When I was growing up, there was a sports show on TV called Saturday heroes. From week to week, Radio-Canada cameras roamed from one discipline to another and from playground to schoolyard to allow us to witness the exploits of young athletes of minor age in the small leagues and organized competitions. I liked taking a look at it.
My own athletic life, at the same age, took place far from the image box. Although, hard to believe today, I already won a bike race organized by the municipality of Maria on the occasion of Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day — yes, on my single-speed CCM equipped with Mustang handles and a banana seat. And if you give me two or three hours, I might even manage to fish out, in an old cardboard box in the back of the basement closet, the incredible trophy brought home that day .
About half a century later, I was heading towards the Sports Center of the University of Sherbrooke with a 10-year-old swimmer who was doing the dance. Competition had never been her strong point, and she didn’t like this particular swimming class, with its instructors who, she lamented, yelled at the kids as if they were training them for the 200 meters. 4 swims of the Olympic Games. Whereas the goal should have been to continue to develop a healthy relationship with water and physical activity. And the possibility of having fun in complete safety throughout the territory of Quebec and its million natural swimming pools from the last ice age.
Not only was this advanced swimming lesson ruining her Saturday, but it was even casting a shadow over her Friday evening, she told us. In the parking lot of the sports center, she was pitiful to see: her face low, her pout sad and her eyes on the ground. “I don’t want to…” she moaned in a small, pitiful voice. I almost broke down and told him: get back in the car, we’re going to go buy poutine. But reason has its reasons that the heart does not have.
And here she is at the edge of the pool, ready to practice her starting dives. The first time she launches, her body draws an angle of approximately zero degrees with the murky, rippling surface, and she commits a ” flat » resounding. On the second attempt, his entry into the water, equally unsuccessful, raises a quantity of splashes which could be enough to rinse the dinner dishes. Oh boy, I thought. It’s going to be a long swimming lesson.
Perched in the stands 50 meters away, I looked away from this anxiety-inducing spectacle to immerse myself in the book that I had picked up almost at random on a shelf in my library before leaving: the Logbooks (1947-1954) by Kerouac.
What emotion to read, 75 years later, an entry like this: “I have another novel in mind — On the road — that I keep thinking about: two guys hitchhiking to California looking for something they can’t really find and getting lost along the way and coming back hoping for something else . I’m also in the process of finding a new writing principle. I will come back to it. »
And he’s going to come back to it, but never to come back, and the world is going to hear about it.
In an entry in this diary, we see Kerouac juggling the idea of reconnecting with sports journalism, just to earn during the day enough to support the nocturnal writing of his still underground work. He had already dabbled in the sports section as a freelancer in a Lowell newspaper, then at Columbia Daily Spectatorthe press organ of the university establishment where this son of a worker from Little Canada in Lowell had landed thanks to a football scholarship.
When I looked up from my book, I saw the flesh of my flesh cutting through the waters of the pool. Not competitive, girl? The only boy in this group of five stood up to her in the breaststroke, but in the front crawl, she took on him without the slightest complexion. She may have never won a bike trophy on a banana seat, but she swam a lot better than me.
When Kerouac wrote about Columbia sports, he was recovering from a broken tibia suffered as a running back for the Lions, the university’s team. Having become a simple reservist, on bad terms with his coach, he will then drift far from the field, far from classes, in a cargo ship on the Barents Sea or in a Greyhound coach speeding into the American night.
It is tempting to make a broken leg the starting point for a career in letters (a writer because he is not a champion, to paraphrase Aquin), but the reality is undoubtedly more complex, as shown by the disturbing report by 2013 which I stumbled upon while “Googling” Kerouac at the swimming pool. Could the Canuck’s brief football career have been the cause of his dismal mental breakdown in the 1960s?
In Vanity of Duluoz, Kerouac recounts a tackle that caused him to lose consciousness and from which he woke up wondering: “Where am I, who am I?” » For a neurosurgeon cited by the New Yorker, the sad, alcoholic Kerouac from down the road had all the symptoms of chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Other specialists cite “a significant history of head trauma”, including a car accident in Vermont and a bar fight during which his skull was banged several times against the pavement.
I wonder which is worse for the brain: fame or blows to the head?
When I picked up my daughter from the locker room, she was on fire. She felt, by her own admission, “motivated, lighter and energized”. It’s Saturday, life is good, and maybe we’ll eat poutine after all.