After school and on weekends I often found myself alone on the farm, nobody to play with. Sometimes I would get together with the kid down the street, but often he was not around.

So I figured out ways to play some version of the three major sports of the era, all by myself.

Baseball was the hardest to do alone. You can’t play catch with yourself, and hitting a ball out into the field and then walking over the field and finding the ball was not any kind of fun.

But the back wall of the barn was made of huge rough but fairly flat stones, almost a foot high and two feet wide. Plus the dirt floor of the barn sloped somewhat down away from the wall to the outside. Which meant that if I pitched a hardball against that back stone wall it usually came rolling back out to me and I could pick it up and pitch again. 

I won many great games like that, often striking out some of the greatest hitters of the 1950s with my blazing fastball.

Basketball was easy, or easier. My parents got into a nasty fight because I was playing basketball against the barn wall and knocking the boards in the wall loose. My mother gave my father quite a bit of grief because I had nobody to play with and what’s a boy supposed to do?

So my father and I got a 4 by 8 sheet of outdoor plywood and mounted the hoop on it so I could play all I wanted without knocking those weathered barn boards loose.

Then all I had to worry about was dribbling the ball on rough gravel and and dirt in front of the barn, and avoid the chicken and duck poop.

You really didn’t want the ball to come back up to you with a slimy yellow duck poop on it, so you had to learn to watch where you dribble. This particular skill was not very useful when translated to the gym floor at the high school where the wasn’t any large bird poops to avoid.

I was, of course, an incredible shooter: I could drill shots from all over that rough dirt court: set shots, jump shots, hook shots, foul shots. I never missed. Oddly enough when I played in the real courts at school I was never able to shoot with such deadly accuracy. Funny about that.

But my one-boy sports life reached its highest level with football. We had a weird old hard rubber football, smaller than a real football, with a jagged hole in it. Even with the hole it kept enough shape that I could throw it.

So I would stand at one end of the barn and throw a high pass – onto the roof of the barn. Then I would run forward and as the ball came rolling off the barn roof I would catch it and score a touchdown. I did this a lot, winning dozens of championship games along the way.

The one-boy football was probably the best of my three one-boy sports. There was no duck poop on the barn roof, so the ball always came down nice and clean.

I suppose this might sound a bit pathetic and lonely but I never felt that way: I enjoyed it and played this way after school nearly every day in the spring and fall, and on long summer days as well.