Life and Sport
Bayou Bryan and the Huba Buba Classic - Part 1: The Office
Author: Bryan Davies
My office is not the typical Canadian home business tax haven. It is the place where I wage my daily battle for effective self expression against deadlines both editorial and self imposed. There are no claims made here for 25% tax deductibility on every imaginable residential expense. Those are the same 'offices' described with exactitude to the Canada Revenue Agency, where the dark corner of a basement that contains only a battered old filing cabinet is transformed into something grand on the annual tax return.
I invariably prize memories as opposed to things.
My office and its contents are my private quirk. I take an embarrassing pride in the seemingly inanimate office space and its contents. It is in this sanctum that all of my good ideas and most of the poor ones have been hatched.
Arranged in battle order are my wordsmithing tools, the books that are the soldiers in my daily wars with words. No Internet search engine or online dictionary, no matter how precise or relentless, can ever convey the richness and the scholarship of a truly great hard bound English reference text.
There are 13 different dictionaries, ancient and modern, within easy reach. Who needs 13 dictionaries? Why do my wife and my daughter each own more than 20 pairs of shoes? They are there if I need them, and unlike footwear, my dictionaries will be stylish when I am very old.
I keep my father's clothbound Roget's Thesaurus close at hand. Its cover is smooth and worn like a stone in a rushing river and its weight and its nature unchanged by time. In a place of honour sits the single greatest non-religious text ever printed, the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (6th ed.). I remind myself of the irony of Winston Churchill's maxim whenever I seek something pithy in it to buttress my own prose – it is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.
There are other volumes, my second stringers, keen, upright little books on synonyms, syntax, and style. Like the obnoxious nerd in a high school class who begs to show the teacher how smart he can be, these books wait for their chance to shine. Next to them is a gorgeous, gilt edged copy of the Qur'an from 1931, its relentless Arabic purity an island amidst the wild carnival that is English grammar. How that beautiful book came to my office is its own tale.
Along the office walls above the reference books are the trophies and the pictures, mine and those of the children. These are the harvest of my sports career, and all but one are a perfect reflection of my athletic talent – good enough to compete, but not enough stuff to excel – and sustaining memories that are as pure as gold.
The spirit of these teams, the races run, or the atmosphere of a day or a time past sometimes descends from the office walls when I least expect it. These are the poltergeists of my athletic past, ghostly mischief makers that carom around the office, irresistible distractions as a writing deadline looms.
One office monument stands alone.
There is one trophy that commands the room, positioned above the others. It is dark and majestic mahogany, fronted by a finely engraved bronze plaque, topped by a stylish pewter emblem. The font and the finish of the words etched on its face are simple and assertive, leaving nothing to the imagination – "Men's Heavyweight World Champion, 1992." In smaller letters, if the reader needed a further explanation, appears the script "The Huba Buba Classic, World Weight Rated Running Championships, Lafayette, Louisiana, USA."
My friends who had seen athletic success slip from my grasp more times that they could ever count, marveled at this prize when we returned home with it. As the years passed, friends offered their explanations as to how this gorgeous memento came to be mounted on my office wall – inheritance, gift, theft, and a yard sale purchase are among the few fanciful ideas.
It is an esoteric world championship, without question. I was at the center of it, and sometimes I am not really sure how everything unfolded. I am certain that here in the office that houses so much of my sporting spirituality, I could remember every stride in the early March mists in the bayou that day. I was racing at the head of a Clydesdale army, 600 determined big men pounding through the flat swamplands of Cajun country.
The Huba Buba is the one pure and exultant moment I shall ever live as an athlete. The rush of victory that was so pure and all consuming. I was picked up by its waves and carried on its crests for the days and weeks that followed. The television crew in the lead vehicle on the racecourse were waving and cheering as the finish line appeared in the distance. "They can't catch ya, big boy! It's yers, it's yers!"
It is the memory of that exhilaration that never fails to raise my blood pressure, even now. Mine is a life no different than most people, because this peak is made even more profound in my personal history by the inevitable valleys that followed.
The journey is often as good as the destination.
We will go back to Natchez, Mississippi, and on to Lafayette, before the Huba Buba is run one more time.
Read Bayou Bryan and the Huba Buba Classic - Part 2: Natchez.
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Published: June 01, 2006
