Raiders Night (15 page)

Dad was waiting in the doorway. It was almost midnight.

“You okay?” But it sounded more like Where-you-been? or What-the-hell's-going-on? than caring about him.

“Worked out.”

Mom was right behind him. “Everybody's been calling, worried about you. Coach Mac, Pastor Jim—”

“Jody!” He shut her up. “Matt. We need to talk and we need to talk right now.”

“About what?”

“Don't start that crap with me now.” He reached out for Matt, nearly fell as Matt juked past him into the house.

Junie and Romo came clattering down the stairs. “Matteeeeee.”

“Back to bed,” snapped Dad.

“Have you eaten, Matt?” asked Mom.

“Not now,” said Dad. “Matt, get your ass in the den.”

Matt turned his back and started for the stairs. “Matt?” He could almost hear the gears shift in Dad's voice. “Please. We really need to talk.”

The pleading in Dad's voice stopped him. The weasel will try anything. Might as well get it over with before this goes too far. Why put Mom and Junie through this, risk another fit?

He turned and walked into the den. Dad followed him, closed the door, and pointed to the couch. Matt sat in a hard wooden chair. Dad sat on the couch.

“Is it true?” Did he know or was he fishing?

“What?”

“No games, Matt. You know what I'm talking about.” The gears had shifted again. The pleading was gone from his voice. “Something happened on Raider Pride Night that could ruin everything we've worked for all your life.”

So he knew. Everybody knows. “You want to pretend nothing happened.”

“I want what's best for you. What else do you think matters to me?” His eyes were filled with tears. Why don't I feel anything? thought Matt. “I love you, Matt. You are all I—” He stopped. “I don't want to see you end up like Freddy Heinz. Or me.”

“It's not going to go away.”

“It will if you keep your mouth shut.”

“No chance.”

“Get tough.” Dad stood up. “Shit happens.”

Matt stared at him.

Dad shouted, “Be a Raider!”

“I am a Raider.” Matt stood up. “I'm not your Raider.”

He held the stare. They were facing each other, about four feet apart. One step forward, Matt thought, and I will be in perfect range to knock him on his ass. And I can. I know he's thinking the same thing and wondering if I would. I've got two inches on him. He's got twenty pounds on me, but it's not muscle. Dad was staring back at him, as if he were searching for some sign of weakness. If he saw it, he would grab for Matt.

Dad didn't move. “What are you going to do?”

He stalled. “I haven't decided.”

“It's not just your decision. There's the team, the town, your family. Affects everybody. College scholarships, business, property values.”

“What about Chris?”

“Doctors said he'll be okay.”

“Not if it comes out all his fault.”

“Why should you suffer?”

“Because I didn't do anything when I could have. I was a captain. I should have stopped it.”

“Okay. But you got to get past that now,” said Dad. “Keep your eye on the prize.”

“That's your prize, not mine.”

“You ungrateful little sonuvabitch.” His face was
hard, couldn't see his eyes. “Everything I did was for you, busting my back so you could have everything you ever needed, best equipment, baseball and football camps, money in your account, you know how much safe steroids cost. I'm not going to let you throw it away.”

“You did it for you.” Matt felt calm. In the zone. I'm the captain, he thought. My captain. “It's not your call.”

He tried to step around Dad, but Dad grabbed his shoulders and pushed him back against the wall. “My house, my call.”

Matt let his knees sag, pivoted on his left foot to turn right, just the way Dad had taught him, and cocked his right fist up at Dad's gut. No. Don't need to do that. He brought his left forearm up hard under Dad's chin, as if he were a tackler. As Dad stumbled backward, Matt banged the heel of his right hand against Dad's chest. It was just enough to put him down on his ass. Dad stared up from the floor.

“It's my call,” said Matt.

Dad didn't say a word as Matt walked out of the den.

Mom was hovering in the hall. “Are you okay?” She sounded like she meant it.

He kissed her. “See you in the morning.” He didn't want to talk to her now, lose what was in his head.

Junie was still awake, sitting on his bed clutching Romo. “Give me fifteen minutes on your wristwatch, CyberPup, then you and your killer dog come in my
room. I got to do something first, and then we can start your training.”

“Awww-riight. What's that?”

“Gotta get you in shape for the season. Bunches of crunches to start.”

In his room, he winked at Jerry Rice. Catch you later, Number 80. I may be playing the outfield somewhere this spring.

He found the froggy online reporter's card on the desk. Let him get the story out. Coach, principal, chief, they're not going to be able to keep a lid on this. After it's in the
Nearmont Eye
, it'll be in the local paper, then on the TV news. Everybody's going to have to deal with what really happened, do the right thing. Whatever that is.

Gonna be a shit storm, Cap'n Matt.

You can deal with it.

Without juice and Vics and alcohol?

Need to stay sharp.

Man does what it takes. The loose, scary thing filled his chest. Bring it, I can take it. He flicked on his computer.

A man does what it takes.

While the machine connected to the Internet, he dialed Sarah's number.

In my long career as a sportswriter, I've been fascinated to watch how the values, both good and bad, of America's elite athletes have also become everyday values in our national life. From the schoolhouse to the White House, you can see loyalty and selfishness, bravery and bullying, working hard and winning ugly as easily as you can see it on the ball field.

But until I met Mike Miletic, I was watching what I call Jock Culture from the outside. He took me inside the mind of the athlete.

Michael J. Miletic, M.D., was my coach and partner in the creation and building of this book. While I did the actual writing, Mike's experience as a world-class athlete and sports psychiatrist is part of every page.

Let me tell you about him.

Mike was raised in Canada, a standout football and hockey player until he began weight lifting for extra strength and found out he loved pumping iron even more than pounding opponents.

Eventually, at 6 feet 2 inches and 242 pounds, he became a member of the Canadian Olympic weight-lifting team. The same week in 1982 he won a national lifting title, he was graduated from medical school. Injury ended his career before he could compete in the 1984 Games.

Mike's insight into the athletic mind has made him one of America's foremost sports psychiatrists. His Detroit-area practice includes professional, college, and high school players. He understands the joy of competition and he knows the dark corners of the locker room.

While the characters and events in
Raiders Night
are totally fictional—they are not drawn from Mike's files or my sports writing—they are not unlike characters and events that Mike and I have seen as doctor and reporter.

We think some of you may know similar characters in your lives and may even have been involved in similar experiences.

If you would like to write to us, we would certainly like to hear from you.

I can be reached at www.robertlipsyte.com.

Mike is waiting for you at www.mikemileticmd.com.

EXTRAS

RAIDERS
NIGHT

Warning!

Robert Lipsyte on Why He Wrote Raiders Night

An Interview with the Author

A Sneak Peek at Yellow Flag

You are holding a banned book.

Schools in Texas, North Carolina, and Washington, D.C., have not only refused to let their students read Raiders Night, they canceled my scheduled visits after the principal or football coach found out what the book was about.

Okay, the book is R-rated and some people think that the hazing scene is too graphic. The language, sex, recreational drugs and steroid use will offend the kind of parents who put locks on their computers and TV sets.

But something else is going on. Since I was originally invited by librarians and teachers—the usual gatekeepers of language—then disinvited by administrators, I think it's less about protecting you from words you supposedly never heard before than it is about the hard look at Jock Culture (call it “Friday Night Darks”).

As it turned out, the high school kids I did get to talk with were cool with the language, sex, and drugs in the book—they dealt with it every day. They had something else on their minds.

They wanted to talk about betrayal by adults.

At one suburban Chicago high school where more than a hundred juniors and seniors had read the book before I came to speak, the football players I talked with privately wanted to vent about their mistrust of coaches.

“There's like one coach I might talk to,” a senior lineman told me, “an old guy, maybe sixty, who doesn't have
anything to prove. He's retired, he won a championship in another district, and he volunteers with us. But the head coach and the other guys, all they care about is winning. Play you hurt, mess with your head, they don't really care about us.”

His friends agreed, although some of them weren't so sure about the old guy either. When I brought up the complicity of their parents, there was some eye-rolling among themselves, but as a group, they didn't want to go there. Too painful to deal with the possibility that Dad was in on the exploitation. Alone, some players talked about how excited their dads and moms got at games, how important success at football seemed to be at home. There was a lot of pressure to perform well. That was as far as they wanted to go.

My coach and partner in the creation of Raiders Night, Dr. Michael Miletic, a former Olympic weight lifter whose psychiatric practice includes many high school and pro athletes, says, “It's very seductive when adults promise a kid fame, power, glory. But what they are really doing is derailing and skewing his development, taking away his chance of having healthy relationships, moral values, of a grounded control of his own life.”

He says all high school athletes should ask themselves this question: “Am I playing for myself, because I really love the game or am I playing for some adult who is getting some emotional or financial gain from this?”

All this is happening right now because high school
sports is the next big gusher in the jock entertainment oil patch. NBC, ESPN, and MTV all have weekly high school football shows, and ESPN and Fox are broadcasting high school football and basketball games nationally. Sports Illustrated has joined USA Today in publishing high school rankings (they already proliferate online) and stories of high school and college scouts at peewee games are no longer strange but true. Every cell phone company and fast-food restaurant chain is drooling at the chance to someday advertise on a national high school championship tournament. Companies are already paying more than a million dollars a pop for the privilege of putting their name on high school ballparks.

No wonder kids feel the push to drive themselves hard, even to use steroids. No wonder this book is treated like a controlled substance.

I wanted to write a book in which a football captain had to make a moral decision, had to go deep into himself to find the right moves even though that might lead to hurting the team and himself in the short run.

There is a negative side to Jock Culture, the selfishness, the winning-at-all-costs attitude, the macho posturing and perhaps most damaging, the separation between Jocks and Outsiders (also known as Pukes). It starts in elementary school, of course, choosing up sides, dividing kids into good bodies and bad bodies, and then takes off as the littlest leagues start skimming their cream into traveling teams, some of whom roam the world with sneaker contracts.

After the 1999 Columbine massacre, I wrote a New York Times column on the shootings as a response to the arrogant, entitled behavior of high school athletes, as encouraged by the adults who lived vicariously through them. The e-mail was overwhelming. It became an internet forum that wouldn't quit as middle-aged men exposed the emotional scars of high school.

This was typical:

 

When I attended high school, I had so much built-up anger from being treated unfairly that, if I had access to guns or explosives, would have been driven to do a similar thing to take revenge on the bastard jocks who dominated the school and made those four years miserable
for me. After high school, I was not surprised to hear that a handful of these jocks had either died as a result of drunk driving and drug overdoses, or had spent a little time in jail for violence or drug possession. As for the dead ones, I would probably pee on their graves.

We really did get special attention, both from the students and from the teachers. We also did cruel things to other students. I have a twentieth school anniversary this summer and plan on seeking forgiveness from the people I know I helped terrorize.

 

Those messages were from men who still bore the emotional scars of high school, at least twenty years later.

How are you going to feel looking back?