Playing All Alone

I grew up with action figures. I had my He-Man ones and a small collection of Teenage Mutant Ninja dolls. I expect that it comes to the surprise of no one that my favorites were the wrestlers.

The big rubber LJN dolls are the most famous from my childhood era—produced from the mid-to-late 1980s, capturing a wide swath of stars in eight-inch form. As art pieces, there are few figures before or since that really compare to them, but as functional toys they leave something to be desired--more like little statues than pliable things.

I uncharacteristically favored the American Wrestling Association figures of the day, produced by Remco. My parents bought the toy ring and set of what seemed like an army (it was probably about twenty) figures as a lot, presumably at a big discount, as the AWA was going out of style and maybe out of business (they’d officially close their doors in 1991).

I never watched the AWA much, and that, paired with the relatively generic look of the dolls may have been the allure. In my head, I recast each figure in different roles--blond haired Buddy Roberts easy to re-imagine as Sid Vicious or Sting; Scott Irwin as Big Van Vader and Earthquake; in a particularly significant non-sequitur for really looking nothing like him, Steve Keirn as the favorite of my youth, Bret Hart.

I played with these figures faithfully for years and then, after a year or two of having put them aside, I pulled them out again, broaching middle school, quite arguably past the point when it was developmentally appropriate to be playing with dolls. I looked at them with curiosity, at a point when a couple of years meant nearly twenty percent of my entire life experience, and thought of how silly they were. In the same breath, I tried playing with them again, in no small part to see if I still remembered how to lose myself to the dream of them.

I did.

There was an addictive quality to these figures, such that once I started playing, only intending to do so for that one time and for half an hour or so, I began devoting an hour or more most days to them again. In an escalation, for a year long period, I began writing match cards in steno pad, keeping track of make believe television shows and pay per view spectaculars.

Nowadays, my wife and I constantly watch our son for signs of his personality to come--that his fussing might represent an innate stubbornness, that his silly smile on the changing table might suggest he’s going to be a goofball. I don’t know that there was any greater predictor of who I’d be than the way I played for that spell of adolescence--committed to the stories I was telling, prone to compulsive record keeping, and, of course, obsessed with wrestling.

And these aren’t bad qualities--indeed, I’d argue that I’ve come to take pride in all three. And perhaps that, more so than any sense of embarrassment was why I so resented my father poking fun at my play at the time, with a steady prodding that I was too old for it, and increasing insistence on tutoring me in advanced math skills each time I’d go to play (at the time, I read him to have annoyingly bad timing; in retrospect, I read the choice as more purposeful).

I can be hard on my memories of my parents, and when I’m at my best, I remind myself that like me now, they were just doing the best they knew how at the time. Deterring a kid from playing with action figures into his high school years, and getting a jump start on his SAT math training aren’t the most misguided principles, even if they weren’t fun at the time.

And yet, I like to think that if my son still likes to play, whatever the toys, whatever the time in life, I’ll let him. As we all come to learn, we have a lifetime to be adults, busy with work obligations and our projects; maintaining social and family lives to the point that they can feel like a burden to fit into the day as well, always tired and chasing those six or seven hours of sleep to be functional the next day.

In the years to follow my wrestling figure obsession, I came to play basketball a lot. I enjoyed playing with different sets of friends--neighborhood kids, and a crew from high school. But truth be told, I think I came to enjoy playing alone best of all. Some of it was not having to share the ball, or suffer under the pressure of anyone else judging my play. But some of it came back to that same instinct from childhood, imagining myself in game scenarios and shooting contests. Practicing genuinely absurd shots and dribbling formations that would never be practical any actual game.

I wasn’t particularly good, but I had fun.

More than that, I cleared my head, and I don’t think it’s any coincidence that those solo basketball sessions tended to transition into writing sessions in the shade of the pavilion next to the neighborhood basketball court I frequented. There, I forewent my anxiety about germs and unfolded the sweaty, folded up sheets of paper I compulsively carried in my pockets, and wrote by dirty hand with a ballpoint pen pages of my first, largely awful stabs at novels and short stories and poems.

And whether I sat beneath that pavilion dirty and sweating, stood on the basketball court minutes earlier, or knelt at my bedside with action figures in the years before that, one truth remained consistent through these different takes on play and make believe.

I was becoming who I am today.