Warning: adult language and situations (oh, the irony)
Sometimes a story chooses its own time to be told.
In Brunswick, Maine, about a twenty-minute drive from my home in Yarmouth, some high-school football coaches have made the national news. According to CBS Sports, head coach Dan Cooper was fired last month after an investigation into a “sexually-charged hazing incident during a preseason team retreat.” For those who may wish to know (meaning most of us, I’d suspect), the incident “involved a player being held down and having a sex toy put in his mouth.” Evidence included videos shot by other students on their phones.
As horrifying as this may be, it is not by any means an anomaly. As we have seen, young athletes are sometimes abused by those they would trust. Training techniques, equipment, performance standards, data research…all these things have improved and helped to advance the sporting world. Human nature has not.
Now, to be quite honest, Maine does not have a storied American football tradition. Google reputes that the most famous player to hale from the Pine Tree State was someone named John Huard, drafted by the Broncos in 1967. By way of contrast, even though it wasn’t really my decision, I grew up playing sports in Jacksonville, Florida, where the pressures on young athletes tend to be greater. By the mid-1970s, certain high schools had become showcases for college prospects, and as I was merely an average player, I was never in that exclusive gene pool. But my alma mater, the Bolles School, was and continues to be one of those places. The stakes are high there, and upon them rests a carefully balanced table of measures: not simply athletic potential, but also such intangibles as personal reputation, popularity, economic opportunity, family legacy, and - among boys - a peculiar sense of honor.
High-school football in Jacksonville is a religion whose churches convene on Friday nights, whose congregations are often composed of adolescent alcoholics-in-training, half-drunk by halftime, of fathers whose own dead dreams for themselves are carried in corn-meal-sack-sized guts pressed against the chain-link fence, and of mothers who adore their little messiahs and brood like Mary on the aluminum benches of the grandstands.
Below, on the field, the passion play unfolds, a story of ancient male rituals and a barely bridled savagery spoiling in the dank September air.
I was there once, and I played my part. In the long week leading up to Friday’s contest, the team must prepare, of course, but in truth it would all begin for us in late August, when our coaches would require all players to attend a ten-day camp during which we moved into the dormitories at Bolles, situated on the banks of the St. Johns River. It was the part of the season we dreaded the most because of its physical, mental, and emotional demands.
Here are some of the ways in which our bodies were tested:
Coaches roused us every morning at six for a one-mile training run before breakfast. On a typical August morning in northern Florida, the grass is well-soaked in a sticky dew, and the sun begins to breathe down your sweaty neck as soon as it appears over the treetops. The mosquitos are up early, too, busy about their never-ending search for their breakfast of blood.
After our own breakfast (usually consisting of waffles and sausages from a frozen box), we would dress out and take the practice field for morning workout. We had dubbed the practice field the “Dust Bowl” because it was exactly that: a grassless pit of dark-gray dust that would collect on the sweat that streamed down our faces and arms. Warmups included calisthenics, stretching (misnamed because it amounted to bouncing on one’s muscles rather than stretching them), “drop-and-roll” drills, and a thing we called “six-inch killers,” done prone on our backs with our legs and feet raised six inches off the ground. It hurt like hell. After that, we ran drills using blocking sleds, a spring-loaded tackling dummy that we called “Big Red” (it could break your neck if you didn’t hit it just so), and various other torture devices.
Following lunch, we were soon dressed and on the field again for the afternoon practice, which would typically include a full-speed, full-contact scrimmage, the prime time when you attempted to prove your worth to coaches and teammates, if you didn’t keel over with heat stroke first.
Evenings, after a five-thirty dinner and a chance for the sun to begin to bleed back beyond the trees, we would be in the weight room, clanging and puffing away, and then we would meet at the track at 7 p.m. We never knew how many laps Coach would assign us, and he always relished the dramatic moment when he would smile, lick his lips, and then call out, “Gimme…gimme eight!” Or ten. Or twelve.
Suffice it to say that an early bedtime seemed a brief reprieve in between sessions on the rack.
Of course, I suppose there were certain kinds of ignorance for which we could not have held our coaches responsible. They did not know, for example, that bouncing on your hamstring rather than patiently stretching it actually increases the likelihood that you will injure it. They did not know that withholding water (or the nasty concoction that Chuck Solomon, our head coach, called “salt peter”) from young athletes did not make us tougher, but simply caused dehydration and possibly heat exhaustion. Nor did they understand that leading with the face mask when making a tackle would one day be deemed one of the most dangerous things to do in all of sports. Nor did they know that such a thing as concussion protocol even existed: I saw teammates knocked unconscious, out cold, in games, only to be sent back onto the field once the fog had cleared.
We could not necessarily fault them for those things, but their ideas concerning mental, psychological, and emotional tactics…well, that is another matter altogether.
Public humiliation was high on their list of instructional strategies. Name-calling was common: “shit-head,” “shit-for-brains,” “dip-shit,” “shit-bird” - all varieties of shit were articulated, but so were the conventional emasculating terms, such as “creampuff,” “peaches-and-cream,” “homo,” and the quintessential “pussy.” These were even more effective when served up with some sort of physical underscoring. Consider, for instance, the virulence of Coach Morgan’s remark, “Hey, cream puff, I’m gonna pull my leg back and cock it, and then I’m gonna swing it on the snap count. If you don’t fire off that line when you’re supposed to, I’m gonna put my foot right up your ass, cleats and all.” Now consider the effect of this declaration if you knew that Coach Morgan meant every word of it.
Praise be that Morgan was blubbery and hairy and really could not move very quickly (why he chose to come to practice without a shirt on, I will never know). Coach Solomon, on the other hand, was fairly nimble, and he was redneck-strong, like someone hired to sling tires off of the track at a monster truck rally, or who could chug two pitchers of beer and then beat everyone at the table in arm wrestling. Nonetheless, Morgan held the edge over him in psychological abuse. God help you if you had any glaring flaw about your appearance, as I did in the form of a bad case of acne, made worse by the sweat and dirt in which we were basted from day to day. During the football season, not only my face but my back and shoulders would bloom like a topographical map. Once I was waiting in a line at the water fountain outside the locker room after practice. We were all shirtless, having torn off our shoulder pads and our stinking, wringing-wet t-shirts as quickly as we could. Morgan walked behind me and sang out in a booming voice: “Damn, Trippe, you ‘bout got some acne, don’t you? Looks like a pizza I ate last night.”
It is odd how your best friends can laugh at your expense at such times, but I did not know then that it was that nervous laughter that says, “Thank goodness it was Trippe that was humiliated, and not me.”
In fact, as students of history know quite well, pitting citizens against one another is a tried and true practice in any tyranny. The same can be applied to a football team. But what is the point of it? The point is to strengthen the tyrant’s grip, because he is a frustrated egomaniac, and when he fabricates a conflict, only he can resolve it, thus fortifying his tyranny.
Coach Morgan had two favorite practice drills, one he called “Morgan’s Mountain” and the other “The King of the Kennel.” Morgan’s Mountain was a training run in full pads, with a twist added. We players would run a circular route, down the steep, sandy bank of the St. Johns River, through a stretch of malodorous mud, and back up another steep section of bank to start over again. One time through the course, and you were gasping for air, ready to puke, and besotted by heat, but you forced yourself to keep moving because of the caveat Morgan had added: “If you catch the guy in front of you, you’re allowed to do anything you want to him!”
I suppose he expected that we would be inclined to do bad things to each other: assault, vicious ball-kicking, forcible sodomy… In any case, through mortal fear, I always managed to keep just ahead of the kid behind me, as did everyone else.
By contrast, the rules of King of the Kennel, Morgan’s other brainstorm, demanded that each of us, at some point, would show what we were made of. The kennel was essentially a cage constructed of a metal frame with chicken wire stretched across its top and two of its sides. Two players would face each other from the open ends, in three-point stances, and we would wait for the whistle. On that signal, we would go at one another, with the object being either to drive your opponent back out the side by which he had entered, or turn him on his back, at which point you were supposed to attack him viciously, punching, kicking, anything that seemed apropos to the moment. With helmets and pads on, there was little danger of anyone actually being hurt, but the trauma of squaring off with your teammate in what seemed at the time a fight to death was unsettling to say the least.
I remember punching my good friend, Chris Vann, over and over, until one shot slipped under his face mask and caught him on the chin. We abruptly stopped our grappling, and he gave me a look that was both surprised and sad. On our next go-round, Chris was able to turn me over and ended up sitting on top of me, with Morgan hovering over the kennel and yelling, “Hit ‘im, Vann! Kick his ass!” But Chris did not hit me; he simply stared down at me with that same sad look. He and I knew - hell, all of them knew - I had sacrificed my honor, but he had not.
Still, I suppose it is one thing to smack your teammate under duress. I am certain that it is entirely another for a grown man of thirty or forty years, a coach no less, to physically attack a teenage boy. Yet that is what happened, time and again, on those dusty playing fields in the long-ago seasons of 1973 and ‘74, surrounded by scrub oaks on one side and the glinting river on the other, as the whistle faded away and the underling tribe fell silent. The film reel exists in the attic of my memory, where I attempt to let it lie, and yet sometimes, perhaps for no reason at all, it is taken out and played once again.
“Damn it!! You! Get over here!”
But before the terrified offender can take a step, Coach Solomon is on him. Maybe the kid has fumbled the ball (a mortal sin), or maybe he has not fulfilled his blocking assignment, or maybe his tackling technique is all wrong, or maybe he has simply smiled and laughed at the wrong moment. One never really knows what small thing might bring on the fever of rage, but there it is. Whop! Whop! Two stiff blows up against the earholes of the helmet. Now grab the face mask of this worthless piece of shit before he can instinctively recoil, and sling him around by it (but not too hard - we don’t want to risk any diagnosable injuries). Now pull him close and snarl redneck gibberish into his panicked boy-face before slinging him away and consigning him to some place of shame - the bench, or the back of the line when at last it comes time to drink the salt peter, with a kick in the ass for an exclamation mark. And the rest of us turn away silently, each of us wondering… Am I next?
But the thing we had just witnessed was quickly sealed up in the tomb of shame; I, for one, never said anything to my parents about these kinds of episodes (for one thing, I knew how my father would have reacted; he had no reluctance in disciplining me himself, but God be with anyone else who ever laid a hand upon me), and I suspect the same held true for my teammates.
The rules of good writing prescribe that the writer must not comment on an action he has just rendered. If he has done his job, there is no need. In this case, however, I am troubled by questions: What was the rationale for all of this? Was it supposed to prepare us for “the game of life”? Was it crafted to make us tougher and more determined than our Friday-night opponents? Or was it the displaced anger, driven by certain failures, of men whose own pasts had been peopled by monsters and demons? Secondly, why did we players, as fairly intelligent youngsters, continue to go back day after day, week after week, season after season? Was it because we, too, believed it was good medicine? Was it a restless desire to be accepted, to be somebody - a football player? Or was it simply a distorted code of honor thrust upon us by men whose time had come and gone long before, who wielded the club of authority not because they cared about us but because they hated us and the opportunities that being young would hold out for us?
I don’t have the answers, but I can offer a few postscripts to this recollection.
Our lives (and hence our subsequent memories) were changed significantly in my senior year, when an entirely new coaching staff was put in place. Our new head coach was a former college quarterback from Ohio, young, with up-to-date ideas and a philosophy of optimism and encouragement. The days of King of the Kennel and salt peter were over, and to us, it was to be a season for the ages.
A good many years later, I was out enjoying a couple of beers with an old high-school friend and teammate, with whom I am still in touch, and who has been a successful attorney for many years now. We were talking about the old days of football camps and related tortures, and he remarked, “You know, Jeff, the truth is that if that type of thing happened today, our coaches would probably be up on child-abuse charges.” He was not smiling when he said it.
I heard that Coach Morgan died in 2014, but a few years before that, I happened to run into Coach Solomon one afternoon when I was still in my forties. He was working in a Jacksonville sporting goods shop, and I went in to buy my son a new bat for little eague baseball season. When I walked up to the cash register, Solomon recognized me first.
“Trippe,” he said quietly. I looked up. “It’s me. Coach.”
We chatted briefly about nothing. Yes, yes, I’m a teacher now. Yes, I knew you had left coaching. No, I haven’t really seen much of anybody from the old days. They’ve all gone off in their own directions, I expect. Then I gathered up my packages, and he looked at me, smiled his lumpy smile, and said, “Well, take care.” Over time, I have managed to convince myself that I saw a small glow of regret in his dark eyes.
Another friend told me that he’d had a similar experience around that same time, had gone into the same store and, just like me, encountered our old football coach, except that in his story, Solomon had gone into a lengthy reminiscence that ended with a heartfelt apology for having “lost his cool” with us a few times, all those years ago.
Otherwise, I have lost the trail of my old coach’s life.