At Long Last: The High School Reunion

By Robert Ringer

After the mini-reunion at Washington National Airport with three members of Brigadoon High's Inner Ring, I was reluctant to go to our upcoming class reunion. Everything was going great in my life, notwithstanding my former principal's advice that my only hope was to learn a blue-collar trade, so I really had no desire to step back in time by engaging in the remnants of The Game.

Nevertheless, I allowed Bob Zak to talk me into attending. And, as it turned out, I'm glad I did, because it was quite an education. To my amazement, my high school reunion was not a faded reminder of the way The Game used to be played, as I had expected. Nay — it was the original version of The Game, in all its glory, still firmly in place! As far as I could tell, nothing had changed.

The jocks and other members of the Inner Ring pretty much held center stage at the event. It was as though time had stood still for them. Their main reason for being there (and thus the focus of the reunion itself) was to rehash old war stories about their days as Brigadoon athletes.

The highlight was the showing of a film clip of an infamous moment in Brigadoon football history. Since I did not play football (except as a freshman, when I quickly discovered that being small and slow are not great assets in that sport), I had absolutely no interest in watching it. Interestingly, though I assume the majority of folks at the high school reunion felt the same way, most of them obligatorily played out their high school roles, making it clear that the rules of The Game were deeply entrenched in their Pavlovian brains.

Before going further, some background. One of the big games of our senior year was against a team that featured a big, super-fast, all-state running back ("George Sutton"). Brigadoon High kept the game close in the first half, but lightning struck quickly in the second half when Sutton returned the opening kickoff 95 yards for a touchdown. It was one of those memorable moments that the guys on the Brigadoon team joked about incessantly, because the run involved five or six missed tackles.

At the reunion, the jocks ran the clip of Sutton's touchdown over and over again, howling with laughter and calling out the names of their buddies as each one missed a shot at tackling him. I guess you'd call it an inside joke, which is fine if you're on the inside. The problem was that most of those present were on the outside — just as they had been all through high school.

Other than that intellectual highlight, the beer flowed freely and cigarettes dangled from lips and fingertips, just like in the good old days. Jonathan and the other verbal bullies shouted taunts throughout the evening, while members of the lower rings quietly mingled with one another and made unobtrusive small talk.

Perverse as it may sound, I remember actually feeling sorry for a few of the jocks who were obviously well on their way to living out thoroughly meaningless lives. I also remember smiling to myself after what seemed to be the tenth rerun of the infamous 95-yard touchdown run and thinking, "This is the last class reunion I'll ever go to, and I'll probably never see most of these people again." I guess I'm a prophet, because both of those thoughts turned out to be accurate.

But years later, when the Columbine shootings occurred, I thought about the Brigadoon High jocks and their endless replay of George Sutton's 95-yard touchdown run at the only high school reunion I attended. I'll explain the connection in the next installment.

Previous - Part XXIX, A Class Reunion Warmup

Next - Part XXXI, Jocks Rule: High School Sports

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