The Coral Gables Times

Sport OUTDOORS The Great Outdoorsman

BY EDWARD STREETER THE OTHER DAY, I was puttering about in my library. Several of my nephews and nieces were sitting on the terrace beneath the window, and I overheard one of them say, "I never saw anyone who knew so much about sports and outdoor things as Uncle Jeff," and my oldest niece said, "Of course. He was a terrific athlete. The whole family was, but I don't think any of them did as many things as Uncle Jeff. He seems to have been good at everything." Then another said, "The family must have been proud of him." I felt a warm glow of contentment creep over me such as I had never known before. These words were an acknowledgement of something I had striven for all my life. I decided right then and there to write my autobiography. These rough preliminary notes will serve, I hope, to pull the threads together until I have time to expand them into a more definitive work. * * * My name is Jeffrey Bottomly. I am 70 years old and of approximately sound mind and body. I was the youngest of five children. We came from a long line of athletes dating back to Thomas a Bottomly of Bottomly-on-Thames, who was said to have been the most skilled horseman and jouster in the British Isles. Be that as it may, my immediate family was obsessed with the conviction that the Bottomlys were a race of champions and that their chief reason for being was to maintain this centuries-old tradition. From the time that I learned to walk, this responsibility was impressed upon me daily. Father and Mother, my uncles and my aunts and my four brothers were always winning cups. Our home looked like a trophy room. There wasn't anything that someone wasn't good at—except, unfortunately, me. Even in the first grade I was a complete flop at such sports as musical chairs and pinning the tail on the donkey. This was, of course, deeply humiliating to my family. I don't think they were ever quite sure that I was not just being perverse. Everything came so easy to them. My oldest brother John, for example, was captain of the Yale football team, and my Uncle Alcott was captain of the Princeton team in the same year. It was taken for granted that they would be. John and Alcott were really the best of friends, but the first time they met on the football field during a Yale-Princeton game John caused Alcott to be carried off on a stretcher. The following year, during the second quarter, John went off in the same manner due to Alcott, and on the occasion of their final meeting they performed the remarkable feat of knocking each other out simultaneously and being carried off side by side amidst thundering applause from the stands. I merely mention this to indicate their dedication to family tradition. My brother Bertram was a track man. When I was quite young, Father took me to see him run the mile. Bert lost a shoe at the quarter mark and broke the intercollegiate record with one bare foot. I remember my father tugging at his mustache excitedly and crying, "That lad could run with one foot behind his back." Harold and Donald, my two younger brothers, were what you might call general-purpose athletes. They just went around the country winning tournaments. It didn't make much difference to them what they were. When my parents discovered that at the age of seven I couldn't catch a baseball without endangering the expensive braces on my teeth, there was considerable talk about sending me to a sanitarium. My mother, however, was against it. If I was crazy, she said, I was crazy. Mother was very practical about such matters. "Let's try to build up his body and teach him what we can," she would say. "If that doesn't do any good . . ." At that point she would shrug in an ominous way. After that, I had instructors in everything imaginable. They all admitted, subsequently, that I was hopeless, but at the time they wanted to hang onto their jobs so they kept telling Father and Mother that I showed great promise. Nobody had time to check up on them. Father was what they used to call a traveling man in athletic supplies and Mother was usually rushing around the country attending golf tournaments. My brothers were away at school during most of this period, so that everybody more or less forgot all about me, including most of my instructors, and I enjoyed the happiest years of my childhood in consequence. WHEN I WAS ABOUT 12, my father took me to some public courts to see how I was coming along in tennis, and I knocked two of his front teeth out with my racquet. It really wasn't my fault. He shouldn't have had his teeth where they were, but he never saw it that way, and that fall I was sent to Buxten's School for Boys. Buxten's had the highest athletic standards of any school in the East. Father had a hard time getting me in. During the first year I battered myself up so much that I spent more time in the infirmary than I did in classes. The cost of this was borne by the school, and eventually they let me be editor of the school paper as an economy measure. It almost killed Father when he heard about it. It did something to him, I'm afraid, because he never paid much attention to me after that, and a few years later he died. My brothers were very nice about it. They never openly accused me of having been responsible for Father's death, but I could tell it was on their minds. I didn't see much of them because soon after that I went to college. They all hoped I would show some improvement there. I seemed doomed to disappoint them, though. I went out for the gymnastic team Continued on page 33