Cup Stories
Eve Bradshaw
Sports Fiction & Essay Contest 2014 (view all the winners)
Honorable Mention, Nonfiction
I'm a girl. I've never worn a cup, bought a cup, or thought about cups. Before my son became a little leaguer, thoughts of athletic cups had never entered my brain. I never thought about where to buy a cup, or how to buy the right size cup. I didn't even know which side was right-side-up—but that's a story for another time.
Then C. Peevie came along. One minute he was wearing onesies and swinging a tiny plastic bat, and the next minute he was signing up for Little League and I was faced with the heretofore unexamined task of cup-buying.
You would think cup-buying would fall naturally into the domain of fatherhood. You would be wrong. Mr. Peevie explained that he had no experience with athletic cups, either. They just weren't considered standard equipment for swing choir and marching band.
Yes, I married a nerd, and cup-buying somehow fell to me.
I found myself in Walgreens, wandering in the "reproductive health" aisle, looking for these mysterious Protectors of Maleness. I found athletic supporters right across from condoms, and I smiled gamely at the handsome twenty-something who was facing the difficult decisions of ribbed versus smooth and latex versus lambskin.
"Is an athletic supporter the same thing as a cup?" I wondered to myself. I picked up a performance cotton supporter strap—because, as you know, it's all about performance!—and, filled with trepidation, I headed up to the pharmacy counter.
Of course, the pharmacy assistant was a pimply-faced teenage boy whose only association with a baseball field was when he walked across one on the way to his Doctor Who Club meeting.
"Um, hi," I said, all friendly and nonchalant. "I'm trying to buy one of those 'cup' things for my son, and I'm not really sure what I'm doing."
He stared at me blankly. I forged ahead.
"Um, so I have this supporter thing, and I'm just not sure if it's really what I'm looking for," I said. "Is this what they mean when they say my son needs to wear a cup?"
The pharmacy dude had spent way more time in front of a computer than on a baseball field; and his empathy skills had been stunted by a lack of human contact. Obviously, he had been raised by a pack of geeks in the wild. He let me continue humiliating myself, encouraging me to go on with the slightest raising of an eyebrow.
"I think there's supposed to be something, um, hard," I choked a little, and continued, "that goes into the supporter thing. Do you have any of those?"
There was a long pause while he considered my question and let the flush reach all the way from my neckline to my hairline.
"I don't really know," he said. "Obviously, I've never played a team sport in my life," he didn't add, but then he said helpfully, "Whatever we have is on the shelf."
Uh, huh. Thanks, dude.
After my less-than-satisfying experience at Walgreens, I decided to head over to an actual sporting goods store. I hoped against hope that the purchasing experience would be intuitive: I'd go to the athletic cup aisle, there'd be a package (oops!) clearly marked for a medium-sized 10-year-old, I'd buy it, it would fit, and we'd be done with the whole cup saga.
It was not meant to be.
When I got to the cup department, I found that cup sizes ranged from small to X-large. These designations were completely without meaning to me, since I had no idea at what age boys started wearing cups. Did six-year-olds wear cups? And if so, would the cup size be much different for a 10-year-old? Would I be insulting my son inadvertently if I bought him the smallest size?
So I looked around for someone to help me navigate the stormy seas of cup buying. The first person I asked shrugged her shoulders. I fully expected her to get on the store PA system and announce, "Customer needs assistance in the Cup Department! Customer needs assistance in the Cup Department!"
Instead, she pointed me to a guy behind a counter, and I headed over, knowing that this experience had a zero chance of ending without humiliation. Unfortunately, the service associate looked like Colin Farrell, and I started blushing even before I said the word, "Cup".
"I'm kind of new at this cup-buying thing," I started off. "You might say I'm a cup-buying virgin."
OMG, I thought to myself. Did I just say that out loud? To Colin Farrell?
I recovered quickly. "So could you explain cup sizes to me? I need to buy one for my 10-year-old," I said. "Son. My 10-year-old son," I added nervously.
Colin Farrell smiled benignly at me. "Well, how big is he?" he asked.
I gulped. "You mean, down there?" I whispered.
"Ah, no," Colin Farrell said, suppressing a snort. "Just in general. Is he small for his age? Or is he a big boy?"
"No, no," I said quickly. "No, he's an average-size 10-year old." And then I accidentally looked right at his crotch.
"Oh, crap," I thought to myself as I jerked my eyes back up. "I just looked right at his crotch!"
"We can probably go with a small size cup for your son," Colin Farrell smirked at me. I grabbed it from his hand and ran for the door.
My cup troubles were over. Right?
Wrong.
C. Peevie was excited about getting a real, big-boy piece of equipment to protect his equipment...until he tried it on. Then he was all, "Um, no, uh-uh, no-way. This hurts. I can't even walk. I'm not going to wear it."
Poor C. Peevie. He walked around the house like a bull-rider with a bad back, legs spread and knees bent, trying to get used to the feeling of wearing a salad bowl around his gonads. He moaned and groaned and cried and whined.
"I can't do it, Mom," he said. "I can't wear this thing. I won't be able to run. I can hardly even walk!"
He hobbled over to the couch, and gently eased himself down, with one arm behind him to support his descent, like a pregnant woman at full-term. "I can't even sit!" he moaned. "It's so uncomfortable."
"You have to wear it if you're going to play ball," I reasoned with him. "You'll probably get used to it after a little while, honey." Not that I had any real idea; my experience with uncomfortable sports equipment only encompassed the binding discomfort of sports bras, and as constricting as they could be, I don't think they ever made me cry.
Well. He wore the cup to practices and games, but he never got used to it, and he complained loudly every single time. I couldn't imagine why the world of baseball had not come up with a better solution to testicle protection than this one, which was so obviously flawed.
And how did other parents cope with the whining and complaining? Why didn't more boys just drop out of baseball rather than put up with the discomfort? Were parents offering sedatives to help their boys over the cup-pain hump? It was truly a mystery to me.
And then one day my friend Cuz came up to me after a game. Her son was on C. Peevie's team, and we sometimes shared rides and stories.
"E. Peevie," she said to me, with a strange urgency in her voice, "I have to tell you this so you don't think anything bad happened."
"Um, OK," I said, feeling my stomach start to sweat.
"Lefty [her husband] took C. Peevie to the back of van," she started out, and my eyes saucered and my fist spontaneously clenched, "to try to help him with his cup."
"He was so uncomfortable," Cuz continued quickly, "and Lefty figured that something must be wrong. It turns out that the cup was on upside-down."
Since you're reading about Little League baseball, you are probably aware that athletic cups are sort of triangle-shaped. In my infinite parental wisdom, I had been loading the damn cup into the jockstrap upside-freaking-down. The wide part was digging into his thighs, and the narrow part pointed up to his abdomen.
No wonder he was walking like a cowboy with a hernia.
C. Peevie moved on to the majors, and wore his cup comfortably and uncomplainingly for many years, his 'nads safely protected.
And I re-learned the perennial lesson of parenthood: We know nothing, and we are completely unprepared for this whole parenting thing. If our kids make it to adulthood with reasonable survival skills, we have accomplished far more than the over/under would have predicted.
