By Neal Wooten
What a wonderful concept, and totally bonkers; of course, cheaters win. That is the nature of being a cheater. That’s the only motivation for breaking the rules. And as honest as I perceive myself to be, I have also dabbled in the cheating arts in my life.
I spent a lot of my senior year in a leg brace from a football injury. It had four straps. Every week in English class, we had a test. The teacher would read one definition at a time, and we had to match it to a list of 20 words. My gang of miscreants weren’t much for reading, so they looked to me. When the teacher gave a definition, I would give my friends the answer using the straps on my propped-up leg. If I laid three fingers on the first strap, it meant number 3. The second strap was five plus my fingers, the third strap ten plus, and so on.
Kids in school play a lot of games like rock-paper-scissors. One game was called Odd Man. Three people would hold their hands out, concealing a nickel. Opening our hands, if two were heads and one was tails, the odd man won the two coins from the others. A friend and I had a system. If I held my thumb to the side, it meant I had heads. If I put it in front of my fingers – tails. We made sure to always have opposite each other, which meant no matter what the third unsuspecting person had, he lost. He could never be the odd man.
Card games, especially Spades and Rook, were big in high school. You guessed it; I had a certain way of holding the cards that tipped my partner off as to whether I had the Rook or Green One or how many Spades I had.
In baseball, all my teammates knew if any of us got on second base, we would try to steal the sign from the catcher and signal the batter as to which pitch was coming. I don’t feel too bad about this one because they still get caught doing that in Major League Baseball.
I still remember the anxiety of pulling a cheat sheet out of my pocket or sleeve during history tests, ducking down so someone could look over my shoulder, passing the answer on a piece of paper to a classmate, or any number of tricks we utilized.
Boy, looking back on my youth, I don’t think I had any scruples at all. Luckily, I grew out of that. I don’t think I’ve cheated on anything as an adult in my entire life. Well, not counting taxes.
