B is for BALL

It came in a box, a bit like a cube and was made of plastic. As far as I can remember, there were only two colours available, white and an browny-orange but both had black lines between the imitation leather panels and the word 'WEMBLY' emblazoned across one side. Each came with an adaptor for the bicycle pump and cost roughly £5, which was quite expensive all those years ago. They were a wonderful football, probably the closest thing you could buy at the time to a real leather football and they had the same 'in flight' characteristics. I spent hours hammering one against the pebble dashed gable of our house or the whitewashed sheds that ran the length of our yard. It was less than kind to both and mum was not at all impressed though dad always retained a certain empathy with my plight as he often joined in the game and could always strike a ball with more ferocity than his son. I lost two of them quite early in their life. The first was found wanting in a hedge full of long, sharp thorns, one of which had pierced the few millimetres of plastic and when removed, managed to take with it any remaining breath the ball had. The second became impaled on the sharp edge of a spouting after a particular strike on goal of which I had been most proud. It was a clean cut and the ball didn't suffer. But the experiences taught me two things, apart from being more accurate with my shooting! First, without the air, the ball was pretty useless, unable to respond in the way I wished and after a few weeks, became so hard that it was almost dangerous to kick. Secondly, I discovered that in such situations, the inflatable adaptor served no useful purpose for no matter how much air I pumped in, it there always was a quicker escape route. By the time I had grown beyond the boxed ball, I had quite a collection of adaptors, but no ball.

By that time I was well into rugby and was already using the walls on the opposite sides of the yard to practise my throwing and catching on the move and the joins on the concrete floor became markers for the try lines and twenty twos, or twenty fives as they were then. However it did seem a bit of a cheat with a round ball which refused to respond in any other way than I expected. No, what I needed was an oval ball that would have a mind of its own, unpredictable, contrary, laughing at my inability to control its waywardness. We searched long and hard for such an object but the sports replica industry was still in its infancy so the best we could do was to compromise. And that came in the form of a rock hard, plastic, orange American football which had being lying dormant on the top shelf of a toy shop in Armagh. I never paused to think why such an object should be so far from home in a place which was hardly an outpost for gridiron and I guess I probably rescued it and the shopkeeper from further disillusionment.

Anyway, it did the job and though it didn't always respond to my caresses like the real leather balls in school, it was always ready for battle and never discouraged by thorns or other sharp objects in the way the soccer balls had been. I often wonder did the two types of balls reflect the mentality of the players from those two sports.

Our yard was a an absolute sports arena all year, for as soon as the winter sports had finished, the stumps and the racquets were dusted down and, once an old tennis ball had been located after a winter under a bush, the concrete markings were mentally adjusted to become, in turn, the court base line or the boundary at the Oval. Unfortunately, a few months of living rough had been less kind to the ball, which by this stage had lost all its hair and some of its bounce, but like any well disciplined soldier, it still responded to my promptings, though mostly from memory now. Many years later, I would discover that hard snooker balls, light table tennis balls and pitted golf balls were less forgiving when my lack of skill became visible in their responses. Yet I never fail to marvel at how, in the hands or at the feet of an expert, any ball can be made to do extraordinary things. But it takes a Steve Davis, a George Best, a Dan Carter, a Tiger Woods or an Ian Botham to bring the best out of it and in our hands, it has to make do with lesser achievements.

God has given us all individuality to allow us to express ourselves, to make decisions and to bring colour to each other's lives. We often call it free will. It makes us unpredictable at times, wayward and occasionally unapproachable. At worst, it makes us unresponsive to His promptings and hardened to His call. Yet in His hands and under His control we are able to fulfil the original purpose for which we were created, but it takes the Master to bring out the best in us and keep us in the right direction. I love the verse in Proverbs which says, 'Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight.' It doesn't matter whether we're big or small nor indeed what size or shape we are. All that matters is that we respond to His control. That should be our goal!.