym class basically consisted of us all filing in, terrified, and him yelling at us to do whatever insane thing he thought of that day. A few of those things come to mind, like running laps of the gym for the entire length of the class and if you ran out of steam and had to walk for a minute he sent you to the bench like a reject. Another time we had to do the high jump over a rope and crash land onto a mat on the other side. I guess I was a pretty good jumper (the added fear makes one jump higher) and I was in the top three of my class. My foot snagged the rope on the last jump I landed pretty much on my head. I remember kinda going blank for a minute and when I got up he said I was fine.

Now, back to the broken bone. One day in gym class we were running a relay and I was the last one on my team to run. We were slightly behind and Mr. Titan was yelling at me to push harder. I ran my little twelve year old legs off. We had to run the length of the gym, touch the wall and run back. I ran so hard, that when I hit the wall with my hand open, I broke my thumb. The pain hit instantly, but I could still hear Mr. T screaming, so I probably did the worst thing possible and curled my thumb up into my hand, thereby completing the break and ran back to victory. When I got back in line my thumb was already purple and swelling. I had sprained fingers before, but I knew this was different. Whatever happened, I was not going to tell the gym teacher. I did not want him to think I was a wuss.

I walked home at lunch and showed my Mom, who used to be a nurse. She thought it was just a bad sprain. She asked what my teacher had said and I told her how I was scared to tell him. Well, she did the unthinkable. When I returned to school, she phoned the gym teacher to tell him what happened.

The next day when I woke up my thumb was huge and a couple different colors. My Mom decided it might be best to take me to the hospital, and after x-rays and examinations it turned out that I had indeed broken my thumb. I had to wear a huge metal splint.

The next gym day my teacher called me up to the front of the class, squatted down face to face and asked me why I hadn't told him. Looking bad, I suppose I'm lucky that I didn't pee my gym pants. I don't recall what I muttered, but he let me go back with my peers and assured everyone that if they broke anything to let him know.

Mr. Titan was just one of the reasons that I was so glad to go to junior high.