By Dave Caldwell
They quit when the sands of time suddenly slip through their once-nimble fingers.
Or they quit when they realize that they no longer can outwit or outhit opponents who are blessed with abundant talent.
Or they quit when their once-limber bodies contain as much stitchwork as an Amish quilt.
Professional athletes usually do not quit because their full-time jobs outside sports suddenly become too much to handle. That probably is because professional athletes usually do not have full-time jobs outside sports.
But J. R. Castle does. And today, Castle is a retired professional athlete because his job, his athletic career, his marriage and his two children simply became too much of a juggling act.
“I can’t pull four strings at one time,” he said last week.
J. R. Castle, 29, of Wyndmoor, never was a typical play-for-pay jock. For one season, Castle played professional indoor lacrosse for the Philadelphia Wings, a team in the fledgling Eagle League.
The Eagle League – which has been rechristened the Major Indoor Lacrosse League (MILL) this season – is not your typical play-for-pay league, either. Last season, Eagle League players earned the unprincely sum of $100 per game. (The MILL decided during the off-season to grant the players a generous 50 percent salary increase, all the way to $150 per game.)
Castle, a former all-East Coast Conference midfielder at Drexel University, was not exactly the star attraction of last year’s Wings. During the season, he logged more penalties (5) than goals (2) or assists (1).
But Castle, the husband of Leah and the father of young sons George and J. R. 3d, enjoyed playing pro lacrosse.
Lacrosse was his first love. And there was a bizarre, Walter Mitty-type thrill to playing lacrosse for money before crowds that numbered between 6,000 and 15,000.
“I played the sport before – but never for money,” said Castle, a Penn Charter graduate who was the fourth-oldest player on the Wings last year. ”No. 1, there was the thrill of playing for the re-creation of the Wings” who played in the National Lacrosse League in the mid-1970s. “And I was being paid for the sport. There was never any money in it – it was not that the money was glamorous or anything.
“No. 2 was getting in front of a large group of people and playing the sport. It was a George Plimpton type of thing.”
It also was an exhausting type of thing.
“It was just too tiring for him – he couldn’t do it,” Leah Castle said. ”I would have liked to have seen him do it. We loved going to the games. But there are more important things in life.”
Such as Wall Street, for instance.
Castle works as a salesman for Mackenzie Financial, a Canadian brokerage business. He is assigned to cover a large territory – from Erie to Bethesda, Md. – and has come to know the roads in that region as well as the American Automobile Association.
When the stock market took its dramatic nose dive Oct. 19, Castle became a very busy businessman. “As my business began to react the way it did,” he said, “it required a lot more time of me to service my accounts.”
So there was less time for activities such as lacrosse. Since most of the Wings live in the Baltimore area, the team’s preseason practices were held at a health club in Edgewood, Md. – a 1 1/2-hour drive from Philadelphia. And the team practices were scheduled for 9 p.m.
“And as you can imagine, whenever you play the game, you get pretty worked up,” Castle said. “So it would take almost two hours to get home, and then it would take two hours to wind down after whacking each other with sticks and all of that.”
And J. R. Castle 3d, who was born last February, demanded plenty of attention from his father – sometimes while his father was in the middle of a dead sleep.
“He’s 11 months old now, but he’s still getting up at 4 in the morning,” Castle said with a laugh. “You always hear stories, ‘Well, my kid sleeps right through the night.’ That’s not true with this kid.”
Such obligations notwithstanding, Castle probably would have made the Wings this season. “But we had to cut down to 25 guys,” Wings’ coach Dave Evans said, “and at the time we were thinking about who we would keep, J. R. had made only one practice. It was right at the time the stock market was going crazy. It was unfortunate, really.”
Castle, Evans and general manager Mike French – a teammate of Castle’s last season – decided that it would be better for the team if Castle yielded his roster spot to a younger player with more free time.
“I’m not happy he had to drop off,” French said. “It was unfortunate that he couldn’t make the commitment.”
“It was probably one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever made in my life,” Castle said. “Ask my wife. She can’t believe I’m still playing now.”
Castle has joined the Masters Lacrosse Club, an amateur circuit that plays most of its games in the Main Line area. The competition may not be as fierce as it was in the pro league, but it still is a chance for Castle to play the game he loves.
And he says that he remains on the Wings’ loosely organized injured reserve list.
“I’m nowhere near the caliber of player that some of the younger players are,” Castle said of the Wings. “But at least I got to go out this way. That’s better than going out the other way.”
He is happy that he did not end his short-lived career by getting seriously injured – or by being embarrassed. But J. R. Castle got to live out his fantasy.
And like a fantasy, his professional career ended quickly and sweetly.
“Except I wished I was back in my early 20s again,” he said. “It came 10 years too late.”
Better late than never, J. R.
(Philadelphia Inquirer, January 21, 1988)