Little Green Men - Part 1

Enough with the schoolyard. Enough with Pretend. It was time to play real football. Here a departure from my portrait of the artist as a young fan. It’s time I tell the story of how and why I departed the athletic arena myself and became, exclusively, a spectator.

I persuaded Mom to let me play in the local Pee Wee flag football league, where players wore Velcro flags that opponents were supposed to pull off to create a “tackle.” She figured it would be safe enough. We soon discovered, though, that the removal of football's elementary violence did little to degrade its essential capacity for rage.

At the end of Pee Wee tryouts, we were introduced to our coach - the tall, reedy, red-haired Dick Sutherland - around whom we were told to gather. In his spare time, he was a real estate salesman. Coach lit a curved pipe, perpetually filled with Captain Black and exhaled the sweet-smelling smoke into the humid August twilight. “Hello, boys,” he said. He seemed mellow.

What gives a man the limitless authority associated with the title “Coach?” A “Coach” got a valued place in Long Island culture. Even the cretin or psychotic called “Coach” received a place of honor. Coach was supposed to possess a combined knowledge of combat strategy and human psychology. Even our gym teacher at Old Mill Road School was a man we simply called “Coach,” just as we were told to call priests “Father,” but I'm not sure what made Coach a Coach, other than the fact that he wore a polyester polo shirt, spandex running pants, Keds, and carried a whistle. Coaches were community leaders, so Dick Sutherland commanded our instant attention as Coach. In his dark aviator glasses (did I ever really glimpse his eyes?) and his pipe, he actually resembled General Macarthur.


All the parents and children participating in Sutherland's enterprise met at his home in South Merrick one late summer Sunday while we boys played in his backyard. Sutherland gathered the parents inside the house for cocktails in teardrop glasses and a talk about what was ahead for the Pee Wee season. I snuck into the house several times to catch the Jets-Giants exhibition game on TV, and I overheard him talking about “sportsmanship” and the need for “fun.” I liked him. So did Mom.

I had already witnessed some bad adult behavior in organized sports. I played Little League baseball the year before for a team consisting of the worst baseball players in Nassau County, myself included. The parents of our opponents would heckle us as we took the field: "You stink!" "Look at you in those uniforms!" "Bunch of sissies!" Yes, the jeering was strange, but to their credit they were working from what they saw.


Our baseball team was the “Beavers,” and our uniforms were yellow. Who would be so cruel as to think up such emasculation? The Beavers were a craven bunch, infected throughout with defeatism. Each of us approached home plate as if he were seeing his last moment on Earth, and opposing pitchers instinctively sensed that we were weak. My on-base percentage was comparatively good because I collected the highest number of walks and was often beaned. Once while limping to first base after being hit in the thigh by a pitch, I heard a parent hiss from behind:

“Next time he’s going for your head, you little bastard.”

Maybe, I thought, just maybe with football, I could give organized sports one more try. I welcomed Coach Sutherland's appeals to fun over competition. I was delighted that our jerseys were Jets’ green. But herein lay a problem.
The logo chosen for our helmets was a skull and bones, rendering my obvious choice for team name irrelevant. What's worse is that we became the "Green Raiders," which, to me, was an oxymoron. First, Raiders are generally pirates, and they certainly aren't green, unless they are either seasick (in which case they need to look for a new line of work) or because something has gone horribly wrong on the ship itself.
Secondly, football Raiders were from Oakland, they were black, and they were the sworn enemy of the Gang Green, the real emerald team.

I made these salient points to the team on the first day. Right away, I could see that no one was going to back me up on this. To my first point, one teammate told me, "Shut up, asshole." So, one down, one to go.

When I argued that as a Jets fan it made no sense to be a Raider, Coach Sutherland looked at me and said, "Who's this kid?"

I identified myself.

"Your last name's a damned six-legged pest, you little creep," he said. "Are you going to change that?"

That wasn't my point, but I saw to quit while I was way behind. I was a Jets fan, after all.

To add to the chromatic confusion, our football pants were purple, making us look more like henchmen of the Joker than a football juggernaut. When Namath's number 12 was already picked and Riggins’ 44 unavailable, I chose number 15.
“Bart Starr,” Coach murmured when he handed me the uniform.
I shook my head. “Babe Parilli.”

He looked at me.

“Joe Namath's backup on the Super Bowl team.”

He gave a look of bewilderment and gestured for me to move on.

I was the team's wide receiver for about five games. Then I got replaced by a shorter kid. It didn't matter. This was American football - manic, disturbed, angry, vituperative. I confess I enjoyed the subtle air of malice that began collecting around practices. One night before the season began, I performed uncharacteristically well on a drill in practice, and Coach made everyone but me run extra laps around the field. No one had ever included me in the business of making fun of other people, but Coach was kind enough to let me give it a try. For the moment, he put aside his disdain for my surname.

“Lookitem,” he said, gesturing to the winded boys taking another lap. “Biggest bunch of pussies you ever saw, huh?” I laughed lustily along with him, quietly wondering why cats were pejorative.

Still, we were a numbskulled lot, more like Little Green Men than Green Raiders. The real trouble began when Coach’s two sons were placed on the team. Adam and Gregory Sutherland were fraternal twins - fat and small, respectively. While Adam was enough of a size that he could move people at the line, he was uncoordinated and furthermore possessed no visible intelligence. Gregory was a ferrety boy who ran away from blockers and refused to touch the ball on the grounds that he would be tackled if he did so.

To further complicate things, it also became apparent that Coach had very little strategy of his own to communicate to us, and while we learned some pass and block plays, his game plan was inevitably to make players “just go very far out” for a pass. In his own mind, Coach must have believed he was trying to teach us something because he became more and more angry at us when we failed to deliver what he wanted.

In practice before our first game, he began screaming at all of us. He declared that we were, at the average age of 9, morons, shitheads, and dumb fuckers. His worst act was to find a scapegoat in his son Adam. During that same practice, I ran too far outside my prescribed pattern. In response, Coach ran over in my direction. I saw him coming, and I thought to myself, OK, it’s been a good life. But it’s done now. What did I last say to Mommy? I thought about running, but I was just too scared. There really wasn’t much to do but take the advice I had heard in the nurse’s office at school about shrinking into a ball when confronted by a bear.


But Coach passed me by. Instead, he reached for Adam at center and gave him a head slap that Deacon Jones would have envied, sending the boy wordlessly to the ground.

“You dumbshit!” Coach said, pointing down toward his son. “Don't let me ever see you do that again!” It was meant for me. Wasn’t it?

“What'd I do?” Adam mumbled.

"You know goddamned well what you did!” Coach shrieked, walking back to the sidelines. And as if accustomed to it, Adam picked himself up in the storm’s wake and got ready for the next down.

The season arrived and quickly felt like a forced march. His barrage of insults grew. Coach’s halftime speeches were priceless. He would often cite one player as inept and then finish the tirade with a ruthless jab at one of his sons. Sometimes his overly-magnified sense of drama actually made him funny, though we dared not laugh:


“The cups are for your penises, boys,” he said after a particularly bad half. “Don't forget that. You're playing like a bunch of pussies without penises.” Coach then left us behind in our halftime huddle to consider the simile.

A cat? one of us wondered aloud.

No, someone said within the huddle.


By the time we were supposed to be back on the field, the one among us with the best knowledge of female anatomy had already explained to the rest of his teammates what Coach had meant. This only raised a new series of questions that, for the moment, had the capacity to distract us from anything, let alone a miserable little football game.


Gradually, we performed more out of fear than volition, like a pirate ships' captured crew. It didn’t make winners out of third graders. By the last game of the season I was sick of it, but as she helped me on with my pads and uniform, Mom told me to just go through with it anyway. She said it would be more honorable to play out one last game than it would be to quit, and that quitting would haunt me forever.

Whatever. I’m grateful now that I took her advice, but not because of anything having to do with honor. What followed made it all worthwhile.