Father’s Sports Obsession at Core of ‘Holy Coach’

“It’s a little therapy thing I wrote to my father,” says playwright and actor John Posey. “Honestly, that’s what it is.”

Posey, 37, is referring to his one-man multi-character show “Father, Son & Holy Coach,” at Santa Monica Playhouse. Well, that’s what it was when he first started working on it as a monologue that he performed with his successful comic sketch group, Comedia, in Atlanta.

Since then, Posey has become a familiar face in countless commercials, appeared in films such as “A Soldier’s Story” and “In Love and War,” along with guest-starring in many television series. And all the while he has been expanding “Holy Coach” until it now contains 21 characters. It has been sold to Tri-Star Pictures and has become a different ballgame altogether.

That’s what the play is about, playing ball, but Posey says it’s more than just a play about sports.

“That happens to be the backdrop,” he says. “It could have been doctors, lawyers, sailors, anything. It happens to be something I’m familiar with, having grown up in the South--north Florida and Georgia, having a brother who played professional ball with the New England Patriots, being around it.”

He adds matter-of-factly that his cousin, Sam Posey, is a professional race-car driver, and that his grandfather was El Armstrong, a professional boxer and football player with the New York Yankees in the old American Assn. in the ‘30s, before it became the National Football League.

It was the story of his grandfather’s decline and eventual suicide that gave Posey the fulcrum that makes “Holy Coach” work. After his playing days were over, “he tried to function in a normal society. He was a great guy, but he could never fit. There was all that adulation that he lived for. My mother would tell stories of him sitting on the sidewalks with her in New York City, sitting down and crying because he couldn’t get his life together.”

Posey remembers a well-known L.A. Raider who was cut from the team not too long ago, went home and, like Posey’s grandfather, killed himself.

“He was only 28 or 29,” Posey recalls. “There are a surprising number of professional athletes, 50 or 60%, who do go into a severe depression when their playing days are over.”

Posey remembers his early days working the oil fields of Arkansas and Oklahoma. “I’ve seen guys who were the town stud quarterbacks, who at the age of 20 were still there wishing something would happen. Their lives were slowly coming to an end right then and there. They never got beyond that. They just didn’t plan, and they thought this would continue. Suddenly, it’s over.”

Although the play uses abundant humor to make its point, it’s somewhat of a cautionary tale, about a boy whose father is obsessed with sports and tries to relive his glory days through his son. Many men remember these fatherly pressures and the resulting disappointment and emotional scars.

Posey’s father was not an athlete, but the father in the play is. “I wanted to look into not having that close a relationship with my father, not having him around when I needed him. I was looking into that. But it’s a similar type of neglect. Sports works as a great tool, a dramatic device to get the point over. I can show the boy’s fear when he’s about to lose, the pressure when he thinks he has to win.

“By the time he becomes an adult,” Posey continues, “from the time he’s 16 years old on, that’s what’s pushed onto him. He’s pushed away from it by his father, who thought that was the standard by which all men were judged.”

When director Stephen Rothman first read “Holy Coach,” he says it was deja vu . “I grew up in the South,” Rothman says, “and I thought, ‘Wait a second, I remember this.’ I wasn’t in sports, but all this kind of stuff went on around me. It really is about fathers and sons. I saw my dad in this. It’s so much, much deeper than being a sports play. It’s a sports play about as much as ‘That Championship Season’ is a sports play.”

Rothman has recently directed the world premiere of “Gilligan’s Island: the Musical,” and was artistic director of the revitalized Pasadena Playhouse. He has just directed two episodes of “The New WKRP in Cincinnati.”

Rothman, along with Posey, questions the wisdom of some current attitudes toward sports, and the way sports seem to be increasingly important in the lives of America’s youth, and particularly the values they seem to be embracing. It happens, Rothman says, “when you’re looking at people who make five, six, seven million dollars a year, playing baseball six months out of the year.”

Posey laughs ironically. “They think at the age of 12 that that’s going to happen.”

Posey remembers that when he was a kid, he and his two brothers dominated the local sports page, and local cops would forgive infractions that might have landed other kids in the station house.

Though fathers and sons were uppermost in Posey’s mind while he was working on “Holy Coach,” what he calls his “metaphor for life,” the sports themselves, leaves inescapable scars.

“Where I come from,” Posey says, “and this is true anywhere--there’s a line in the play that says if you didn’t play ball, you didn’t exist. A lot of that is true. You had to be part of football, baseball, wrestling, some kind of sport, or you kind of disappeared. You weren’t there.”

“Father, Son & Holy Coach,” Santa Monica Playhouse, 1211 4th St., Santa Monica. Fridays and Saturdays 8 p.m., Sundays 7:30 p.m. Ends May 15. $17.50; (310) 394-9779.