I didn't win because I was better than the competition. Actually, I took home the blue ribbon that day because I showed up for and completed an event.

I won my blue ribbon that day by rounding buoy number one, returning at a slower pace to the wake, and then rounding buoy five.

Sometimes the race goes not to the naturally gifted or most qualified, but to the one who finds a way to stay on his feet, to the one who simply completes the course.

Throughout my life, I have won only one award for individual athletic ability. In 1959, I was the Junior Boys' Slalom Champion at a mini-tournament put on by the Panhandle Boat and Ski Club. I didn't win because I was better than the competition. Actually, I took home the blue ribbon that day because I showed up for and completed an event. Let me explain.

In the late '50s, water skiing was just beginning to catch on in West Texas, and my dad and his friend B. J. Hunter purchased a boat together, taught their families to ski, and joined the fledgling Panhandle Boat and Ski Club. This organization competed with others like it on area lakes in events such as the slalom course (much like snow skiing with a series of buoys to navigate in and out of), the ski jump, and trick skiing. All ages participated with divisions for children, teens, adults, and seniors.

At 10-years-old, I was in the junior boys division where, in the slalom event, I had only two rivals. My brother Craig was 12, and our friend Al Sternenberg was 11. Al and Craig always beat me, not because they were older, but because Al was a natural athlete and Craig knew no fear (and believe me it takes lots of courage to lie with your body parallel to and nearly touching the water while you reach speeds almost double that of the motorboat that is towing you).

The choppy water that Saturday morning was not all that unusual for windy West Texas, but it did mean that the winner probably would need only to make four or five consecutive buoys. Al was first, and I watched with admiration as, on his approach to the course, he tried out his moves, sending a wall of spray into the air with every turn (This is one way to tell a good slalom skier; the only spray I ever produced came with the splash I made when I fell).

The towboat went through the first gate (two buoys) and Al easily rounded the first buoy (off to the right of the boat). However, as he crossed the boat's wake to approach the second buoy, his ski caught a wave and he went down. "I guess Craig gets this one," I remember thinking to myself.

And yet Craig did no better. In what could have been a video replay of Al's performance, he fell at the same spot, and I, still sitting on the dock ready to go next, made a decision.

As I approached the course, I could feel Al's and Craig's indignation, for I had exchanged my slalom ski (a single ski with a deep rudder for sharp turns) with a pair of jump skis (two skis now, wider, with less rudder making them much more stable). So I won my blue ribbon that day by rounding buoy number one, returning at a slower pace to the wake, and then rounding buoy five.

As I write these words nearly forty years later, I smile, partly because I can still imagine the chagrinned looks of Al and Craig who had been beaten by "the kid," and partly because of something that gives me hope in midlife. Sometimes the race goes not to the naturally gifted or most qualified, but to the one who finds a way to stay on his feet, to the one who simply completes the course.

And even I can do that.