And, to make things worse, I was pathetically, pathologically shy. My limbs had a tendency to do things that I didn't want them to do, like make me fall over boxes and down stairs. I was tall and shaped like a stretched piece of Play-Doh with twigs stuck into it. I, on the other hand, was what some of my disappointed sports coaches had consistently described as "physically awkward." Whereas my sister had inherited all of my parents' athletic genes, I had inherited all of their gangliest. By the time I was graduating high school, she had worked her way to the top echelons of Canada's rowing community and was even considering trying out for the Olympic team. Ever since I was a young kid, she had always been an exceptionally talented athlete - a runner, swimmer, biker and rower. She logged about 50 miles per week, and when her friends ran half-marathons on weekends, she would run along, just to give them "emotional support." My dad, a tall, thin doctor, had competed in triathlons around Western Canada for a large portion of his adult life. For as long as I could remember, my mom had been an obsessive long-distance runner. I had always been my family's black sheep when it came to sports. In my case, that situation involved man-on-man oil wrestling.
As soon as our parents drive away from our dorms, and leave us alone with our boxes of books and Ikea corkboard, we're free to make an extraordinary number of mistakes and end up in situations that may not teach us much about organic chemistry or Emily Dickinson, but let us figure out who we are and who we want to be. As I felt the liquid drip into my shoes, he leaned over and said, "Get ready to wrestle."Ĭollege is a strange time. A tarp nearby had also been covered in oil, and other members of the team were streaming into the backyard with bottles of beer to watch what was about to happen. "Be prepared to have the worst acne of your lives over the next week," he warned us. Our team captain, a 200-pound hulk of a man, was walking from freshman to freshman with a large vat of vegetable oil, and letting it cascade all over them one by one. After two weeks of tryouts, we had finally made the grade, and this was our reward: An afternoon of embarrassing hazing activities, followed by a homoerotic climax that seemed to have come straight out of my 17-year-old gay subconscious. For the last two hours, 10 other young rowers and I had been undergoing "initiation" to my university's varsity crew team. That's what I kept thinking as I stood in the middle of a sun-dappled backyard, dressed in nothing but a spandex unitard and running shoes, preparing to have oil poured over my body. I had no idea college was going to be so much like a gay porn movie.