Tucson Weekly: Up Tight (June 26

Stretching Is For Lesser--Read 'Thinner'--Mortals.
By Tom Danehy
AS I TRAVEL ever deeper into my 40s, I look back at things I never did. Mostly I thank God I was smart enough or lazy enough to avoid them, but occasionally there will be something I really wish I'd taken up.
Danehy Tops on that list is...well, I guess tops on the list should be financial planning. But that's not what this article is about. Besides, I can take up planning for the future any time. I'll always be able to work, and the stock market's going to keep going up forever, right?
I'll start next year, I promise.
No, what I wish I had taken up back then is stretching. I never needed it back then and now it's way too late.
You know that old poem: See a penny, pick it up/
All day long you'll have good luck.
Nowadays with me it's: See a penny, pick it up/
Your back'll feel like it's been hit by a truck.
I ain't bendin' down for anything less than a quarter, and then only if I need something for the newspaper machine.
In my feeble defense, I must say the benefits of stretching weren't widely known back in my high school athletic days. Heck, that was the era when only football players lifted weights. If you played other sports like basketball and baseball, as I did, you were supposed to avoid the weight room at all costs, lest you become muscle-bound.
This was never a serious concern for me. I played football and everything, but when I graduated high school, I weighed around 135. When I put my shoulder pads on, it looked like I was wearing a clothesline pole under my jersey.
Still, the coaches wanted me to stay out of the weight room. I think it was mostly so I wouldn't hurt myself, or even worse, one of the really important players.
And if weight training was just a victim of misunderstanding and bad word-of-mouth, the merits of stretching were known only to adherents of obscure Eastern religions. I knew about yoga, but if it was going to make me crazy like John Lennon, I didn't want any part of it.
The only athlete I knew about who stretched was Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. And here's a dude who changed his name from Ferdinand to Kareem, so I just figured that he was crazy before he started stretching.
I remember during his second year in the NBA thinking how weird it was that this great athlete stretched before and after games. By the time he reached his 20th year in the NBA, I didn't think it was quite so weird any more.
To be perfectly honest, even if I had known about stretching, I probably wouldn't have done it. I have this strange body that's pretty much immune to most athletic ills. Over my 30-plus years of playing ball, I've had some bumps and bruises, strains and sprains, but never anything really serious. I never missed a game or even a practice due to injury.
Plus, I never needed to stretch. I could jump onto a basketball court and be ready to go without any warm-ups. In fact, all the way through high school and college and well into my late 20s, I used to wear gym shorts over my underwear and under my Levi's.
(To be sure, they were those really short, short, polyester-type gym shorts that make kids today gasp when they see highlights of pre-Michael Jordan basketball. If I tried that with some of today's basketball shorts, they'd roll up to where it would look like I was wearing life savers around my thighs. Not that I could fit in Levi's, anyway.)
I used to walk around like that, ready to play ball anytime, anywhere. In fact, I'd drop my pants at the very sight of a basketball.
That's very Pavlovian, I suppose. Fortunately, a basketball is a perfect sphere, so there's nothing Freudian about it. You know how those Freudians are. They define a phallic symbol as anything longer than it is wide.
The first time I ever stretched for real was during my tryout to be a walk-on for the UA football team. This was when Tony Mason was the coach for the Wildcats, a period which will someday come to be known as The Golden Age of UA Football.
Anyway, they had us run and then stretch a little bit. I felt kinda stupid, not having ever done it before. But I went along with the arm wraparounds and so forth. Then they had us sit down. I remember that day so vividly because that was the day I discovered I had hamstrings.
We sat down on the field, the thick August heat above us and every species of bug in Arizona below. We were told to put feet together, legs out, then slowly stretch our hands out toward our feet.
My hamstrings were tighter than G. Gordon Liddy's sphincter on his first day in prison.
I felt a twinge, and then a pull, and finally a stranglehold working its way up the back of my leg and heading for my nether regions. I thought to myself, "Please let me be in the grips on some horrible mutant bug."
No such luck. It was my own body talking to me, cursing my indifference to stretching all those years.
I still don't stretch much. I figure I'm past my stretching prime now. Heck, skinny for all those years, and now...well, not skinny. Obviously, on the way from there to here, I had one day where I was as perfect as I could be. With my luck, it was probably that day I had all that dental work and ended up sleeping 22 out of 24 hours.

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