Verified by 
Tony and I were looking at our high-school yearbook and commenting on which girls we thought were cute, when I wistfully exclaimed, “I sure wish I knew how to talk to girls.”
I was 14 years old and wanted to date, but I was too shy to engage in conversation with any girl to whom I was attracted. Tony had a solution and replied, “You know who the girls talk to?”
I shook my head, “No.”
“They always talk to guys on the football team; you should go out for football.”
It was all the motivation I needed. So, without ever having played the game, without even knowing the rules, I joined the junior varsity football team. I immediately found that I hated it. I had to run wind-sprints, up steep hills, over obstacles, in full pads, every day in the hot August sun. I had to lift weights and do sit-ups and pushups, but the worst part was tackling. I was six feet, two inches tall and weighed 150 pounds; I was a skinny bag of bones with no cushion, and getting my body slammed to the ground really hurt. And, I was getting bruised for nothing; the girls were not talking to me. What Tony hadn’t realized when he offered his advice was that the girls only talked to the football stars—not the average linemen.
Be Careful What You Wish for
I wanted to quit in the worst way, but that would’ve meant losing face and getting chastised publicly by my teammates (and possibly the entire school—I’d been bullied relentlessly in elementary school and was terrified of that happening again), so I stuck it out, but not before wishing—repeatedly—that there was some honorable way out. Then, one day, because of my height, I was asked to scrimmage on the defensive line with the varsity team.
“Ten, twenty-two, seventeen, hut!” The quarterback yelled. I burst through the line and lunged forward to tackle him. I was inches from grabbing him, when suddenly I was hit so hard it lifted me in the air. I crashed to the ground face first, and when I tried to stand, I felt an explosion of pain that made me black out. Seconds later, I came to, but my leg would not move. When I looked down, it was bent in the wrong place, and I could see the bone pushing against my skin.
Be careful what you wish for...I spent the next two weeks in the hospital. I had two surgeries, three screws put into my bone, and a cast on my leg for more than five months. Adding insult to injury, walking on crutches still didn’t get the girls’ attention or sympathy!
A Threat to My Masculinity
A few months later I was called to the counselor’s office. He pointed to my cast and said, “You’re not going to be able to take P.E. next quarter, so we need to come up with a suitable substitute. I see you’re already taking Drafting, so you can’t take Woodshop because you’re only allowed to take one industrial arts class per quarter. As I see it, your only option is to take Home Economics [what is now known as Consumer Sciences].”
“No!” I cried out.
“Don’t worry,” he said, “this isn't the sewing or diaper-changing class; it’s the cooking class.”
I looked at him skeptically, and asked, “I’ll get to cook real food and actually eat it?”
“Yes.”
“Well, if I got to, then I guess I’ll take Home Ec.”
When the class started a few weeks later, I found that I was the only boy in a room with 29 girls. We were divided into teams of six and worked in five kitchens arranged around one large room. Suddenly, I had to communicate with five girls every day: planning menus, ordering supplies, and cooking food. But, it didn’t end there. I also found myself needing to talk with pretty much every girl in the class from time to time.
The Unexpected Twists and Turns of Fate
On Valentine’s Day, my school held an annual fund-raising contest called “Mr. Irresistible.” Girls would purchase red construction-paper hearts, with “Mr. Irresistible” printed on them, to pin on their blouses. Throughout the day, boys would try to get a girl to speak to him, and if she did, she would have to give up one of her hearts to the boy. The boy would then pin that heart to his shirt. The captain of the football team easily had a few dozen pinned to his shirt. At the end of the day, the boy who had collected the most hearts would win the title of “Mr. Irresistible.”
It was during the next to the last class of the day on that year’s Valentine’s Day, and I was in my cooking class telling jokes to the girls in my kitchen. They were laughing, but I wasn’t getting any of them to speak to me, when one of the most popular girls in the school, who was in an adjacent kitchen, overheard one and laughed, too. She then called all the girls in the class over and they went into a huddle.
When the huddle broke up, one of the girls came over to me, said, “Hi Bobby!,” unpinned a heart, and handed it to me. I finally got a heart; it felt so good. I felt desired, important.
Then, suddenly, I was surrounded by all the girls in the class, and they said, “Hi Bobby!” over and over again, unpinned their paper hearts and handed them to me. I was overwhelmed with joy to receive all this positive attention from so many girls. It gave my confidence a huge boost. I received more than 200 hearts and won the “Mr. Irresistible” contest by a landslide.
A few days later, I got my cast off, and even though I could barely walk, I invited one of the girls from my kitchen to the Valentine’s Day Dance, and I went on my first official date in high school.
Sometimes...you get exactly what you wish for!
