The Cheaters

When it came to sports and games in general, my grandfather (on the right in the photo) saw a black and white world. Frank W. Owen had zero tolerance for cheating. Period. He envisioned a clear code of honor for games like football or baseball. Not only must you never cheat, you had to always give the game your best effort until it's over. Thus, good sportsmanship was essential. 

 

Of course, when it came to the real world, he surely knew the ready supply of cheaters, chiselers and weasels has never been exhausted. Nonetheless, the way he saw it, for a couple of hours on a field of play, we can choose for ourselves to keep the sports realm clean.

  

In 1916 the fit members of the Richmond Light Infantry Blues were dispatched to Brownsville, Texas, to watch over the border and chase Mexican bandit/revolutionary Pancho Villa, who had crossed the border to stage a few raids on American soil ... or, so people said. To do the job the young Richmonders were converted into a cavalry unit. My grandfather, seen at the age of 23 in the 1916 photo of football teammates, was one of those local boys in that Richmond Blues outfit.

Following that campaign, in 1917, the Blues were sent to Fort McClellan in the Alabama foothills for additional training. Then it was across the pond to France to finish off the Great War -- the war to end all wars.

The way I remember him, my grandfather depended completely on his own view of life. If he had doubts he hid them well. The stories I remember him telling from his years as a soldier were about his singing gigs, playing football and poker, and various colorful adventures. He apparently saw no benefit in talking about the actual horrors he'd seen. At least I never heard such stories. 

 

My grandson's middle name is Owen. The story below about my grandfather was published in Style Weekly in 1999. 

 

The Cheaters

by F.T. Rea

Having devoted countless hours to competitive sports and games of all sorts, nothing in that realm is quite as galling to this grizzled scribbler as the cheater’s averted eye of denial, or the practiced tones of his shameless spiel.

In the middle of a pick-up basketball game, or a friendly Frisbee-golf round, too often, my barbed outspokenness over what I have perceived as deliberate cheating has ruffled feathers. The words won't stay in my mouth. I can't resist noticing a cheater in action any more than a watchful blue jay can resist dive-bombing an alley cat.

The reader might wonder about whether I'm overcompensating for dishonest aspects of myself, or if I could be dwelling on memories of feeling cheated out of something dear.

OK, fair enough, I don't deny any of that. Still, truth be told, to this day I believe a lot of it goes back to one particular afternoon's mischievous diversion, gone wrong.

A blue-collar architect with the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway for decades, my maternal grandfather, Frank Wingo Owen was a natural entertainer. Blessed with a resonant baritone/bass voice, he began singing professionally in his teens and continued performing, as a soloist and with barbershop quartets, into his mid-60s. He was comfortable in the role of an emcee. 

Shortly after his retirement, at 65, the lifelong grip on good health he had enjoyed failed; an infection he picked up during a routine hernia surgery at a VA hospital nearly killed him. It left him with no sense of touch in his extremities.

Once he got some of his strength back, he found comfort in returning to his role as umpire of the baseball games played in his yard by the neighborhood's boys. He couldn't stand up behind home plate, anymore, but he did alright sitting in the shade of the plum tree, some 25 feet away.

This was the summer he taught me, along with a few of my friends, the fundamentals of poker. To learn the game we didn’t play for real money. Each player got so many poker chips. If his chips ran out, he became a spectator.

The poker professor said he’d never let us beat him, claiming he owed it to the game to win, if he could, which he always did. Woven throughout his lessons on betting strategy were stories about poker hands and football games from his cavalry days, serving with the Richmond Blues during World War I.

As likely as not, the stories he told would end up underlining points he saw as standards: He challenged us to expose the true coward at the heart of every bully. "Punch him in the nose," he'd chuckle, "and even if you get whipped he'll never bother you again." In team sports, the success of the team trumped all else. Moreover, withholding one’s best effort, no matter the score, was beyond the pale.

Such lazy afternoons came and went so easily that summer there was no way then, at 11, I could have appreciated how precious they would seem looking back on them. 

On the other hand, there were occasions he would make it tough on me. Especially when he spotted a boy breaking the yard's rules or playing dirty. It was more than a little embarrassing when he would wave his cane and bellow his rulings. For flagrant violations, or protesting one of his umpire calls too much, he barred the guilty boy from the yard for a day or two. 

F. W. Owen’s hard-edged opinions about fair play, or looking directly at whatever comes along, were not particularly modern. Nor were they always easy for know-it-all adolescent boys to swallow.

Predictably, the day came when a plot was hatched. We decided to see if artful subterfuge could beat him at poker, just once. The conspirators practiced in secret for hours, passing cards under the table with bare feet and developing secret signals to ask for particular cards. Within the group, it was accepted that we wouldn't get away with it for long ... but to pull it off for a few hands would be pure fun.

Following baseball, with the post-game watermelon consumed, while the table was cleaned up I fetched the cards and chips. Then the four card sharks moved in to put the caper in play. To our amazement, the plan went off smoothly.

After hands of what we saw as sly tricks we went blatant, expecting/needing to get caught, so we could gloat over having tricked the great master. Later, as he told the boys' favorite story -- the one about a Spanish women who bit him on the arm at a train station in France -- one-eyed jacks tucked between dirty toes were being passed under the table. Then, gradually, the joy began to drain out of the adventure.

With semi-secret gestures I called the ruse off. A couple of hands were played with no shenanigans. But he ran out of chips, anyway.

Head bowed, he sighed, “Today I can’t win; you boys are just too good for me.”

Utterly dependent on his cane for balance he slowly walked into the shadows toward the back porch. It was agonizing. The game was over; we were no longer pranksters.

We were cheaters.

As he carefully negotiated the steps, my last chance to save the day came and went without a syllable out of me to set the record straight. It was hard to believe that he hadn’t seen what we were doing, but my guilt burned so deeply I didn't wonder enough about that, then.

Well, my grandfather didn’t play poker with us again. He went on umpiring, and telling his salty stories afterwards over watermelon feasts. We tried playing poker the same way without him, but it just didn’t work; the value the chips had magically represented was gone. Summer was ending and the boys had outgrown poker without real money on the line.

Although I thought about that afternoon's shame many times before my grandfather died nine years later, I don't think either of us ever mentioned it. For my part, when I tried to bring it up the words always stuck in my throat.

As the years passed I grew to become as intolerant of petty cheating as F.W. Owen was in his day, maybe even more so. And, as it was for him, the blue jay has always been my favorite bird.

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