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Chapter 1
Merri
“You’ve made a fool of my team, my organization, your father, and worst of all me,” the red faced old man said as his strings of spider veins brightened and crawled under his ridiculous looking white goatee.
Lowering my head, I allowed my mind to drift into another world. Have you ever had a dream about doing something? It could be achieving a goal, or to make a parent proud of you.
Perhaps after a lifetime of disappointing your father, your dream was to be his assistant coach as he coached his team to an NFL championship. Just as the clock counts down, he turns to you for the play that will win the game. And having waited for this your entire life, you pull out what you’ve been working on for months.
“A hail Mary pass?” He’d say to you.
“It will work, Coach,” you’d tell him unsure of yourself but sure that it was the right call.
“I don’t know about this. The game is on the line.”
“Trust me, Coach,” you implore.
When he looks away with doubt, you grab his shoulder and say, “This will work, Dad.”
And because of a lifetime of working together, he puts the championship in your hands and calls to the quarterback who initiates your play.
As the players blitz and settle, the quarterback launches the ball. Airborne, it travels 30, 40, 50 yards. And just as you drew it up, the receiver shakes off his defender, leaps, and then snatches it out of the air, falling into the end zone and winning the game.
Cheers and streamers follow. The other coaches lift you onto their shoulders victorious. And your father, who might have had his doubts about you, looks you in the eyes and nods as if to say, that’s my son and I’m proud. …Or, you know, some less oddly specific dream than that.
Well, I’m not too proud to admit that that might have been my dream. I’ve never been my father’s favorite. You might even say that my father thinks of me as a bit of disappointment.
Yes, I am my father’s assistant coach. And after having a stellar Division 2 coaching career, the miracle that is ‘being offered an NFL team’ occurred. But that is where my dream ends. Because after two years of circling the drain, my father’s career might be over before it really started.
Worse than that, as we played our last game of the season, the one that determined our playoff chances, my father ignored me completely and called a play that lost us the game.
That was fine. Our team was used to losing. It is what it is. But suddenly unburdened by game preparation and everything else football, something else found its way into my mind. After months of ignoring my boyfriend, I remembered that our relationship was on the rocks. Like my father’s coaching career, it was circling the drain.
With those thoughts overwhelming me, something unexpected happened, my face appeared on the giant screen. This had happened before. When games are televised, the cameramen are always looking for reaction shots.
The only problem this time was that they had chosen to focus on me because, like a world-class homo, I was crying. I hadn’t even realized it. And if you’ve ever thought that there was no crying in baseball, I can assure you that, unless your son just won you the NFL championship, there is definitely no crying in football.
“You fuckin’ cried? On my football field? What type of god damn queer bullshit is that?”
The team’s manager looked at the team’s owner knowing he had just crossed a line. Of course, he didn’t say anything about it. The team’s owner might as well have had his hand up the manager’s ass for how much of puppet the manager was.
“You’re an embarrassment to my team. And that is saying a lot considering how much of a fuckin’ embarrassment this whole season has been. But do you know why it’s been an embarrassment? I said, do you know why it’s been an embarrassment?” He asked me.
“Because our blitzing is weak. We’re not deep enough to compensate for injuries. And our quarterback can’t complete a pass to save his life?”
The 72 year old man sneered at me with disgust.
“No, you piece of shit, know-it-all, pillow muncher. You god damn, fuckin’ pansy ass, Mary. It’s because your father is surrounded by shit-for-brain assistants who would prefer to stare at the players in the shower than coach a football game.”
Prickles of heat crawled through me. Every muscle in my chest clenched making it hard to breathe. He had found it. The thing I have always feared hearing the most, he had spit at me like venom.
I wasn’t always open about being gay. I was the son of a football coach. Working for my father since I was a kid, I joined him in locker rooms. There were times when he would give his end of game talk with half the team naked. That’s just what happened in football whether it was at the college level or the pros.
So, would things change if everyone knew I was gay? I certainly wouldn’t be welcome in a locker room. Trust was an important part of game. We had to trust that the players prepared themselves adequately for every game. And the players had to trust that we weren’t staring at their swinging dicks and jacking off to the thought of them when we were alone at night.
In short, gays weren’t welcome in football. But here I was, the openly gay son of a losing coach whose crying had been broadcasted to every television in America. I felt humiliated.
For so long I had tried to be the man my father had wanted me to be. For so long I had laid in bed dreaming about my father finally treating me like he was proud instead of embarrassed of me. Yet time and again, I kept letting him down.
