“If children grew
up according to early indications, we should have nothing but geniuses,” wrote
Goethe. Contrary to literary theory, the magisterial author of Faust was not alluding to the
youngsters’ academic success but to their athletic prowess.
When I first read
this, I concluded that Goethe must have had considerable experience as a youth
sports coach, and attributed the quote to one too many unpleasant
confrontations with disgruntled parents over the coach’s deployment of their
basketball-playing sons.
I’ve been there,
Johann. Looking back on my 22 years (and counting) as coach of sixth-grade
basketball, I recognize that I haven’t heard everything. But I have registered a fairly comprehensive category
of outlandish claims by delusional moms and dads of the putative excellence of
their offspring.
Just last March,
shortly after my undefeated regular-season basketball team lost in the county playoff
finals, I received a text message and email from the enraged father
of one of my players. I telephoned him.
“How,” he
demanded, “could you have taken out [his son] at crucial moments in the game
when you would not have been a .500 team without him!” He added,
“Why did you stick with a 2-3 zone when it wasn’t working. You were never in
the game.”
Channeling Thomas Jefferson (“Nothing gives one
person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled
under all circumstances”), I argued with dad’s math. Overall, the team was not .500 without his son;
it was 1.000 in the three games the boy missed. Dad then proceeded to throw two of his son’s truly
talented teammates under the proverbial bus for the loss.
I wondered (as I
often did at these moments) if he had been watching the same game I had been watching.
How else to account for our widely disparate points of view? We were never in a
2-3 zone, I told him, but a 1-2-2 and then man-to-man, although that might have
been hard to discern because of the freelancing style his son was playing.
As for our
uncharacteristically poor play in the first half, we were down four at the half
and immediately answered with a basket off a set play at the start of the
second half. So much for never being in the game.
I knew dad was
not hearing what I was hearing. Otherwise, he would have caught the bitter curse
his son hurled at me and my two assistants after I removed junior a second
time, early in the second half, for repeatedly abandoning the game plan and
undermining his teammates on offense and defense.
“He was NEVER
going back in the game after that,” I told the father.
Dad, however,
promptly checked with his son about the veracity of my claim and then
confidently reported that, no, his son never said what I (and my assistants and
the fans in the first few rows) unmistakably heard. But quickly dismissing that,
he returned to his original question while I thought to myself, “Who was it who
said that there are none so blind as those who will not see?”
Years earlier,
after my decidedly outsized and underdog team had surprisingly held its own only
to lose to the defending state champions, a huge thorax attached to a tiny head
and bright red face accosted me at the team bench.
“My kid only
played 5 minutes,” he said, sputtering. “IT BETTER NOT HAPPEN AGAIN!” His kid
was a starter who played major minutes that day and in three or four of the previous
games. It took me major minutes to process the implied threat before I asked
him to be more specific about it. Namely, what he intended to do about it when
it would happen again?
Like all bullies when confronted,
he stomped away. There was never a second outburst.
Other
confrontations over the years have been less, well, disagreeable. File the
following stories under the fearsome category of “Overly Protective Mothers.” I
fondly recall one telephone conversation:
“I don’t think you realize that my son is a point guard,”
said mom No. 1. I tried to put a positive spin on it, telling her, “I
think his strengths lie elsewhere.”
“Did you know that [he] was personally trained by [NBA
Hall of Famer] Nate Archibald?” she asked. I told her I was unaware of that while silently
calculating that her son had probably been to a summer camp at which Tiny had impersonally
addressed the entire assembly.
Earlier that
season, with the same team, mom No. 2 quickly sized up the roster and correctly
concluded that one Joey Karabbas, an 11-year-old recently relocated to the town, presented a direct threat to her son’s playing time. She did a little
private investigation, learned that the newcomer was not a registered
parishioner, and turned him in. Like the rabble in the New Testament, she cried
to the pastor, “Give us Karabbas.”
We all think that
our children are special and uniquely gifted, and they are in different ways. I
try to remain evenhanded and cool in the face of so many subjective and less
than clear-eyed appraisals of their child geniuses. My friend Terry, who for years ran the local Babe
Ruth league, had a brilliant practical approach when dealing with complaints
from players, coaches, parents, umpires, and others.
“Profess concern
and do nothing,” Terry said.
I remember the
first time I had a chance to test that philosophy. During warm-ups before an
inconsequential game one season, the father of one of my players buttonholed me
on the sideline. He offered an unsolicited three-pronged formula for success
that day that revolved around his son. I listened respectfully, nodded conspiratorially, thanked him for the
game plan, and retreated to the team bench. My friend and assistant coach at
the time, Mike, overheard the entire monologue and gleefully remembers that I
turned to him and said, “We’re not doing any of that.”
But it was not
always possible or an effective counterstrategy to profess concern and do
nothing. One season, at half-time during a mid-January early-afternoon
game, a parent strode purposefully across the court toward me. Because my
first-place team was comfortably ahead at the time, and because I had
a history with this parent (having coached his two older sons), I wondered what—if any—was his problem.
He got quickly to
his point.
“Mike needs to
score four points in the second half if the [New York] Giants are to win [their
NFL playoff game] later today,” he said. He wasn’t kidding. Understand this:
(1) Mike was not his son, (2) he did not explain the transcendental alliance
between an 11-year-old’s CYO point production and its significance to the
Giants’ odds of victory or (3) how I was to insure that this symbiotic
relationship would successfully enable the Giants to take their next step on
the road to the Super Bowl.
He conceded one major point, donating his own son’s
second-half minutes to Mike to further facilitate the cause.
As it turned out,
Mike scored just two points in the second half. Chagrined at having won with St. Margaret’s at the cost of a Giants’ victory in a game that had not yet
started, I approached the superstitious parent with some trepidation at the
final buzzer. He waved me off. “Mike had an assist to go with his one basket,
so he was responsible for four points after all,” he said. I was off the hook
and the Giants’ success validated in advance.
In Goethe’s
masterpiece, Faust confidently made a bet with the devil, believing that his
own spirit was so restless that he, Faust, could never be enticed and tied down
by one fleeting earthly pleasure. He wagered his soul, telling the devil,
“When I
say to the moment flying;
'Linger
a while—thou art so fair!'
Then bind me in thy
bonds undying,
And my final ruin I will
bear!”
Unlike Faust, I have willingly
tied myself down to the pleasure of coaching and working with young players.
When that becomes fleeting, I will not linger.
