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love his gentle nature, but we began to loathe the whistle. Lenny stated our feelings most succinctly. “If I ever get hold of that whistle, I will squash it like a fly.” We laid out plans for the demise of the offending instrument. We couldn’t just destroy it; Lloyd loved it too much. We, therefore, bought an identical whistle and demobilized its sound. The next problem was getting Lloyd’s whistle. We figured he probably slept with it. But Lenny, who had spent his early years in a big city of 50,000 or so, had become adept as a pick pocket. While we distracted Lloyd, Lenny slipped the whistle from around Lloyd’s neck. Lenny quickly stuffed it in his pocket and held up the other one. “Lloyd, did you drop this?” Lloyd looked to see his whistle was missing, and thanked Lenny profusely as he held the replacement whistle lovingly. Long before we reached conditioning time, our coaches sensed something was up. But when Lloyd blew hard into the whistle, only to have it emit wonderful silence, the smirking of many on the team told the coaches what we had done. Our head coach handed Lloyd his own whistle, so we wouldn’t miss a beat, and the next day the coaches ceremoniously, with smirks of their own, 7