Goethe, Child Geniuses, and Youth Basketball

“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.