Life and Sport
Bayou Bryan and the Huba Buba Classic - Part 3: The Starting Line
Author: Bryan Davies
This is a continuation of Bayou Bryan and the Huba Buba Classic – Part 2: Natchez.
Everyone has stood waiting at a starting line. The start is the metaphor that resonates through every channel in which our lives flow. Bad starts, great starts, fresh starts, false starts – starts lead to finishes, alpha and omega. The finish line is the next start, omega to alpha. We shall race until we die.
Athletes feed off the expectation that builds as the start approaches, whether it comes by the sound of a gun, the kick of a ball or the drop of a puck. Bravado battles fear while doubt dampens confidence and countless other lesser emotions surge forward within us and take sides in the struggle for self-control. The start is a release and a relief from a bitter inner contest.
The smell of the starting line is like no other. The air is fragrant and pheromone charged, making a humid human bouquet of sweat and weird liniments with a hint of day old cologne floating in the mix. The smell of 600 runners and their collective anticipation is a strange and wonderfully unifying sensation – we are all in this together, a tribe gathered and assembled to be discharged from a start line to run 600 separate races that would take us to the next start.
Starting lines are laid out on every avenue of our lives.
It is a kaleidoscopic sea of wild neon, oxblood reds, and electric teal, a snapshot of athletic fashion forever balanced between personal eccentricity and mass conformity. If you substitute boardroom blue and business suits for the swirling parade of shorts and singlets the starting line is transformed into the first day of a new job or a career making presentation. The gun and the tearing rush of the runners breaking away from the pack at the start line could be likened to marriage or a new child. Starting lines are laid out on every avenue of our lives. It represents the beautiful division between hope and painful experience, the sublime conflict between preparation and result, expectation and conclusion.
The back of the pack runner will tell you convincingly that they never compete – their satisfaction is in their participation and the results do not matter. The middle manager who refuses to seek further promotion or greater corporate challenges says that he or she is content with where they are right now. Do not believe them; we all race, even if the only competition is ourselves.
There is no final race, because we never know when the last race will be run. Triumph and tragedy are each intended as transitory states, never permanent conditions – these are only chapters to a grand and forever incomplete story. Competition to be our best is the essence of our humanity. Resting on a laurel wreath or avoiding a start line on the road before us is to deny our nature.
There will always be another race, because the race is what we are.
I was not so philosophical on the morning of the Huba Buba Classic 14 years ago, as a drawling Cajun voice floated, disembodied and distorted by amplification across the park in Lafayette: "15 minutes to go!...10, boys, 10 minutes!... Just 5 minutes, get to the start line, please!" The start line smell was as pungent as ever as 600 big men readied themselves, each in their own way. I remember laughing then as my mind flashed back to the starts of other races. While waiting for the gun at the Washington Marine Corps marathon two years before, I stood packed and greasy like a sardine in the start line mob beside two crew cut Croatian runners, immaculate in their matching singlets designed in the red and white checkerboard colours of their country, furiously smoking unfiltered cigarettes to the utter horror of the crowd around them. They said that they were nervous. At the start of my first marathon in 1978 on a steamy August racecourse in Toronto, when mass participation racing was still a novelty that seemed accessible to anyone with an interest, I watched a wide man in Bermuda shorts and deck shoes complete his final race preparations by scarfing two sandwiches that he produced in rapid succession from a fanny pack. Here was a guy who was just making a day of it. I admired his kamikaze style.
I do not remember now what I thought – as the Huba Buba starter raised a rather large firearm skyward and fired a volley through the mist – except to consider that 2,000 miles was a long way to come to run 5 miles and be embarrassed. Nine o'clock on a March morning in the Louisiana bayou and it was already tropically humid – I wondered how they could ever do this in the summers here.
Memory will often gild a base metal into gold, and that is how it should be.
Where ever in our world we find success, our triumphs must be preserved as we require – our minds are not a court of record – and the personalized memory of a great success will be the only record worth keeping. I won the Huba Buba that day, and how it happened or what grand racing stratagems I employed is not part of that memory –the pure exultation of accomplishment is my treasure. Like applause that follows the killer presentation or the clinching handshake that concludes a powerhouse promotional interview, my memory embraced the success of that instant of race day triumph and backfilled enough selected detail to make it whole. This is not invention or fantasy or delusion – our memory keeps alive what we need to know to move ahead, and shreds the rest.
That is why the esoteric Huba Buba world championship was my Olympic victory. The Huba Buba glimmers on the receding horizon that I see whenever I look behind me. It is a man made mountain whose elevation is not so great when compared to what others have done, but the Huba Buba has a silhouette in my memory that is made majestic by the valleys that were carved in my descent from its peak. We all have landmarks that we see as we look back, and for most of us they also point the way ahead.
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Published: June 20, 2006
