I still have bitter high school football recriminations. My 1980s Episcopal boarding school in Texas glorified football above other sports. I attended on a scholarship from family connections, not through any academic or athletic merit. And I learned the wrong lesson about authority from the sports program.

A recent obituary in the alumni newsletter helped spur me to write this, although I’ve been kicking it around for 40 years. Nothing personal against Coach P who I don’t have to name. For the purposes of this story he is the universal coach. This is not to disrespect his essential personhood or whatever. But I learned things I did not want to learn about society and all the rest of it — universal things I never forgot.

Coach P’s obituary said he was the decades-long athletics director, had coached thousands of games and taught thousands of history classes, too. He is fondly remembered by nearly everyone, including myself. He was a real Texas character. His knees were busted up and it crabbed his walk. I assumed it had happened on a football field in his younger days, a brutal hit or series of hits marking him, claiming him for the sport. You knew he was committed. He was gray and had the hairy ears of an old man if he let it go, something I noticed sitting behind him in chapel once or twice, and it made me swear to never get old or sentiments to that effect. He wasn’t really that old but he was weathered. He was not without warmth or humor, and he bonded with his players particularly. Like in the Lou Reed song, they “wanted to play football for the coach.” They liked how, when he was consternated at you, he would exclaim “Hellfire, son!”

Failure to Launch

He had other coach-like aspects of his personality, like a low tolerance for tomfoolery. I know this because in 9th grade, one late Sunday brunch when the cafeteria was mostly cleared out, he made me and my buddy John clean all the butter pats off the ceiling. He’d seen us trying to catapult one up there with a fork. It was our first try and we weren’t even successful: the butter pat was too warm, so when we hit the fork, the half-liquid butter exploded on the launch pad. We laughed and laughed until Coach P walked over from the faculty table across the cafeteria. Without question, the ceiling was covered in butter pats from generations of students successfully launching them. It was the kind of thing you didn’t really notice until you looked up there and gave it some thought. Seeing us trying it, Coach P in fact both looked up there and gave it some thought. John and I had attended for less than a full year and couldn’t possibly have been solely responsible for all the butter pats on the ceiling. We protested — “None of those are ours!” — but he was determined to teach us a lesson. I don’t really blame Coach P, it’s funny now. But John and I had to stand on the tables and scrape all the butter pats off, certainly dozens of them.

I roomed with John and he talked in his sleep. And maybe it was about the butter pats, or maybe the football story below — but one night John woke up screaming, “Fuck you, Coach P!”

The Football Story

Here’s how the football story started. Day one at school, my mom helped me check in and register and meet my advisor, etc. All of this was happening in the library with tables set up for students to circulate through, getting their schedule and dorm room assignments and the like. And one of those things, for me as a freshman boy, was to sign up for football.

I hated sports, having only embarrassed myself in little league baseball and basketball. So I became a bookworm. I did not want to play football, but they even called it a draft. All freshman boys had to play. I forget which coach was running this table, there were a small handful of assistant coaches below Coach P in the pecking order doing his bidding, it may have been Coach P himself. But football was the cultural focus of the institution. “What about other sports?” my mom asked, looking for a way out for me. I was told something like, “Well, you have to play for at least six weeks. Then, after you give it a shot, if you still want to switch to something else, you can.”

The school’s objective was to find every possible football player, and that meant forcing me and every other nerd misfit through the program just in case we were undiscovered idiot savants at the game. I would have rather joined the cross-country team, I was a better fit with the skinny runners. Running is a solitary pursuit even if you’re technically on a team. You just have to run your heart out, you don’t have to execute plays or tackle anybody or get hit. I agreed with the old George Carlin routine about how football is a martial contest. It turned me off, even the cheerleaders somehow added to the patriarchal war vibe of the game. There were no cheerleaders for cross country. Every day I watched the cross country runners head out to the trails, the boys’ and girls’ teams mixing together. Meanwhile I had to go through this football basic training and there was no girls’ football of course, don’t be ridiculous. There were some sportos on cross country but it was weighted heavily with rock ‘n’ roll weirdos and cool kids. I couldn’t wait for six weeks to be up so I’d be free to join them.

The few friends I’d made from my freshman dorm were all nerds with zero natural inclination toward team sports, more liable to sit around criticizing the very concept than to want to play. We complained about the draft to each other as the weeks passed. Our football training wasn’t particularly terrible but it was thoroughly unenjoyable. We didn’t even have to wear any gear yet, but there were a lot of laps, hitting dummies and tire runs. You can imagine the montage. What a drag. My least favorite was when the coaches would line everybody up and make us run out for a pass one by one so everyone could watch. Coach P would shout go and I’d run down the field, then he would call out some jargon I’d never heard before about where I should be to catch the ball. The assumption was everyone had grown up playing football because we were Texan-Americans and understood these plays in our bones. But kids like me who had never learned it looked like idiots out there. The system was not for us; we’d get konked by the ball. It was a waste of everyone’s time.

As the weeks counted down, I made sure the coaches knew I’d been told six weeks was the limit. I plainly expected to be let onto the cross country team with my other friends who hated football. But I think maybe no one had ever made such a desire known before, because the system failed. Even my faculty advisor was powerless to prevent the coaches from making us work for it.

Zero Hour

The six-week mark arrived. One of Coach P’s assistants was Coach Romeo let’s call him. Coach P was the general but Coach Romeo was his sergeant. Coach Romeo was younger and in better shape. He obviously lifted because his chest and shoulders were so ripped he could barely move his gigantic arms. Dude had muscles for brains, a very full head of hair, and a macho swagger. He wore shitkickers and his disdain for nerds was clear.

On that day, Coach Romeo had the whole team sit on one of two sets of bleachers. Then he said, “Okay it has come to my attention that some of you don’t want to play football anymore. So, anyone who does not want to play football, move to the other bleacher.” I was only in 9th grade but I clearly recognized this as your basic peer pressure tactic. He was making it as difficult as possible to quit because you had to publicly choose to not belong to the in-group. But I was determined and by this point, insulted. No peer pressure on Earth could make me stay, so I stood up and moved to the empty bleacher in front of God and everybody. A small handful of other dorks slunk over as well, but my dorm buddies all caved. John kind of looked at me sheepishly from the corner of his eye as he kept his seat on the football side rather than stand out in front of the jocks. It all seemed designed to elicit sneers and smirks as those who weren’t manly enough self-selected from the herd of boys. It was bullshit then and it’s bullshit now; it was a failure of leadership to allow this muscle-bound authoritarian jerk to pressure us into staying, when we had been told we would be free. The pressure worked on my buddies, all of whom I knew for a fact hated being in football, but were shamed into staying. Back in the dorm I called them out for abandoning me and they kind of shrugged. I couldn’t even blame them, the pressure had worked as designed; I had felt it and it had taken a degree of fortitude to defy it. It was a high school satori, a moment when I realized how hopeless it was to try and fit in. I had to publicly accept I was a freak. In a way I should thank Coach Romeo but I simply remember it too well. Fuck that guy.

Bait and Switch

And that wasn’t even the end of it. You’d think Coach P and Coach Romeo would have been glad to be rid of us, to release us to the cross country team where we could maybe contribute something meaningful to the athletics program. But no. Coach Romeo explained it to us on the loser’s bleacher: “I know you heard you had to stay in for six weeks but actually you have to stay in for eight weeks.” No further explanation was given.

So, while everyone else got issued shoulder pads and helmets and gear and started playing scrimmages, the nerds who had the nerve to reject football were made to run pointless laps around the field for an extra two weeks. I watched the cross country team run out to the trails every day while I had to run around the field again and again watching my friends play football. There was no reason to it. Why, if I was already running, could I not run cross country? But the fix was in. Any behind-the-scenes power struggles between the sports was being won by the football coaches. Our asses belonged to them. I could not conceive of a way this was not punitive to me. As I ran, I watched my nerd friends getting creamed out there, and I pitied them because their situation also seemed punitive. Far from being granted any benefits of belonging, the jocks wiped the floor with them.

So finally the eight-week mark arrived. I said I wanted to join cross country now please. And I was told: “It’s too late to join cross country, the window has closed for switching sports. You have to join General PE instead.” General PE, the lowest form of life, was run by a sleight art teacher. And you know what he had us doing? Running the trails.

It was a bait-and-switch. I had been doing nothing but running for weeks, and now they had me doing more running, but there seemed to be no way under Heaven for a freshman boy to join the cross country team. Maybe it was merely a bureaucratic snafu, or maybe it was a genuine Catch-22, a logical impossibility on the books. But I don’t think so. To the extent there had ever been a real window to change sports, I had been overtly excluded from it. The following year I was allowed on the cross-country team with no problem. I never excelled at it so I never made it off the junior varsity team, although I did win a dramatic JV race one time. I’ll never know if I could have made the varsity team if I’d had another year of proper training by a coach who cared, a year actively denied me by a Christian football cult while President Reagan told Congress to eat his shorts. Over time I made some friends on the football team and the cheerleading squad, so who really cares anymore? But that’s what happened.

The Punchline

During my sophomore year, Coach Romeo disappeared one day. I had a girlfriend in the junior girl’s dorm, and she told me one of her classmates had disappeared too, and it was because Coach Romeo had impregnated her. So he had been fired, and I would have loved to be a fly on the wall when Coach P fired Coach Romeo. I imagine Coach P expressing deep professional and personal disappointments, like “I trusted you” and “Get the hell out of here.” Hopefully, Coach Romeo was referred to law enforcement if everyone was doing their jobs. And his pregnant high-school age girlfriend/victim had gone back to whatever fresh hell part of Texas she had come from, to hopefully not be forced to carry the baby of this statutory rapist abusing his authority. She would be forced to do so today. Have you seen high school girls? They’re children. Coach Romeo wanted to screw children so he became an authority figure at a Christian school, which is how that works. Along the way he saw to it that the beta weirdo cucks under his command could not possibly play the sport they wanted, because his values included the wielding of power for its own sake. All due respect to Coach P, but the main thing I learned from the athletic program, unfortunately on his watch, is that authority sucks.

An index of Jim Richardson’s essays may be found here.