TUPA VIEW: from heroes and goats to the flying nun

By Mike Tupa
Bartlesville Area Sports Column

Tuba-toothpaste.

Two-bits.

Tupa-linsky.

Tu-pay (toupee).

I’ve heard ‘em all.

The day after I enrolled as a fifth-grader at Lynn Elementary School, one of my clever classmates, a tall, lanky, tousled-blond haired kid — whose facial expression seemed perpetually frozen in a half-sneer, half-grin scowl — ingested my last name and by the first recess coronated me with the sobriquet “Tuba-toothpaste,” 

The other monikers listed above followed during my junior high and high school years.

But like tape on a PVC pipe, none of them stuck for very long. 

By the late 1980s, the reference to my name flip-flopped — Dozens of people called me Tom Tupa — obviously mistaking my athletic physique and bearing with that of the former Ohio State and NFL quarterback/punter.

Not that I minded being mistaken for a guy with multi-million dollar toes — but I usually ended up chewing on my own foot.

There’s two nicknames, however, that after more than 30 years still haunt me like a whiff of fresh cow poo-poo.

 I don’t know that I’ll ever get past the fragrant stigma.

More than three decades ago, I sat at my work desk pounding away on my computer when our receptionist summoned me. I bee-bopped — in innocent ignorance — to the front office.

Standing on the other side of the customer counter was a middle-aged woman. She stared at me with icy eyes that could have chilled hot chocolate. 

She didn’t take long to get to the point — my slander against the proud group of animals named goats.

The tin can of contention had been my recent New Year’s Day sports feature “Heroes & Goats,” listing the luminaries and the lunkheads in the world of athletics from the previous season.

Her umbrage was sincere; I had bad-mouthed her hollowed-horned friends — who obviously took a back seat to dogs as mankind’s best amigos in her book.

She assured me that goats were sensitive, compassionate, gentle-hearted critters. By using the word “Goats” to denote negativity I had besmirched their reputation and hurt their feelings. 

I’ll be honest — I didn’t know we had goats among our family of subscribers. But obviously erred in that assumption.

I don’t remember how we concluded our one-sided conversation. What could I say? I stood naked in the barrage of her verbal barbs. I was guilty. I had permanently smeared the good name of Goatdom. An apology didn’t suffice. Nothing could undo the damage.

After she finally left, I trudged slowly back to my desk, shuffling as I were leading a funeral procession.

What happened next was — I suppose — inevitable. The receptionist strolled back to my desk and handed me one of my business cards. But where my name was supposed to be, she had glued a piece of paper that read: “Goat Basher.”

How true, how true — I’ve had a recurring nightmare during the years I would wake up to find my toes chewed off by a pair of shaggy-bearded goat enforcers.

My other most harrowing nickname episode had occurred several years earlier while for 12 weeks I enjoyed the hospitality of Marine Corps Boot Camp.

One day, our Drill Instructors took us to one of the obstacle torture courses. 

First, you need to know I wasn’t the most popular recruit in the squad bay. The D.I. 's picked me as the platoon’s poster boy for pathetic. The D.I. ’s screamed my name 25 times a day as if it were a swear word. I flirted with the idea of asking to change my name tag to “Worm.” 

Anyway, one of the tests on course was called “The Slide for Life,” or something like that. It featured a tower about 50 feet, or so, off the ground. On the front side were one-or-two-inch thick metal cables stretched downward at about a 45-degree angle. The object was to lay one’s body prone, face down, on one of the skinny cables, hold on tightly with both hands while using balance and feet to stay on top of the cable. At the sound of a whistle, the recruit had to pull himself hand over hand down the cable while maintaining balance and make it all the way to the ground.

I had succeeded the first time. The second time, on the whistle I overextended one of my hands, lost my balance and rolled over so that my full body was dangling down while I kept a tight grip with my hands. I tried to kick upwards to hook my foot back around the cable, but the trajectory was too steep. Finally, my hands loosened and I plummeted groundward toward a tiny patch of water. As I went into the water, my feet went into some kind of shock absorber that prevented any injury.

As I lifted myself upward through the water, I slapped it in disgust with both of my arms. The assistant series commander told me I had flapped my arms like a bird during my 50-foot descent. He barked at me to climb out and run to the squad bay to change into dry clothes.

I earned a new nickname from the ordeal.

You guessed it: “The Flying Nun.”