Socrates simply said that with Xanthippe, you could be sure that after the thunder—after her shrewish harangues—would inevitably come the rain. During his early years as a philosopher, Socrates decided to define man as a featherless biped. He got a plucked chicken thrown at him for his pains. The sage took pleasure in these things, saw them as conducive to a modesty that was the obverse side of the mental fearlessness he also cultivated. As Falstaff, an Elizabethan Socrates, says, “I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men.”
Lears simply kept talking to Sandra and calmly ignored the rest of us. As time went on, we would get to him. How could we not? But on this, the first day, he held his ground. He continued with a demonstration of what real teaching might be like—though we were too dim to see as much. For what we saw was rank weakness; another teacher had arrived who did not know his trade. The Doober, our guide, had shown us the way. This class was going to be fabulous. We could do anything we wanted. Good times were about to roll.
Chapter Two
MUSTANGS
If Franklin Lears’ so-called philosophy class was going to be a circus, all to the good. I detested school; a little diversion would help me get through the day. What I cared about—and with an intensity that bordered on religious devotion—was football. The football field was where my real life was going to unfold. For I had grand hopes for this, my senior year. When I think back on the game and what it meant to me—and what it meant for Lears to pull me from it, as he eventually would—one day in particular stands out.
This was our last day of double sessions, two-a-day practices. (It might, in fact, have been the day that Frank Lears got his first look inside Medford High, faculty orientation day.) On the field, it was brutally hot. Eighty degrees is bliss on a leafy New England street; on a high school practice field, where the ground is so hard that you and the ballcarrier bounce like a couple of india-rubber dolls when you make a tackle and the dust billows perpetually in an ongoing simoom, it’s something else again. I felt like I was being boiled alive in the cauldron of my helmet.
This was the only day all year that we did grass drills. As far as I know, the last pro football coach who could regularly get his team to do grass drills, or up-downs, as they’re also called, was Vince Lombardi, the man of whom the defensive tackle Willie Davis said, “Coach treats us all like equals, treats us like dogs.” Lombardi was a legend even during his life.
Mace Johnson was here today. He was my history teacher, our last year’s backfield coach, now in charge of his own team on the other side of Boston, and he was legendary to us. Johnson had come to revisit his old squad, whom he’d keep track of through the year almost as closely as he did his new team. Though physically absent through the season, he often seemed more with us than the new coaches who had come on to take his place.
Most anything Mace Johnson asked we would have done, and what he asked for on this particular day was grass drills. It was time, as he said in his staff sergeant’s drawl, to “get ’em up.”
He is there, standing in front of us, in blue coach’s jersey and shorts, with his close-clipped hair and his whistle dangling. Johnson was six-feet-two, about 190 pounds, all prime-grade Marine Corps muscle. He was handsome, with a face that looked like it had been cut from a block of marble. The cheeks were long and smooth, the forehead high and similarly unlined. Johnson had close-set eyes, soft blue, and a nose unremarkable and perfectly proportioned to the rest of his face. There was a simplicity and purity in Johnson’s appearance, as though he were a knight who knew that he served the best of kings and that his causes were just. There was no room on the face or behind it for self-dissatisfaction, ambiguities, mysteries, doubts.
Johnson had
Lears simply kept talking to Sandra and calmly ignored the rest of us. As time went on, we would get to him. How could we not? But on this, the first day, he held his ground. He continued with a demonstration of what real teaching might be like—though we were too dim to see as much. For what we saw was rank weakness; another teacher had arrived who did not know his trade. The Doober, our guide, had shown us the way. This class was going to be fabulous. We could do anything we wanted. Good times were about to roll.
Chapter Two
MUSTANGS
If Franklin Lears’ so-called philosophy class was going to be a circus, all to the good. I detested school; a little diversion would help me get through the day. What I cared about—and with an intensity that bordered on religious devotion—was football. The football field was where my real life was going to unfold. For I had grand hopes for this, my senior year. When I think back on the game and what it meant to me—and what it meant for Lears to pull me from it, as he eventually would—one day in particular stands out.
This was our last day of double sessions, two-a-day practices. (It might, in fact, have been the day that Frank Lears got his first look inside Medford High, faculty orientation day.) On the field, it was brutally hot. Eighty degrees is bliss on a leafy New England street; on a high school practice field, where the ground is so hard that you and the ballcarrier bounce like a couple of india-rubber dolls when you make a tackle and the dust billows perpetually in an ongoing simoom, it’s something else again. I felt like I was being boiled alive in the cauldron of my helmet.
This was the only day all year that we did grass drills. As far as I know, the last pro football coach who could regularly get his team to do grass drills, or up-downs, as they’re also called, was Vince Lombardi, the man of whom the defensive tackle Willie Davis said, “Coach treats us all like equals, treats us like dogs.” Lombardi was a legend even during his life.
Mace Johnson was here today. He was my history teacher, our last year’s backfield coach, now in charge of his own team on the other side of Boston, and he was legendary to us. Johnson had come to revisit his old squad, whom he’d keep track of through the year almost as closely as he did his new team. Though physically absent through the season, he often seemed more with us than the new coaches who had come on to take his place.
Most anything Mace Johnson asked we would have done, and what he asked for on this particular day was grass drills. It was time, as he said in his staff sergeant’s drawl, to “get ’em up.”
He is there, standing in front of us, in blue coach’s jersey and shorts, with his close-clipped hair and his whistle dangling. Johnson was six-feet-two, about 190 pounds, all prime-grade Marine Corps muscle. He was handsome, with a face that looked like it had been cut from a block of marble. The cheeks were long and smooth, the forehead high and similarly unlined. Johnson had close-set eyes, soft blue, and a nose unremarkable and perfectly proportioned to the rest of his face. There was a simplicity and purity in Johnson’s appearance, as though he were a knight who knew that he served the best of kings and that his causes were just. There was no room on the face or behind it for self-dissatisfaction, ambiguities, mysteries, doubts.
Johnson had
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