Freddogg Off The Chain

Modern day lacrosse and bike helmet manufacturers recently figured out what my track athletes understood 30 years ago: The human head is aerodynamic—or not!

Downstate Delaware is big into nicknames most of them unimaginative letters in the Caucasian community like T.C., G.W., J.R. and my personal favorite, C.R. Fanny, written on a Milton man’s mailbox who didn’t understand the joke because it was just a family name.

Afro American nicknaming in my experience is much more personalized and starts with the head and often doesn’t get any further. I remember a minor league black kid back in 1975 leaning over the major league fence looking up and staring at 12 year old Hank as he stretched and rotated his trunk in the on deck circle.

Hank looked back. “What is your problem?”

“You got a big old water head,” the youngster said with amazement in his voice. “Yaw know you need a bigger helmet.”

I was teaching Special Education that year and had a room filled with black kids with high I.Q.’s who had been labeled “Culturally Disadvantaged” by the culture of C.R. Fanny and other local Caucasian educators who regularly objectified the subjective pronoun saying things like “He did it hisself or “I’ll do it my own dam self”

There was this family in Cool Spring where every kid in the house had a nickname. The last name was Beckett but mom Madeline married a guy named Cox and some of the kids changed their name and some didn’t. I advised a hurdler, Peter Beckett, that he should keep his name and not change it to Peter Cox but Peter said he kinda liked it and it forecast what would be his life’s story. And he was right because today Peter is the father of 13 children and also the person responsible for calling me Cabbage Head, which is a term of endearment used by the Cool Spring Connection to describe their old coach.

One time about 1978 I called the Cox homestead which housed Pie, Chico, Candy Man, Dino, Horse, Granny, Feedy and Petey. The phone was picked up and then dropped on a desk. It sounded like a house party going on. Finally, Granny picked up the phone, laughed and asked,”Who you want?”

This was a time period when a white man calling a black household in southern Delaware always drew suspicion. I tried not to sound too officiously like the dorky and annoying white guy. I had never called the house before.

“Gimme Chico!”

There was no hesitation. “Chico, Fredman wanna talk to you!” I have no idea how they knew and when I asked I was told that “everybody knows what Cabbage sounds like.”

In the spring of 1981 with a track meet against Seaford already in the mathematical win column I put together a Cool Spring Connection 4 by 100 relay team. It was next to the last in the order of events.

The pass between three and four runner was dropped and the guys were depressed and on the way back on the bus kept looking at me like I should know better.

The next day I arrived to my first period class right on time five minutes late and there was a stick figure cartoon on the board. There were four figures with a dropped relay baton between number three and four. Stick figure number three had a hydro head three times bigger than the other runners. There was a large X drawn over his body.

Peter Cox appeared in my doorway. “Cabbage, you know you got to get Jellybean off the relay team. You know he can’t run, his head is too big. And you put him on a curve too. How’s a Jellybean with a big old head supposed to run a curve? Sometimes Coach Cabbage don’t make no sense.”

Jellybean, my fastest 100 meter sprinter at 11.1, ran one more straightaway and then quit because he was just tired of big head jokes Coach Cabbage Head was powerless to stop.

Twenty five years later I ran into Tim-his real name- working his magic with a crowd of women on the outside deck of the Rusty Rudder. A look of panic came over his face.

“Please don’t call me Jellybean,” Tim whispered.

I couldn’t help but notice that Tim was much heavier since high school and his big old Jellybean head was “off the hizzy” Jellybean Bigger as was my corned beef boiled head of cabbage.

Life throws lots of curves but Jellybean and Cabbage are sitting on the fastball looking for Flomax.


Freddogg