Last weekend Rachelle and I took our nearly three year-old son Jones to soccer.

He’s too young for soccer, as are all the other toddlers in the class, but it still felt like a virtuous way to spend the morning. And so all the parents sat on the picnic tables scattered about the unmowed patch of green that was the field, while rosy-cheeked Coach Nancy, all of 13 years-old, benevolently led our children through their “drills.” This, a summer job she would surely look back upon as amongst the best of her life.

Above us turrets set against an easy, deep blue, and in front of us about a dozen children either ignoring or doing some improbable variant of the stretching exercises Coach Nancy was encouraging them to follow. Jones was in the totally ignoring her camp. Putting the tiny, orange pylons on each of his arms he declared himself Iron Man, and after acting like a robot for a minute or two, carefully placed one of the pylons on my head.

And then he ran away and across the field to the perimeter where beds of stones lay waiting for his curiosity. He marvelled at them like the precious jewels they were.

He then climbed a tree. Saw a bear. Heard a plane. Did a somersault. And as he was riding a horse back across the field to the rest of the Little Kickers, he stopped very suddenly and pointed up at the sky shouting, “The moon!” And there it was, a barely visible silver edge up there in the morning sky–classical music drifting over from a nearby estate that just sort of hung there, as if a cloud, as if the most natural thing in the world.

Jones then found another bed of rocks, this one directly in front of a fenced gate. He started to throw the rocks, playing a game in which the point was to hit one of the metal bars of the fence and make a “ping” sound.

Unknown to him, a small crowd of Asian tourists walking down the street to Casa Loma had stopped and were watching him as he went about his joyful labour. When he came close, they would all lean to the side, softly exhaling an “Ooooh,” and then when he made the “ping,” they all shouted and applauded,  and Jones spun around, utterly amazed at this encouraging surprise, and so happy– happy, like this was and always would be the world.

Kind of like Academy Award Winner—only in a way that brings absolutely no positive connotations.

Back in 1988, when he won the Olympic gold medal in Seoul, Korea and shattered the world record for the 100 Metre, he was an absolute hero. I was a student in Montreal at the time and my friends and I were so euphoric, so energized by his victory that we sprinted down St. Laurent screaming for joy. It was a completely spontaneous act. We simply could not prevent ourselves from running, as every elated cell in our bodies was commanding us to do this.

Of course, you had to be willfully blind to not realize Johnson was on steroids. Even his nickname, “Big Ben,” implicitly hinted at his usage, and his eyes were jaundiced and yellow– a clear indication his liver was over-taxed from the drugs. He looked like a bull, and his mood was always remote and defensive, happier (if that could ever be a word associated with him) in the shadows than in the spotlight.

Carl Lewis, the great American athlete and his Arch Enemy, was everything that Johnson was not. Lithe, maniacally outgoing and resembling Grace Jones, Lewis loved the spotlight and seemed to effortlessly excel at every sport he touched. He sang, sold sweatshirts and played at being a kind of corporation, a latter day Muhammad Ali (only absent the charisma), if you will, and he was everything we hated about America, and then to have somebody as quiet and unloved as Johnson, not just defeat him but crush him, seemed a titanic victory for underdogs all over the world, and it was this that sent us shouting down the street.

IN YOUR FACE, USA!!

Of course, a couple of days later it was revealed that Johnson was doping. He was stripped of his medal and ever since has been known as “disgraced sprinter Ben Johnson.” Post fall, he has been in trouble for pointing a starter’s pistol– from his Porsche– at another motorist while on the highway, was hired by Gaddafi as a football coach for his son (resulting in the son being suspended from the league for drug use), raced a horse and a stock car, headed a failed clothing line called Catch Me, chased a Romani gang who robbed him of his wallet in Rome and failed to catch them, and endorsed a sport’s drink called Cheetah Power Surge, the commercials of which player off the fact Johnson was a cheater.

It’s been this nearly-forgotten way for almost thirty years, and it must get kind of exhausting, but every once in awhile Johnson raises his head from the shadows, most recently emerging for a photo-op to lend his support to Toronto Mayor Rob Ford’s unceasing and exhaustless bid for re-election. Disgrace, one would presume, and not her better angel redemption, being what brought the two men together under the Big, Confused Tent that is Ford Nation. *1

*1 It’s as if Marvel Comics was creating a super-group of villains in the Ford camp, all readying for some great apocalyptic battle to take place in a future issue.

To compound matters the girl who was instructing me on how to ride had a speech impediment. It might have been that she was deaf, or that she had so many dental apparatuses in her mouth that verbal communication was next to impossible, but the result was that I couldn’t understand a thing she was saying. It was awkward, this, because I didn’t want to draw attention to something she was certainly self-conscious about, but I also didn’t want to give the Horse Explode command by mistake, so I politely asked her to slowly go through the instructions again– something that likely happened to her quite a bit. This made her angry and frustrated, and her instructions were now a reprimand shouted quickly from underwater.

I sat on Grace, who was banging my leg against a wooden fence.

I asked another ranch hand what the original girl had tried to tell me and she said, “Oh, Cathy is alright!” telling me nothing about how to ride a horse. It was my hope that the horse had plodded the little route my group was to take a billion times and that I would be safe, as I had just seen a dozen 10 year old girls return, all giggling and smelling of strawberries and sunshine.

I shrugged, received a dirty look from Cathy, who was probably 17, and fell in line at back of our horse train.

At the front of the line, as if to get back at me, Cathy flirted with a friend of mine who is good at everything and looks like he is good at everything.

“Ah your ah chawbay?” She asked him.

I wanted to be a cowboy.

I’ve always wanted to be a cowboy.

Grace was walking me into low hanging branches and pausing to eat grass.

Up ahead, where all my friends were, they were talking about good names for horses. Now this is something that is right up my alley. I live for moments like these.

Cathy, showing off by riding sidesaddle so that she could face everybody but me—who was way back and to the left–asked, “Wha bout Bella, is ha a gawd name?” I tried to shout out, “For a Twilight geek who wants to marry a vampire” but nobody heard me except Grace, to whom this apparently meant “Detonate.”

She tore off and I stated bouncing wildly around in the saddle, my left foot shooting out of the stirrup. I was completely out of control, like a British comedian, and then the horse slipped on a rock. I did not even know that horses slipped, and as Grace went down to her knees I leapt off her like I was fucking James Bond, and rolled across the trail like I was born to roll across trails, popping up like a ninja ready for combat.

Everybody, even Grace stopped and looked at me with amazement.

Cathy, stunned and with wide-eyes, stared, “Arh ya a cawhboy, too?  Cuz ya dan look lie a cahbay, mahbe a jhockey?”