Coach Hale and Shania Twain

I went to the gym tonight and swam for a workout, and while I'm in the locker room cleaning up the song "That Don't Impress Me Much" by Shania Twain comes on over the radio and I couldn't help but be momentarily transported to another time.

Not literally of course, but here's the song, followed by the story. . .



It was my junior year of high school at an after school basketball practice. As was our routine, after some brief warmups we gathered in a haphazard circle to stretch as a team. This particular day like many others, one of my teammates inevitably started quietly singing the song stuck in her head. On the good days, these half whispered song lyrics soon caught the rest of our attention and often resulted in impromptu sing-a-longs and on the great days, they turned into all out karaoke improv as was the case this time. Since it was a fairly popular song at the time, we quickly started singing along, but like most people, we couldn't remember all the lyrics, so we started to make up our own. Being that it was basketball practice we thought it appropriate to take turns calling out our opponents' mascots, after which we would all declare. "THAT DON'T IMPRESS ME MUCH!"

Like any good Lady Trojan would do, the first one called the number one enemy: Madison.

"So you're a Bobcat huh?! THAT DON'T IMPRESS ME MUCH!"

We continued to declare the unimpressive nature of tigers, knights, grizzlies, and bees alike before working our way to the more ridiculous ones (sorry Shelly, ID)

"But you're a Russet? THAT DON'T IMPRESS ME MUCH!"

Since we all had a bit of the giggles by this time laughing at our histrionic presentations, it was easy for Coach Hale to pipe in:

"So you're a LEOPARD? . . . [SILENCE]. . ."

We all stared at him for a second before one brave soul broke the ice. . .

"Um, Coach, that's not a mascot. . . "

(At least it wasn't one at any of the schools we knew of). We all laughed thinking how pathetically out of touch he was for not understanding the game, when he responded:

"Haven't any of you seen the video?  She wears a spandex leopard print jumpsuit."

We all shook our heads and laughed again, this time at the fact that out of 10 teenage girls,  our 40 something year old coach was the only one who had seen the latest Shania Twain music video.  Anyways, after that it became a bit of thing to joke about anything and everything to do with leopard print.  And since I opted for the lyrics only version of the video so as to shield the eyes of my innocent blog readers from the partial immodesty of the actual music video, here's a screen grab so you can get the full effect of the infamous leopard print costume.