When I was a child, in my family, you just didn't quit. Anything! You didn't start a game of monopoly unless you planned to finish it. You didn't quit just because the game went six hours. Quitting wasn't fair to the other players. No, you toughed it out. In the first eighteen years of my life (all the years I lived at home), the only thing I remember quitting was Cub Scouts. Even then I'd stuck it out for a whole year.

I somehow grew up believing that quitters were bad, unambitious people who never amounted to anything, vagrants not worth the cardboard they slept beneath. Quitting revealed a basic flaw in one's character. Quitters didn't have the stuff to stick it out when the going got tough.

I'd wanted to quit a bunch of things, as a kid, but I didn't. Now I think maybe I should have. I took geometry, trigonometry and calculus. I started to get lost about three weeks into my first freshman term and never really found my way out of the confusion. This continuous floundering in the Pits of Pi caused tremendous stress and made me feel intellectually inept. I've never completely recovered. So in college I took Math 101 pass-fail, passed by a hair (I have no idea what that is in metrics), and have not opened a math book since.

And Spanish! Mi Gloria! Why did I have to take four years of Spanish? Why couldn't I have taken two years like some of the other kids? No one spoke Spanish within three hundred miles of my town except maybe my Spanish teacher, and I don't think he spoke it very well. I know I couldn't understand a word he said.

Looking back I can't recognize any rewards for toughing it out. I should have quit. But it was too scary at the time. There were too many unanswered questions like, Would I end up sleeping over a heating vent or would I have to marry someone in the eighth grade? Well, yes, probably. Those are the kinds of things that happen to quitters.

I remember the first time I quit something on my own. I didn't do it very well. I'd played high school football for four years, and surprisingly, I'd been fairly good despite the fact that I never really liked the game or the competition. What I enjoyed was the team camaraderie and particularly the attention I received in my little town. I was fortunate to play on teams that, by my senior year, had won twenty-three games in a row. So a number of my teammates and I received letters from interested college recruiters. The truth is I didn't have the desire or the talent to play college football. However, several colleges couldn't tell that from my game films. I should have gotten out of the game when I had the opportunity to do so with honor, but I didn't even know how to quit when I had the chance.

It turned out to be worse than I could have imagined. My first-year-coach, Coach Vader (no relation), was a maniac. You remember Woody Hayes when he went nuts on national TV and beat up one of his young players? Remember Bobby Knight and his folding chairs? Remember Jack Nicholson in The Shining? Then you get the idea.
Coach Vader berated us in practice, screaming at us nonstop even during meals, his face only inches from the side of our heads. We awakened in the dark each morning to his voice taunting us over the dormitory intercom. (Actually many of us had never gotten to sleep.)

It was so bad that two tri-captains, with distinguished college careers, quit on Friday, five days into the preseason. I only made it to Thursday. I didn't even have the guts to talk to the coach. At 5:30 in the morning, on the way to the field house for ankle taping, I turned around, hopped a Chicago cab, and rode off in the sunrise.

The cabby said, "A donde vas?" but of course I didn't understand.

"Take me to my aunts in Brookfield," I said extra loudly presuming that the louder I spoke the better he might understand English.

We drove for an hour or so, and I began to wonder if my cabby was not only driving me to my aunt's but also taking me for a ride. It seemed as though we passed the same shopping center quite a few times, though perhaps there could be a chain of Laundromats called Ronnie's One and Only Cleaner. Several hours later, he collected a good portion of my fall tuition with a big smile and a "Muchas gracias, senor!"

I said the only Spanish that came to mind, "Que sera, sera. Feliz Navidad."

I stayed with my aunt for a couple of weeks until school began. I'd only been on my own for four days, and already I was a quitter.

In retrospect, I now think I did the right thing. My mistake was to begin in the first place. One plays college football for the love of the game, or at least for the love of the scholarship money, but I played for neither. I played because I didn't know how to stop. I didn't know that I could be me without a helmet in the autumn. I didn't know that people would like me even if I wasn't a great athlete.

So I quit football and then I began to find the rest of my life. I auditioned for and was chosen to sing in the college choir. I signed up to sing in a small group that represented my school. I played intramural football. I even studied and did well for the first time in my life, and I never had so much fun learning.

Hey, I'm not suggesting that anyone should make it a habit but maybe there is a time when the best thing is to call it quits.