It’s Just a Game--but for the Coach, It’s War

Call him Tom DeWitt. Call him a building contractor. Say he lives in Covina. It has to be that way. We have to hide this man’s identity because he is grappling with a personal crisis, one that touches many men in their prime and twists them into something crude and crazed.

He has become an out-of-control youth sports coach.

The sport is soccer, which has taken over so many American parks that it is no longer a given that you can find room to casually toss around a football, let alone organize a pick-up game. Soccer leagues for kids have gobbled up the landscape. And leagues need teams. And teams need coaches.

And that’s where Tom comes in. He coaches a bunch of 8-year-olds. You would not expect this, because Tom knew zilch about soccer when he was growing up. He fancied baseball and boxing. He didn’t know the difference between an indirect kick and a throw-in. Then someone recruited him to participate in the league in which his son, Jerome, plays.

Last year Tom began coaching Jerome’s team and a funny thing happened. The notion of control, of leading a squad of men--never mind that the men are four feet tall--seized him. He became enthusiastic, and then he became a zealot--a benevolent one, but a man possessed nonetheless.

You see evidence of this illness over dinner. The talk is about the Rams or the Lakers or, as often happens, the foibles of a professional coach, and suddenly Tom takes the conversation and sends it on a wild left turn toward his own struggle to convince little kids that they can pull off the complex physical maneuvers required to guide a soccer ball into the opponents’ goal.

He does not hide from what has happened to him.

“I’ve become the idiot I’ve always watched,” he admits, half amused, half mystified.

Tom always loved the maniacally single-minded George Allen, a pro football coach who, when asked by a sportswriter after a Christmas Eve loss if his team would fly home for Christmas, answered tearfully, “When you lose there is no Christmas.”

A decade ago, Tom had a job that put him in contact with Pop Warner football, and he used to laugh at the tantrums of otherwise sane realtors and teachers and bankers who, when suddenly let loose, became furious majordomos on the field of play, captives of the need to win, to purge life’s frustrations through the success of children.

Tom’s not throwing tantrums out there, but he’s not laughing any more, either.

“It’s sick,” he said. “I take my family out to dinner and without even realizing it I take out my pen and I’m playing around with different lineups. What am I doing ? I’ve lost my mind. These were 8-year-old kids!

“One Sunday morning, the morning of a game, I woke up at 5:30, thinking about it, and couldn’t go back to sleep. My wife woke up at eight and saw me. She told me I was nuts.”

A horrible thing happened to Tom this season. His team won and won and won. He taught his kids a special play that would fool the opponents. It worked, they won a game 1-0 with it. He told me about it three times.

A few weeks ago I told him I wanted him to share his illness with you. He looked up in horror. It was too embarrassing, he said. “Please don’t use my real name.”

Besides, he said, the timing was all wrong. The playoffs were coming up.

“It’s not that I care about how it makes me look,” he said with believable sincerity. “I don’t want to upset their concentration. Look, I know it’s sick . . .,” he smiled, “but we’re not going to lose another game!”

They did, though. His kids got beat in the opening round of the playoffs.

“My son took it better than me,” Tom said. “He told me, ‘Knock it off, dad, it’s basketball season.’ ”

Will the coach be back for another season?

“I didn’t think I wanted to do it next year, but now I have to. It’s an obsession.

“I’ll be calling the opposing coach’s office at 10 o’clock each Wednesday night. If nobody answers, I’ll know we’ll win.”

That was another George Allen line.