I had always wanted to be an athlete, but I didn’t realize until much later that I simply didn’t inherit athletic ability. Some of that truth began to surface during my junior year at Denver South High School, after yet another failed attempt to make a sports team. I’d been dribbling a basketball since I could walk and played on a YMCA team in grade school. But being on a team and actually playing for the team are two different things.
My baseball-playing aspirations were not very different. I only played sandlot ball in those early years in Nebraska because Little League practices conflicted with Boy Scouts — and my grandmother made it clear that Scouts came first. I actually made the freshman baseball team in high school, but only because I had a broken finger during tryouts and the coach let it heal before making the cut. Once it healed, it took exactly one at-bat during practice to reveal the truth about my abilities.
The point is, I moved through those years with a kind of innocent cluelessness — about my athletic limits, about my place in the world, and about the larger forces shaping the lives of people around me. When I didn’t make the high‑school basketball team, reality began to sink in. I could see that the players who made the team were simply better. Our team won the state championship twice while I was on the sidelines playing trombone. It was a great team, and I understood I wasn’t playing at their caliber.
But athletics were not the only area where I was unaware. I was equally naive about anything resembling social consciousness. I remember the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., but I had no idea who he was or why the nation was grieving. President Kennedy’s assassination shook me deeply, but MLK? He wasn’t on my radar.
Racism was a blind spot. In 1970, Denver Public Schools became the first school district outside the far South to have the Supreme Court implement a forced‑busing plan to address segregation. Denver had nine high schools at the time. As I remember it, two were primarily Black, two Hispanic, and the rest mostly white. I believe I had only one Black classmate in twelve years of public school.
Segregation, though, wasn’t the only issue. Denver South was known as the South High Rebels. We embraced southern regalia — flying Confederate flags and playing “Dixie” as our fight song. To me, it wasn’t a political statement. It wasn’t about superiority. It was just team spirit, a rallying cry to help our teams win. But in the national context, I should have been more aware of what we were doing and what it meant.
Then I didn’t have a clue what Black families across town may have thought of our flags in 1969… I should have.
That’s the part that stays with me now — not guilt, but clarity. I wasn’t being malicious or trying to send a message of hate or superiority. I didn’t know that, as a school, we were stirring up symbols tied to a painful past. I was living inside a bubble so complete that I didn’t even recognize the racism embedded in the Confederate flag. And bubbles like that don’t pop on their own. Something has to crack them.
This memory is one of those cracks. It didn’t open all at once. It didn’t transform me overnight. But it planted a seed — a small, uncomfortable awareness that the world was bigger than the narrow slice I had grown up in, and that my understanding of it was far from complete.
Awareness often begins this way: quietly, awkwardly, and years after the fact. This memory of a 17‑year‑old living in a different time is just the first of many moments that would eventually invite me to wake up and reflect on the assumptions I still carry. The invitations keep coming. I invite you to walk with me on this journey of Awakening to Awareness.