The coach

It started like this—no one gave a shit about the wrestling team. They were the outcasts of the school’s sport-industrial complex, looked down upon by the baseball players, ignored by the basketball team, even made fun of by football players—until Damon. He was a freshman trying out for the junior varsity team, when he wrestled the coach—an immense man, over 250 pounds, broad shouldered with an immense stomach, a grey goatee, and a tattoo of a flaming rose on his bicep, himself a former football player who had never gotten over the fact that his life had peaked at 19 and had been downhill ever since; rumors spoke of a car accident, an injury, physical therapy, walking with a cane before his 20s were over, a marriage to a pill-popping bride, the drowning of his first born in a pool, a nasty divorce, Alcoholics Anonymous, a string of increasingly less dignified coaching jobs, a growing waistline, a second-born who hadn’t spoken to him in a decade.

This was a man who consistently pretended that, despite being in his 50s and despite having a shattered kneecap that had sidelined his college football career and forced him to use that cane, pretended that the best was right around the corner, that the future would be bright because a call from the Dallas Cowboys was coming any day now, any second, a call that would finally draft him into the NFL where he would have a last late flash of glory in the sunset of his life.

This coach liked to ‘test’ the incoming freshmen when they tried out for his wrestling team by shaming each of them in front of their peers, casually tossing around the word ‘faggot’ as he used his immense bulk to pin them to the ground and leave them there until they began to gasp for breath. Damon wrestled this man to the ground in 15 seconds. It was so fast that the coach was in a neckbrace for a month and ultimately forced to retire.