A whistle was blown and we took a knee around our head coach, Frank Johannsen. Coach Johannsen was redwood tall and just as mightily built, with a broad hairy chest that imposed swirls through his T-shirt’s fabric and gray cloth Champion shorts that showed off calves so big I was put in mind of a National Geographic photo of a boa constrictor that had swallowed a deer whole.
—Afternoon, gents.
I didn’t catch much of his opening speech, distracted by Gus and the other kids who were looking at me and whispering. Johannsen ordered us to form a line for warm-up sprints, and as we did, Gus made a crack about the supposed tightness of my shorts. I looked over at the parking lot, where Dad had gotten out of the car to watch us. I could run over and tell him to speed us away from this horrible place. I could beg him and Mom to homeschool me and never say the word “football” again. But then the whistle sounded and I was sprinting in my gangly boyish way, my anxiety receding a little bit more with each step forward. I wasn’t at the head of the pack, but I wasn’t bringing up the rear, either. I was right in the middle, happily absorbed into the thudding, gasping masses.
I was euphoric by the time we returned home, and while Mom finished cooking dinner I locked myself in my parents’ bedroom to rehearse the aspect of football that excited me most. I donned the gouged helmet I’d been given by Coach Johannsen at the end of practice, buttoned the sweat-crinkled chinstrap, and knelt on my parents’ mattress to stack two pillows widthwise. I took a third pillow and leaned it vertically against the stack so that it was standing—and I watched the thing mutate into Gus Mintaur, the villain I and only I was heroic enough to tackle. I stared him down as I tiptoed backward. The moment my butt touched the door, I was off running, steaming, and at the lip of the mattress I launched myself through the air, sailing, obliterating Gus with a ferocious tackle. I landed on the mother-father-fragrant duvet cover and paused there a moment, gripping the pillow to my breast, luxuriating in the softness. Then I was up again, righting my helmet and restacking the pillows for the next round.
My thirst for contact made me a natural outside linebacker. I took to the position fanatically, and within a few weeks Coach Johannsen was bringing me magazine profiles of greats like Lawrence Taylor and Junior Seau, loaning me hand-labeled VHSs of all-time college and NFL games, staying after practice to work with me on stance and footwork. Dad was delighted I’d been singled out, but Mom grew suspicious of a man with no wedding band showing her son so much individual attention. One Sunday, she invited him over for dinner to get a closer look, and her fears were quickly allayed. Coach Johannsen was simply exhilarated to have found a player so precociously obsessed with the game, and by the end of that dinner Mom had gone from worrying my coach was a pedophile to insisting he come over again the next Sunday.
It became a weekly tradition, these dinners, and over the course of that season we learned Coach Johannsen’s improbable story. He grew up in a Montana town too tiny for a traffic light, the youngest son of a ranch manager. His two older brothers dropped out of high school to work with their father, and Coach Johannsen would have followed suit had he not been encouraged by his high school’s football coach to put his unusual size and strength to use in another way. He started playing eight-man ball and became a legend in the area, feared by opponents and cheered by a town that didn’t have much else to cheer for. Toward the end of his senior season, a University of Wyoming recruiter drove up from Laramie to watch him play. The fantastical stories the recruiter had heard were true, and the man was so impressed by Johannsen’s performance that he offered him a scholarship in the school parking lot after the game.
Rapt, I listened to Coach Johannsen tell how he went on to be the first person in his family to earn a college degree and, more important, a four-year starter named All-American in his final two seasons. He was selected in the fourth round of the NFL draft by the New York Jets and signed a contract for more money than he’d thought a man could earn in his entire lifetime.
But then his ascent mysteriously, abruptly ended. Coach Johannsen never made it to New York. In fact, he only got as far as Sillitoe when he pulled off the highway and found work as a number cruncher in the accounting department of the same mining company that employed my parents.
Why in God’s name would someone forgo such fame and fortune? Coach Johannsen was an amiable sort, gracious and exceedingly easy to talk to, but on this subject he became what you might call warmly diffident. Whenever my parents tried prying into why he’d quit the game, he would just smile in a way that said he didn’t mind at all that they were asking, but he had no intention whatsoever of answering.
I was stumped myself. Rejecting the NFL was like refusing the gift of flight.
By age twelve my pulse started racing at the oddest moments—whenever gym class ended and it was time to hit the showers, or when the warm weather returned and my male classmates resumed wearing T-shirts and shorts. A group assignment would be announced in biology and I would find myself in a lose-lose bind: if I was partnered with the boy I wanted to be paired up with, I would become unhelpably nervous when we worked together, thereby reconfirming my reputation as a weirdo; but if I
