McGrath: A New Year’s confession long delayed

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Updated: February 16, 2012 8:12AM

Stunned by news that this fall we’ll celebrate our 50-year reunion of St. Bernadette grammar school in Evergreen Park, I have decided that the New Year is finally time for me to come clean.

The stealing started after I made the eighth-grade basketball team. I survived the last cut but not for my star potential as a player. Surely, I was strong and dogged from playing in the driveway with my brothers, so I did all right on defense.

But I could not dribble, shoot, rebound or pass, and I was neither tall nor particularly fast. In fact, the starting center said I only made the team because the coach was kissing up to my old man who was a village official at the time.

Everybody in the locker room laughed when he said it, so I laughed, too, not thinking it true. But after a couple of months of never playing and being strictly relegated to the practice team, I thought maybe he was on to something.

The thefts occurred after basketball practices on Tuesday and Thursday nights. Most of the good players were picked up by their parents. But “Stretch” and Whitey and myself, the core of the reserves, would pack our duffel bags and hoof it home in the dark.

Stretch had a tough break, in a way. His older brother had been the tallest guy in the school and a basketball hero. Stretch, who resembled the comic book character Archie, had all this to live up to but ended up a 5-foot-9 reserve.

Yet he had a different talent. He could mimic Maynard Krebs on the Dobie Gillis show or Amos McCoy or Tonto or just about anybody we saw on TV, it seemed.

All the way home from practice, Stretch imitated the coach yelling at the players, cursing at the reserves, which gave me and Whitey cramps in our sides from laughing.

“For crapsakes, son, the game is basketball, not air ball!” said Stretch, in coach’s booming voice, and Whitey dropped to his knees on the parkway, holding his stomach.

Sure, I guess you would have to be there to find it funny or else just realize that this was raucous, rolling release from all the tension at basketball practice — from all the resentment at being foils for the starters and from being yelled at by the coach to stand still in our zones, like bumpers in a pinball machine, so the good kids could practice set plays.

Halfway home, Stretch wanted to stop at Jerozol Drugs for a can of 7Up, so we went in. Whitey and I had to cover our mouths to keep from laughing as Stretch proceeded to ask questions of the elderly pharmacist in his Amos McCoy dialect. I thought it was hysterical, not to mention risky, to be mocking him right to his face, but the old guy didn’t seem fazed.

After Stretch got his 7Up, we left the store. When we had gone about a block down the street, I opened my duffel bag to share the box of Popsicles I had snatched from the chest freezer while Stretch was flummoxing the druggist.

My conscience bothered me later on, for it was more serious than sneaking loose change from the old man’s dresser top. This was a whole carton of Popsicles concealed in the duffel bag, like with real robbers on Dragnet or Hawaii Five-O.

So I resolved to stay out of it the next time. But something about the contagious laughter again on our walk home and our unity in being shunned as reserves acted as intoxicants toward danger and loyalty that superseded rules of conduct — rules left back at the gym with the coach and his speeches and the starters and their parents picking them up each night.

Within us grew a rebellious pride in our trio of outcasts. No more was asked of membership than to despise and mock the coach and then slink three abreast into Jerozol and, shortly thereafter, out again, with a duffel bag of loot.

No one caught on until sometime in spring, when the drugstore must have called the school. The coach convened an unusual meeting before a Tuesday night practice session, asking that any player who knew anything about the chicanery going on at Jerozol Drugs to step forward.

Stretch raised his hand.

“Coach, is there a reward offered for catching these varmints?”

When Whitey erupted in a coughing spell, his face getting all red, the coach ordered him into the hall to get a drink of water. I was able to hold my breath until Stretch shut up, and the coach got back to his lecturing us about good athletes being good citizens.

I thought I could stifle myself as long as I avoided looking at Stretch’s mug, but then the word “varmints” echoed in my head, and I, too, had to be excused to the water fountain.

Turns out, the varmints never did get caught, which is why this New Year I’m confessing to the crime, unburdening my conscience and coming clean to resolve the Mystery of the Class of ’63. On to the reunion!

St. Bernadette lost to Holy Redeemer in the finals of the 1963 South Suburban Catholic League tournament. Former reserve guard David McGrath is author of “The Territory,” a story collection.