Tyranny’s success depends on a misplaced sense of duty among ordinary people, and this was how Coach’s autocracy worked. He possessed the tyrant's mistaken sense of being inherently cheated by invisible forces of corruption. He often asserted to us in practice that the Pee Wee referees had made several unfair calls against him, and now we, his minions, needed to exact revenge. A tyrant persists in a state of illegal authority and perpetual lies, and eventually the autocrat cannot help but share the gift of lying with his subjects. So Coach taught us how to cheat - specifically how to slow down a football game after your team has run out of timeouts. The best way was to fake an injury and be granted an automatic timeout. The referees - usually fathers volunteering from the community - came to understand what Coach was doing, and they resented him for it; they could hardly be seen to question a little boy's injury while he was crying with conviction on the field.
It became a part of our game plan. Instead of practicing formation and drills during the week, he now spent the bulk of time teaching us the nuances of faking an injury. He would tell us to keep a phony injury nice and low-key. He would insist that when called upon, you needed to choose an injured part of your body to hold or wrestle, but not too dramatically. Writhe around, yes, but just a little.
“Less is more, boys,” he said.
Coach emphasized the method acting direction of think about a time when you were really injured. It worked, of course. Pete Skolaski would feign a muscle pull and then Coach would call us over to discuss the next play. After hearing Coach issue a special code from the sideline, Brendan Farley would roll on the ground at the end of a play and be carried off while we strategized in the huddle. At first, several of us on the team told him that our consciences were bothered by this. Coach reassured us. Don’t worry about right and wrong here, fellas. You’ll forget all about it when you win.
Not surprisingly, we didn't forget it, for the Green Raiders entered the last week of the season with six losses, a tie, and no wins.
For the last game of the season, we played the “Chiefs,” a team with red uniforms and yellow trim just like their Kansas City namesakes. The Chiefs had gone undefeated all season. Their quarterback was Joe Nardi - a name we whispered among ourselves throughout the week leading up to the game. At the age of nine or ten, most boys might have only the makings of basic athleticism somewhere within them. But Joe Nardi was different.
Joe Nardi. We knew how great he was. We had dreaded him the whole season the way Russian peasants whispered fearfully to one another of Napoleon’s advance. We had heard that he scored every one of the Chiefs’ touchdowns. At quarterback, he ran with the ball on every play, and he never seemed to get tackled. We had heard of offensive totals of 48 and 56 points in some games. His coach ran up the score. He gleefully sent Joe Nardi out onto the field like the Angel of Death to crush the dreams of little boys who had once innocently imagined themselves growing up to be football players. So, on the day of the season’s final game, the Green Raiders stoically waited for their punishment at the hands of young Joe, whose talents in the fourth grade were the kind we would never possess in all our lives.
However, on this particular day Joe Nardi was a no-show. He wasn’t even on the sidelines. Why? Because, to our delight, he was playing in a junior league basketball game in Massapequa, and he and his father had decided to use his talents to win that game instead of wasting his time beating the witless Green Raiders. How fortuitous!
Suddenly we became unbeatable. At the end of the first half, we were up 21-0 against an undefeated team.
“This is it, boys,” Coach crowed at halftime. “Let's go out and finish beating these little peckers.” Conscious or not of his double-entendre, we saw that the coach was smiling, and that’s what was really important. We nodded to one another in disbelieving satisfaction. It seemed plausible. Maybe we could win. The Chiefs were obviously nothing without their Superman, and their coach had relied so heavily on the prodigy that he had never planned for his absence. So we took the field and kept the high ground but failed to score in the second half.
And then it happened. Fate came out of its drunken haze and pointed Its finger squarely at us. As a Roman Catholic Jets fan, my instinct to keep hopes dim had crept even more deeply into my consciousness, and this is why I may actually have seen what was coming before anyone else did.
A Pontiac Bonneville swung its vast rear into the parking space next to the football field. Out of the car came an ordinary young boy with his father. The boy wore shoulder pads and football pants; he needed only to put on his football jersey and his helmet. A horrible feeling overcame me - the kind I now regularly experience whenever the Jets take a lead into the fourth quarter. It was Doom.
Sports fans casually come to think of their team's winning as an eventuality, as a logically inevitable thing, whereas a Jets fan comes to think of a hefty lead as a terrible burden to carry for all four quarters. By the end of 1977, over the course of four seasons, I had seen the Jets win only a handful of times, whereas in my own life, I had never actually experienced a single victory with an organized sports team.
For Joe Nardi, though, a single victory was simply part of a day's work - sometimes not even a full day's. Word spread quickly among our team that he had arrived. He had been the top scorer in the basketball game earlier that day, and now he was ready for his next appointment with victory. His teammates saw him approach and were euphoric, turning to us with the bitter determination of besieged settlers whose sight of the cavalry has given them the spirit to throw away the hastily created surrender flag and stick it out after all.
Most stories such as these teach the traditional American lesson that what stands in our way are only the fears that persist in our own minds. It just so happens in this case that everything we had heard about Joe Nardi was true. He was a force of total destruction. He took the field in the fourth quarter like the hammer of the gods. He never gave the ball to another player; he didn’t need to. Not once. He simply ran, and perhaps it was because we were in awe, or because we had gotten too close to victory and couldn't handle the stress of it all, but it didn’t matter. No one could touch him.
By the time he was on his way to scoring his fourth (!!) touchdown, we were scraping and leaping at him with sobs of despair, not quite believing that Fate could be so feckless with grade school boys. With only one minute remaining, we failed again to score a second half point. The Chiefs got the ball back and Joe Nardi began driving downfield once again. It was all over, and we knew it.
And now Coach was upset. Really, really upset. I don’t know whether he was angry at the officials for permitting young Nardi to play so late in the game or angry at our collapse, but the Chiefs were now winning 28-21 late in the game, and he was beginning to lose control. He went fucking insane actually, screaming like a man who’d caught on fire. Meanwhile, parents began hurling criticisms at him from the stands: We thought you said this was fun. Losing’s not fun you asshole!
They contradicted themselves, just as children's sports are always an inherent contradiction among the competing realities of fun, hard work, and losing. The parents had tolerated his craziness, but now the tyrant was vulnerable, and the crowd took heart.
Coach saved the best for last, though. With no timeouts remaining, as the Chiefs lined up for the next play, he yelled out in a hysterical tone the routine code for faking an injury. He directed it to a dull-witted boy on the Green Raiders named John Bean. We all recognized the signal.
* * * * *
A decade later, while watching the 1988 AFC Playoffs on NBC, I would have a visceral sense memory of that fateful day. They called it the "Seattle stall," a strategy used by the Seawhawks' Chuck Knox who instructed his players fake injuries to slow down the Cincinnati Bengals' no-huddle offense. In the end, it's a passive aggressive gesture, a classically defensive position of last resort. When the Bengals then moved on to the AFC Championship game against Buffalo, Marv Levy threatened to use the stall throughout the game. The Commissioner then declared the no-huddle off limits. Thus do effective strategies get punished when there is no legitimate way to counteract them. That kind of philosophy was something Coach Sutherland understood.
* * * * *
But the trouble was Coach had never requested the injury fake of John Bean before, and to be honest, Bean had never quite gotten the whole method-acting thing down in practice. More importantly, John Bean had also never quite grasped the concept that in order to successfully fake an injury, he needed to actually make contact with an opposing player. Joe Nardi was calling signals.
Instead of waiting for the play to unfold, though, Bean spontaneously crumpled to the ground without so much as anyone taking a glance at him, and he began wrestling madly with his knee. Several of the Green Raiders looked away, embarrassed by his crude, summer stock performance. By Coach's standards, it was a poor acting choice - certainly an overly stylized depiction, strictly amateur. It was so bad in fact that the officials at last had the evidence they needed, and they slapped Coach with the penalty they had been waiting to give him all season - a 15-yard personal foul, moving Joe Nardi even further into our territory. There was only a little time left on the clock.
In response, Coach Sutherland raised his long arms in mock crucifixion and declared in a shrieking tone that the game was a forfeit. He stalked off the field, got into his car and drove away, leaving both of his sons on the field, apparently to be driven home by someone else. It was finally over.
Under Mom's arm, I walked to the parking lot. There and then, I decided that I was done playing sports. From now on, I would remain a spectator, preferring the relative psychological comfort of the stands to the playing field. As Mom drove us away, she intoned, “We're getting out of this madhouse.” I stared out the window and waved farewell to my athletic career.
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