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ONE I stood in the dressing room of Sempronious' decrepit swimming pool, CCC-constructed like our own, only according to a yellowing sign on the front doors this one had been condemned by the Health Department of the Town of Sempronius and the County of Hendricks nearly four years ago. I was trying to tell the boys my one bit of wisdom, which they'd heard countless times-if not this season then last. For the seniors, even the year before. "Look," I said. "We lost tonight. That's over. Here's something that you'll find true: you're going to lose. Sometimes, you're going to lose. I hope that doesn't surprise anyone. But, let's look at this another way. Let's look at now as ground zero. Let's think about right now as the starting point." This was not all that easy for any of us to do because we were two and three and had just lost to the team the preseason coach's poll had ranked last in the conference. To be fair, Sempronious was now four and one, and obviously much better than everyone had thought, but didn't help us. As I talked, I could hear our two busses idling outside, waiting to take us to the Yankee Burger in Filmore. I hated Yankee Burger. "If you think of now as the beginning," I went on, "if you don't fixate on what has happened, then there is nothing but potential, there is nothing but what is in front of us." These sort of metaphysics invariably fell on deaf ears-understandably so-but it was all I had. Also, I believed it. "What we need is not self-flagellation. We need a commitment to realizing this thing inside, this potential that is still lying there ungerminated." I realized of course-that it is, I knew-that I was talking about myself. Perhaps only about myself. Toby Callan had his hand raised. A sophomore. Only arrogance would cause a JV player to raise his hand at this moment. We say that there are no dumb questions, but I've never known anyone to believe it. Obviously there are dumb questions. Thousands of them. "What is it Toby?" "What is self-flagration?" He intentionally and, he thought, humorously mangled the word. "Flagellation," I said. "It means hitting yourself. Beating yourself up." I could see the confusion come across his face. Why would you hit yourself? He wanted to ask. "Don't worry about that part, Toby." Soon someone was going to ask about germination, too. What kind of school were these kids getting educated in? I looked at Dale, who was watching me with the wonder he reserved for my speeches. The other coaches nodded as I spoke, as if what I had to say had the utmost relevance, was perfectly coherent. They had by this point practiced those expressions, though I knew they were more or less completely tuned out. Dale, though, watched me, like I was a street performer, a naked man streaking across the field between quarters, a spectacle. In spite of the fact that he was hard on me, Dale was really the only one I had any trust in. None of them-Dale included-really knew much about the game, so that wasn't it. It was his skepticism that I trusted. "Bring it in here," I said, extending my hand out toward the middle of the room. They were sitting on the benches that made a square perimeter around it; everything was painted aquamarine, including the floor and ceiling. It was chipping and shoddy looking. The boys all moved toward me. "This is not real life. It's a game. But it bears a resemblance to it. How you think about yourself here will carry with you past this. Winning and losing is less important. But how you think of yourself. That matters." They were huddled all in the center now, all 43 of them, their hands extending toward my own, the coaches on the outside of the ring also extending their hands. I looked at the faces I could see. They were dirty-it had been raining. They stank. The place, everything, in fact, stank. All of it was wet and dirty and it all stank. "There is skill in this game, but mainly there is execution. If you're focused, if you're there, I mean there, you guys, not thinking about pizza or rumors about your girlfriend or whatever, if you're there and you mean to realize that potential, then you can come out and beat anyone. Do you hear me?" They were uncomfortable, tired, wanting me to stop, to say one, two, three Marauders. But I wasn't done. "Right now, alright? Starting right now, we begin to prepare mentally for next Friday. I don't give a shit about Atlas' record. Their state ranking." I knew the boys were freaked out by playing a state ranked team. I'd heard them talk about it. "Listen, we start right now. Tonight? Tonight is not even history. It didn't even happen. We are potential. Alright?" They nodded, a few of them actually following me a little now. "Alright?" They nodded more emphatically. "One, two, three," I started. But then I interrupted myself. "Wait," I said. "On three, we're not going to say Marauders. We're going to say Potential." I could see that they thought this was gay. "Alright? Okay. One, two, three." And then everyone joined in, not with much gusto: "Potential." Outside, it was cool and misty, early October, wet leaves were strewn about from an ancient oak in a nearby cemetery. There was a crowd gathered, mostly parents, but some others, including the folks from the radio station and the newspaper. "Tough loss, Coach," someone said. Dale was at my side now. Just loud enough for me to hear, he said, "I think they need some fucking self-flagellation." "A lot of learning going on," I said to the voice out in the crowd. Quieter, to Dale, I said, "Maybe. But I'm going with this plan first." Dale turned toward me so that his back was to the crowd. "If you admit nuance-if you suggest all of this mumbo-jumbo about possibility or whatever, potential-then you invite dissension, you invite chaos," he said, all parental tone. "Shit, Nate. These kids don't know anything. The concept of potential-it doesn't mean anything to them. You're asking a duck to talk. Their world-the one that they think is real-is naked boobies and all night keg parties like they see on HBO. It's shit, Nate. Their understanding is shit. You have to squash it. If you want results from them, you beat it out of them. You don't coax it out with philosophy." "I'll take that under advisement," I told him, shorter than I usually was with him. Don Argyle from WDRE was approaching with his recorder. "Do you got a minute, Coach?" "Sure." The defeat in my voice was unambiguous, now that I was away from the boys. "You should be playing the younger boys more," someone said from the crowd, a man's voice. I didn't look to see who it had come from, but I was pretty sure I knew-it was Toby Callan's stepdad, Marshall. The Callans were a rough hewn tribe responsible for two murders since the mid-60s and frequently in the paper for drunken brawling, assault, and weapons and drug charges. In recent years, their notoriety was for the intimidation of a neighbor, a Columbus attorney, who had bought a plot of land on their road and had been taking steps to put in a bed and breakfast. After a handful of unfriendly run-ins with the Callans-notably, the burning down of a barn, which killed a goat and three cats-this attorney (an attorney!) had sold the land well below market value to an independent agent who, low and behold, turned out to be buying in behalf of the Callans. My backs coach, Gene Mills, who had his real estate license, had told me that a real estate map of Moraine County showed a long north-south vein along Cox Warner Road with property values hovering in the realm of speculation prices. Hard to say if it was just isolationism or some more devious plot. But they were not a friendly lot. "Are you reconsidering this offense, Coach?" Don was asking, his microphone hovering near my throat. "Tonight had nothing to do with what offense we were running," I said. "It had to do with being outplayed by a team that wanted to win more than we did." "What do you make of Snopes' performance?" "Bad, Don. It was bad. All across the backfield was bad. Too many mistakes, too many fumbles. Not enough focus." "Sempronius seemed to have the single wing by heart," he said, returning to the familiar song. "Many times, they were in the backfield before the handoff was made." This is the last question, I thought. "That's the way the offense works, Don. Sometimes people don't get blocked. But you have to execute. If you don't execute, then it doesn't much matter what strategy you're using. It doesn't matter what offense you're running." "Any changes for Atlas next week?" "We play Atlas next week?" I said. Don looked at me surprised for a just a second. Then saw that I was making fun of him and refusing to answer his question all in one go. "Thanks, Don," I said. "I don't have much to say tonight." The other coaches funneled out of the locker room and we all stood around in the mist and waited for the boys to shower and get dressed. Ten minutes later, the first few of them shuffled out. Another twenty minutes and just about everyone was there. We piled in and made our way north. The Weston team had beaten us to Yankee Burger by 20 minutes, and some of them were still waiting in line for their food, which slowed things down considerably. After observing the situation inside, I went back to the bus and sat by myself. I pretended to have notes out, going over them, in case anyone came in. By the time our busses pulled into the high school in Moraine, it was midnight. I was far too wound up to sleep. I thought that a beer or two might be calming, though I knew I couldn't go to Cooley's, where the sports-crazed lunatics would all be. So I drove to a place on the edge of town, near the BPOE. Larry's. The guys in there didn't give a rat's ass about me or why I was wearing such strange clothing. I minded my own business and they minded theirs. I watched a boxing match on a small television above the bar, chatted just a little with the bartender. When my fourth beer arrived, he told me quietly that it was last call, which was startling news. I stood, left five bucks on the bar and made my way to my Alliance, leaving the fourth beer where it sat. Outside, I dropped the whole mess of my keys into a puddle as I fiddled with them to find the one for the door, and it took me a good two or three minutes to fish them out. By this time, the wisdom of walking home had become apparent. I wiped them off and put them in my jacket pocket and started walking. It was over a mile, and the walk, I think, did me some good. At the carriage house-it was now almost 2:00-I started up the stairs, but something stopped me on the third step and I stood there for a long moment. Hornets, I thought. I'd been battling a nest in the yard for some years and they'd been on my mind recently because I'd been stung four times the last time I'd mowed, the previous Tuesday. Addison-villainous Dr. Addison, my landlord, retired physician, missionary; I knew him everywhere except to his face as just plain Addison-and I had been round and round about the hornets, which had gotten me exactly nowhere. These hornets had become the real issue for me with the lamentable rent-for-work deal that I had with Addison. "Vespa crabro," my cousin Phillip Dante, who was in the bug business, told me when I took a dead one to him a year or two ago at Crossroad Lanes in Atlas, where I knew I'd find him. "European hornet," he said, in between bites of a hot dog. "Invaders. These guys are goddamn tough hombres. They been runnin roughshod over this continent since the nineteen hundreds." He was holding it up to the sickly fluorescent light and examining it like a panning miner checking out some pyrite. "You tell your man to give me a holler," he'd said confidently. "I can take those bitches out." I reasoned there on the steps that it was time to take matters into my own hands, which was probably not a decision I should've been making after three beers and a loss to Sempronius. Inside Addison's garage-which sat beneath the carriage house, my cramped quarters, 333 square feet, not counting the crawl space, which was packed with boxes-I found one of the three five gallon canisters of gasoline he kept-the Addisons were stocked to the gills everywhere you looked: metric tons of Nova Scotian shrimp in the chest freezer in the basement, entire shelves full of things like sandwich bags and aluminum foil in the pantry; I couldn't stop myself from exploring their closets while they were gone, where I found two backup and as yet unworn pairs of identical shoes for every pair in use; I have to assume the same was true of underwear and BBQ sauce. I hefted the can back out toward the hole in the ground that I knew it by heart, even in the moonlight, and I stood over it for a long moment, savoring this modicum of power. Then I dumped the entire contents into the hole, which took over a minute, and I shook the can at the end like some fanatic, getting every drop out of it. This just didn't give me the sense of satisfaction I was looking for, though. I went back into the garage to hunt up some matches. It took me a long time just to find the overhead light switch, and I banged around quite a bit in the searching. With the lights on, I finally found an old brown book, from the Glenwood Motor Hotel, Alpine, New York. Probably from a vacation Addison took his family on circa 1961. I could just imagine the place with rockers in front of each door, everything nicely painted, forest green or a deep blue. Bucolic America. Once upon a time stuff. Now all of the motels like this one were places to buy or use crystal meth. I went back outside to be done with the hornets once and for all, but the matches didn't work. I stood over the hole once more, focused my gaze on the matches, pulled one from the pack and struck it, but nothing happened. I tried again. Five, ten, fifteen times. I tried another match. They were damp or too old or both. I was standing there, my mind whirring along in its clunky state, considering the distance to a reliable pack of matches. "You're not going to throw a match down there, I hope," a voice came from behind me. He'd caught me off guard, and probably because I was drunk I spent a few seconds searching for the source of the sound. It was of course the old man himself. I could see him clearly now. He quickly recognized something strange about me, though he probably wasn't sure what. In any case, his tone changed. "It's late, Coach," he said. "The hornets," I said. "Okay," he said. "I promise to deal with the hornets. Alright? But let's not do it tonight." "What was it like at the Glenwood Motor Hotel?" I asked him, strangely at a loss for something to say. It was as if I just wanted to have a meaningful conversation and would even have it with Addison. "The what?" "This," I said, jutting the book at him. I got my first glimpse, after five years, of Addison's famous missionary compassion. He pretended to look at the matchbook, which I knew he couldn't see, because it was dark and because his vision was poor anyway. This wasn't the way he and I interacted. "I'm sorry. I have no memory of this, Coach," he said, a strange generosity in his tone. "It looks like a nice place," I offered. "It does," he said. "I'll have to ask the Mrs. about it. She'll surely remember it. She remembers everything." He was probably right about that. I nodded. "It's not a big deal," I said and started for the carriage house stairs in the hopes of avoiding further weirdness. "It was just…" But then my voice trailed off. I didn't bother trying to retrieve the idea either. "I was sorry to hear about the game tonight," Addison said. I turned back and saw that he was wearing pajamas-pinstriped-and his dark green Wellingtons. Someday I wanted to have a pair of Wellingtons like that. I don't know why, but his saying this made me want to bawl, and it was everything I could do to hold that in. Recognizing that I wouldn't be able to muster something pithy about loss and learning as I wanted to-as I would normally do-I said instead, "I appreciate that." And then I scurried up the stairs. I was not comfortable with the compassionate Addison. It was one more thing to throw things out of whack, and the list of such things was growing hourly. TWO Later, as I lay in bed staring at the ceiling, I heard sirens erupt out of the quiet early hours. Over the next five minutes, it sounded as if every truck in Moraine was being dispatched. I could hear them, one after another, leaving our two firehouses. After some time, they sirens died off in the distance to a small sound, though an occasional singular siren-volunteers, most likely-sped along one of the avenues. The fire wasn't close. But I had a sick feeling about it nonetheless, about those trucks and where they were going. It wasn't until very late that I finally lost consciousness. Sleep succeeded only in supplanting one ill feeling with another, as I dreamt of turgid, dark waters swirling around me, a brackish sea even Jacques Cousteau would've been reluctant to enter. As I was eating some toast in the morning, bleary-eyed, exhausted, my hair pointing in nine different directions, I saw Dale's figure at the top of the stairs. He rapped the screen door once and then opened it and stepped inside without waiting. "Morning, Dale," I said, looking up at him, chewing on my toast. As those words came out-as, I guess, I saw him, processed his being there-it came to me. I don't know how I knew it. "Someone burned down Stubbs' place," I said. This surprised even Dale, who was hard to surprise, or who, at least, rarely showed surprise. "You go out there?" I shook my head. "I heard the sirens. I wouldn't have thought much more about it except Coach Dale Roanoke is on my step at eight in the morning." He nodded. "Listen to me," he said. "You need to keep some distance from this." I eyed him. "What is that supposed to mean? Emotional distance?" He looked at me weirdly, as if the very word "emotional" were something taboo. "Sure," he said. "emotional distance. But physically mainly. I mean stay away from the house." "What would I do?" "I don't know. You really never know with you what you will do." "This is big deal, Dale. " He followed his usual tack. "As we have been over, Nate, there's nothing special about Jim Stubbs' old house. It's just a goddamn house," he said. "Like any other goddamn house. And now it's just a goddamn house that burned down." He has a way of simplifying things that is sometimes more valuable than others-that sort of sober assessment is invaluable on fourth and one, when I start over-analyzing. He's usually there to send in a quarterback keeper. Here, though, he missed the point wide. His supremely common-sensical take failed to take into account the figurative. The house was the unspoken symbol of Moraine football coachdom, which is why it had sat unoccupied for five years. And which is why now it had been burned, apparently to the ground. Dale's insistence that it was just another empty house didn't make it one. Once, Moraine's football coach had lived there. And then he'd been chased out of town and his house had been left there to rot. "I'm not sure you're seeing this all that clearly," I said. "This is about me a lot more than it's about the house, and it's a little fucking scary." "Don't get all girly," he said. "Come on, Dale. You don't have to worry about anything. You teach your kids how to make bird houses and then you come out and enjoy the weather during practice each night. You don't have anyone breathing down your neck. Don't tell me about girly. I intend to get extremely girly about this." "Well, anyway," he said, backing off. "I wanted you to know what happened before you came up for film." "I appreciate that." "Are you ready to go?" he asked "Yeah." "You wanna ride?" "Yeah. Okay." Sitting in the passenger seat of Dale's picked up, I felt all of it creeping toward me, the controlled burn of five years starting to come into a real vein of fuel. "You okay?" Dale said, looking over at me. "Yeah, I'm all right." "You look bad." I didn't respond. "You sick?" "Look, Dale. I had a few beers last night. I didn't sleep well. I'm tired, existentially tired." "Yeah, okay. That's what I figured. You don't handle your alcohol so well." The boys were appropriately quiet after the loss, sitting in 127, an ancient room, part of the oldest construction-mostly made of the kind of yellow ceramic brick that was manufactured locally a hundred years ago. I'd taken earth science in eighth grade in there, and the rock samples from then still lined the windowsills-obsidian, quartz, marble-dusty and probably untouched in the intervening 15 years. Two connected TVs were at the front of the room, last night's game film paused identically on them, the kickoff team poised under the lights awaiting the opening whistle. The boys all looked to me when I walked in. "Out to the track," I said, which struck fear through the room. My assistant coaches-there were seven including Dale-all did their best to hide their own surprise, but I could see it in them too. There was a quiet, nervous walk through the long hauls of the school, and then across a parking lot in back, past the trailer I taught in, and down the stairs of the stadium. When everyone had assembled at the starting line at the southwest corner of the field-the field itself looking green and pristine, untouched during a stretch of away games-I said to them, in a neutral voice, "I want you to think seriously about what I said last night. I don't have any interest in going over that film with you. I want to wipe that from my memory, and from yours. Do you understand?" They-or most of them-nodded. "Okay. I want you to run a very leisurely mile to get the kinks out from last night. And then I want you to go home. I'm canceling practice Monday, too. I'll see you Tuesday. Come ready." I could see the mood lighten. Tuesday, for them, was months away. Years. Jeff Tibbet, the JV coach, spoke up then. "The JV squad will meet in the locker room after school on Monday to run over some things before the game." I'd forgotten about the JV game. How could that have happened? It was against Atlas. The Monday JV games were frequent harbingers of what was to come, the younger kids from the two schools outlining their playbooks for the Friday night matchup. "We've got Atlas," he told them, as if they needed reminding-I thought I could see a chill run through the younger boys. But before they all had time to get too anxious, I yelled, "Now go." In a marathon pack, all 43 of them started off down the straightaway. When they were gone, we all stood there for a minute. I was processing everything still and I had, in spite of such a spate of bad news, an unmistakable feeling of release. Whatever had happened with the fire, it had started me down some course or another. And the truth was that I was happy to be on one. "Got a plan here?" Dale said. "Gestalt," I said. "Huh," he said. "It's just a game, right?" Everyone smiled and nodded, understanding the prickly underside of the this. As the boy's passed us the first time, the backs effortlessly upfront, the offensive linemen moving at a somewhat quick walk in the back, Dale yelled at them, told them that leisurely didn't mean fucking walking. They stepped it up then. I headed for home on foot. THREE At the bottom of the stairs to the carriage house, the morning paper lay in its plastic cover. I could see the word "fire" showing through the transparent blue. I picked it up and thought to walk over and check on my handywork of the early hours. I had no trouble locating the nest portal: it was a gaping hole, ten inches across. I don't know how bees worked, if they had simply co-opted the vacated home of some larger critter, or if they'd somehow dug this out themselves. It was a good question for my cousin Phillip. I stood at a bit of a distance at first, ten feet back or so, to reconnoiter the level of activity. No movement was apparent, so I incrementally moved closer until I was right over the hole. From here I could see that there were in fact live hornets on the ground. I watched one crawl from the hole, sort of shake off dog-like, and then take wing, albeit cumbersomely. Holy shit, I thought. Philip was right. These guys were goddamn tough hombres. I climbed the stairs and went inside and sat down in the living room and looked the paper over. First, the sports page, to see about our loss and the damning photographs that Harold Wolski, the Daily News' photographer, had captured. There were two. A boy named Cheeks high-stepping over one of our fallen linebackers-it wasn't clear which one, but you could see the number was thirty something. On the opposite page, there was Henry Snopes running for his life, holding the ball like a loaf of bread, exactly the way I'd told him forty-five thousand times not to. The article itself was somber, declarative, subjective-lacking the usual flair and hyperbole. Back to the front page, which wasted no time in the story of the fire to get to the details of Coach Stubbs' scandalous exodus from Moraine. It was the kind of legend that people loved to recount, because it was filled with deceit, repentance, vengeance; it really only lacked sex to put it in the realm of Greek tragedy. This was at least the third time some version of it had appeared in the paper since I'd been hired. The story is not long: a Point Pleasant bookie had had a religious conversion-picked up serpents, the whole nine yards. This kind of thing was not terribly uncommon around there. Handling snakes apparently really seals the deal with God, so by the by, the guy's conscience got the best of him. He'd told all of this to a Parkersburg paper. And so, he'd said, he could no longer go on running the gambling ring he had for the past 24 years-high school sports, bass fishing tournaments, WVU football, Marshall and Ohio University basketball, as well as for the Alley Cats, Charleston's double A baseball team. This was a blow to gambling addicts all up and down the Ohio Valley. Eventually, he brought forth his books, which implicated two state congressmen, a higher up in the West Virginian diocese of the Catholic church, myriad other local officials and celebrities, and about a half dozen high school coaches, including Stubbs. To say nothing of all of the ordinary folks. The pages in this guy's book that included Stubbs' bets were photocopied and printed in the Moraine paper, a messy third-grader's scrawl out of which Stubbs' name emerged. Stubbs had bet on a lot of college basketball. But the damning part, the part that people cared about, was that he had on five different occasions bet on Moraine football games, twice against Moraine. (For the record, Moraine won both of those games.) When this news broke-midseason, five years ago-things got ugly quickly and Stubbs and his family had to leave their house in the hands of Tyson Realty and flee back to California's Central Valley, from whence they had come seventeen years back. Fresno. They left in the middle of the night, in fact, and didn't stop until New Castle, Indiana, where they slept on the side of the road for a few hours before moving on westward at dawn. Someone had followed them that far to make sure, apparently, they were gone. I'd heard the story countless times from proud community members. Tyson Realty's sign in the front yard notwithstanding, the house, it was widely understood and accepted, would never sell, no matter how cheap it got. Anyone who showed interest in purchasing it would be profoundly discouraged-harassed, actually, if it came to that. Five years down the road, the house sat vacant, still fully furnished, an unraveled hose still snaking through the front yard and permanently displacing the once vibrant Kentucky bluegrass beneath it, which now perfectly mimicked the hose's figure. It was a big price for Stubbs to pay for his mistake. However successful he had been over the years at gambling, it was hard to imagine that he'd ever made enough money to offset even six months of this. Any discussion in Moraine of Stubbs and the sad little Cape Cod down near the Highland River eventually-and inevitably-ended up returning to me. There had become a fixation on my decision or, according to some, lack of decision, to purchase a house. This was played out in the newspaper mainly and had provided for an expansive and apparently entertaining referendum on, essentially, me during these five years. In an early entry in the debate, for instance-and for some masochistic reason, I have saved these things-a Mr. Scott Franks of Glenville Road wrote, on May 3, 1996-take note that this is during the off-season-that I was "not fully committed to the success of Moraine High School football and was probably ready to abandon ship at the first sign of bad weather." The obvious problem with this assessment is that already by this time, we'd had in the MHS program-pretty much since the day I'd arrived-what I would call non-stop, unmitigated bad weather, the kind that, were it actual weather, would likely make it on to one of the apocalyptic shows that aired on cable TV about weather. Another author, this one anonymous-many of these authors were anonymous, which galled me immeasurably-wrote, by way of critique of my inaction, "Coach Holland's decision disturbs me a great deal because private property is the very basis of our republic. It is what we fought the Revolution for and what defines us." It would seem a joke, this sort of thing, except that it wasn't. Responses to this and other letters have poured in in constant stream since the first letters started trickling in just weeks after I had started. Not all of the letters were critical of me, but when one wasn't, it generally unleashed a flurry of those that were. A composition instructor at the community college in Wileyville suggested a few years back that if Moraine wanted such a commitment from its football coach, then they shouldn't be in the business of financially ruining previous coaches. This of course set off a wildly emotional series of missives, several from people I knew, variously defending my actions and decision-and attacking them. "Immature and unhealthy" was the subject line of the forum for a couple months a year ago, as in, "Immature and unhealthy, Cont." The single wing has been a favorite complaint throughout. Dozens have voiced their opinions about whether or not the offense was the problem or merely a symptom. For instance: "Whether or not Coach Holland is going to rent or buy is less important to me than whether or not he's going to abandon the folly of this antique offense and get with the times. Look around, Coach. The I Formation rules the day! Do you claim to know something that Bill Walsh and Mike Ditka do not?" But the main crux of things was about the house. I promised myself early on that I would never retaliate or try to defend myself. But it has been difficult. And I did, six months in to the first batch of letters, attempt to put an end to it at the source. I went to the office of the Moraine Daily News to speak with the managing editor, James Fish. I told him that it seemed to me that this was an invasion of my privacy, and that it seemed like something a respectable paper wouldn't want to be known for. Be that as it may, he told me. Circulation for the paper had ramped up to an all-time high because of it. Subscribers were writing in from all over the country, former Morainians who had been told by friends and family that they could keep up with the debate by subscribing to the paper. "I'm sorry, Coach," Fish told me, "but we have no choice." The fact that Coach Stubbs' house sat empty, I can say, actually had little effect on whether I did or did not buy a house. I was not worried about reprisals. I didn't want a house. It was true that I had a certain amount of indecision about whether or not I wanted to continue coaching, but those questions were not really related, no matter how many interested citizens voiced their opinions on the matter. A few letters actually encouraged me to continue renting so that my imminent exit wouldn't be too difficult on me. It is true, though, that I saw the house as a symbol and had a small fixation about it. It is also true that on occasion, I went to the house, sat in Coach Stubbs' office, read through his old playbooks, even used his phone, which miraculously still had never been disconnected by GTE, to call my mom once. Those things are true. Dale didn't know those things. Nobody but Sheila did. Today, I reluctantly turned to the op-ed page to see what sort of editorializing about my life the fire had generated. Granted, it would had to have been quick work, because there was only a three hour window between the fire and the time that the paper had to be at the printer. Nonetheless, they were able to manage not one but two pieces about what this had to say about my coaching career. Fish himself wrote one of them, pointing out the obvious, which was that whoever had started the fire had given Stubbs a get out of jail free card. And why would somebody do that? What did have to say about things now? Fish thought-as I did-that it marked a new level of frustration with me, with Moraine football, with the single wing. Choose your problem. The loss to Sempronius, he pointed out, was not just the latest in a series of losses or a case in point of how bad my coaching was. The loss, he said-and this was news to me-was the first to Sempronius since 1937. Since, he wrote, but Depression. The Depression, I thought. |