Alison Wade's essay on John Babington emphasizes a major problem of coaching abuse: never knowing where the edges of trust end

Predators like these will only disappear when the prey is somehow delivered the strength to signal the herd

When I was about to start the third grade, my family moved from downtown Concord into the very outskirts of the city. In 1978, this was basically the boonies, though I could see the New Hampshire State House dome from the top of a nearby nascent apple orchard.

My nearest neighbors included a boy two years older than me and a girl in my grade. It behooved me to get to know this girl before classes started at Eastman School, because I would be the New Kid there. At Conant School, I had already seen the issues such children faced and was intent on fending these off, i.e., conforming.

The Wingers—and none of the names in this story are real—had a grossly dysfunctional child-rearing operation going, though of course many years would pass before I could appreciate this. Jim, the boy, and Tina, the girl, were both adopted. Their parents were old, in their early forties at least, and looked older than they were because they were drunk all the time on weekends and on most weeknights as well. The mother was a bank teller and I can’t remember what the father’s job was, though I remember clearly that he was a Boy Scouts leader.

I’ll skip forward about three years to the time Tina and I were around 11. In the interim, I’d watched both parents rip through cases of ABC and Black Label beer, the absolute cheapest swill on the market, at a startling rate and unload on Tina and Jim for absolute trivialities, which led both of them to commit not-trivial “crimes” like hiding their parents’ car keys. Both smoked like chimneys and would stand outside in their meager garden bellowing at each other, butts in hand and bottles within reach. I was regularly thrown out of their house for lame reasons, often returning minutes later through a basement or back-bedroom window with the help of its sober occupants.

I understood, in the way a kid does, that these two lived a different life than I and my younger sister did. We played together, went to the same schools, had dogs that ran around together, rode the same buses, watched the same television shows. But time that was quiet for me and my sister, and is supposed to be quiet for all children, wasn’t quiet across the street. I “knew” this, but one day in 1981 or 1982, I was given a troubling dose of evidence.

Tina told me, I believe as we were sitting in a tree house that had fallen from its perch years earlier but still served as a local meeting hub, that her father had been sexually abusing her for years. She didn’t put it in these terms, but she was telling me this now because it had stopped in recent months. Tina didn’t know whether this was a consequence of her getting older and into the range of being willing to disclose forbidden truth or whether it was because her father was sick. He’d been throwing up blood for a few weeks, and his doctors seemed to be thinking he’d drunk himself into a liver problem.

What Tina told me is not easy to remember or type, so it’s not fun to read, either. You can skip the next paragraph and not miss anything important about this post.

She told me her father had often been coming into her room late at night and early in the morning since she was a young girl and telling her that his dick was a special kind of lollipop, and that she needed to put it her in her mouth. Which happened. And Tina described to me the act of male ejaculation, which is not first-hand knowledge a grade-school girl should have, especially pertaining to her own father.

I wish I could remember just what I did with this new knowledge—both how I processed it and whom, exactly, I told. I have vivid memories of a lot of events from my childhood and teenage years, but the only solid aspects of this memory are that the conversation, or disclosure, definitely happened and I had just become the only person outside the family to know about this horror show.

But I don’t remember. It would have been in my nature to tell my parents, but had I done this, I’m pretty sure my mother would have reported Mr. Winger to the authorities. I think I told one or two neighborhood kids, but if I did, they were as stymied as I was about what to do, if anything. The notion of confronting other people’s parents, even known deviants, is a towering one to a fifth-grader.

Mr. Winger would soon be diagnosed with stomach cancer, quickly unravel, and die. Years of nonstop drinking and smoking are a good way to achieve this gruesome outcome—noted intellectual, tippler, and puffwagon Christopher Hitchens wryly admitted as much before dying too young himself—but some readers might be inclined to attribute the particular way his life ended to something else.

More on Tina, and Jim, later.

Yesterday, Alison Wade of Fast Women wrote an essay addressing the decades-long and decades-suppressed sexual abuses of teenage female athletes by John Babington. As I mentioned in my review of the World Cross Country Championships, the Boston Globe published a long article last week chronicling Babington’s actions and the quirky confluence of factors it took to finally eject his dark secrets into the light. Wade was already aware of some of these details.

I have ripped Alison Wade mercilessly for her various stances, mostly her chatter about wanting to cancel a popular race director for a non-offense and her deliberate (if not necessarily conscious) attempt to ruin sports set aside for girls and women. And soon, I will do it again. But Wade’s love of running is genuine, and in her many years following the sport, she’s seen a lot of things for herself she has every reason not to like. (Wade is in her late forties and therefore not much younger than I am.) And this is a beautiful essay about an ugly reality.

I sense the steadying editorial hand of Sarah Lorge Butler in the mix, but this is Wade’s essay, and she doesn’t hold back. It’s not a rant, or a plea, or anything. It’s a cogent reaction, one in which Wade is at such a loss that she actually appears less antagonistic toward men overall than she usually does, perhaps because the example of an especially nefarious one makes the rest of us standard self-monitoring horndogs look at least presentable in public.

What seems to bother her the most is what bothers me the most about this awfulness: There is just no easy way to either identify even a next-level deviant or push a magic button that inspires victims to come forward in real time and tell someone who can help them exactly what’s going on.

It also troubles me because I have long been close to people very close to this situation. I’m not going to go further into that, but just knowing that someone as sweet and precious to the sport as Melody Fairchild narrowly averted being a victim is troubling enough. Even the name Bob Hohler (the author of the Boston Globe story) brings back early memories of running, as Hohler was a reporter at the Concord Monitor in the mid-1980s, almost precisely overlapping with my high-school years, and in addition to taking the lead on the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in January 1986 that killed a Concord High social-studies teacher, he occasionally wrote articles about the Concord High cross-country team. It was also during this period that I met Lynn Jennings several times.

I would rather everyone read Wade’s essay than focus on my pull-quotes, but a few things jumped out at me with special vigor, and I don’t think Wade intended for these parts to be the powerful ones. Here’s one:

I still don’t know if sexual abuse in coaching is really that prevalent, or if I just had some rough luck in crossing paths with several coaches who preyed on young athletes. 

What I can add is this: It’s possible that, while plenty of men my age would gladly engage in sexual activities with teenage girls—and it doesn’t have to be even one percent of us for this to be a massive problem—these guys, when they have coaching jobs, are simply not daring to start “relationships” (and bigger scare-quotes are needed) with teenage girls because of a higher possibility of being caught thanks to basic advancements in the speed and manner with which young people communicate with each other and adults.

But I also know that one former coach at an elite prep school who probably would have been formally called out after crossing various lines, as well as destroying the morale of the entire team, avoided this by dint of being from an extremely wealthy family. This is a pattern around the country, no doubt—protected types, low-level Hunter Bidens, waltzing into and out of coaching jobs and either crossing moral lines or doing their best to live in a grey area before scuttling off unscathed to similar posts.

Wherever there are straight males and teenage girls, some of these men will want to do things with these girls, and many in this subset will have coaching jobs, teaching jobs, and support-staff jobs that quietly allow special access to teenage minds and spaces. Some will merely be neighbors. And I haven’t even touched the Roman Catholic Church, the Latter-Day Saints, Jehovah’s Witnesses (a truly evil cult), Southern Baptists, or various executives at JP Morgan Chase, all of whom love having young children around, especially if they also have pals with private islands.

Wade—who also notes that SafeSport is a dilapidated outfit, though I don’t think she knows the scale of the grift it’s running, a tale for another day—also wrote this:

It wasn’t until March 2021 that I got a call that led to me learning everything in Friday’s Globe article. I processed the news by going for an early morning rage run on Wellesley’s campus—still closed to the public at the time due to the pandemic—prepared to give anyone who tried to stop me an earful.

What I see here is not defiance, but an expression of raw, helpless powerlessness. Had some security guard told her to get off campus, Wade probably would have quietly complied. But what else was she supposed to do with all of it? What is anyone?

It’s hard for me to see this through the eyes of women, victims or otherwise, because this is just not a perspective boys face. I would not have been traumatized by a female coach in her twenties or thirties trying to have sex with me when I was 16, and I would have surely done it, then told everyone in sight. That wouldn’t have made the actions of any of these adult women any less wrong those of a man-on-girl abuser, but the dynamic is different, and everyone knows it; the excellent culture-raker Richard Hainana wrote about this phenomenon.

One other thing in Wade’s essay struck me, and it’s that Darlene Beckford, despite being a woman and a police officer, went years believing that she was the only teenager Babington had targeted. This is another common theme, and I’m tempted to get exasperated because there is never, ever only one girl with these guys. Never ever, unless they get caught after one instance. This is baked into what they do. Many of them can’t stop if they are around girls. And unless an outside force keeps them from mingling with girls, that’s what they do. Often for decades.

Tina and Jim lived with their mother for several more years after their father died. Jim graduated from high school in 1986 and joined the Army, while that same year Tina moved out of the little red shack across the street from our log-cabin duplex and into a home in Concord’s South End for runaway and abused teenage girls. She told me stories about the place, including one about a girl who was thrown out for encouraging a dog to put its snout-tongue apparatus in a guessable, improper crevice. She ran cross-country for a couple of years, in the middle of the pack, enjoying it.

After high school, I mostly lost touch with the Winger kids. After Jim left the Army, he tried unsuccessfully to become a police officer and washed out of the police academy amid a cheating scandal. He then embarked on a career as a security guard, going from business to business. I knew this because he often lived with his mother, who somehow survived until just a few years ago, and I was occasionally in the old neighborhood until my parents sold the Concord-outskirts house in 2004.

Tina sometimes wrote to me by e-mail out of the blue until we were in our thirties, and I would write back. She changed her name and became a wiccan, though I am not sure if that stuck. She moved to a small town outside New Hampshire and became involved in women’s services. She seemed to be doing okay. Hopefully she still is; I have lower hopes for Jim, and am disinclined to research these things.

Wade mentioned going to therapy as a result of events tied to the Babington saga. I don’t know if she was an abuse victim herself, and that’s entirely her business. What’s clear is that you don’t have to be one, or even be a potential victim, to appreciate why some people would really not have their daughters or sisters or friends coached by men. It’s not fair to paint with a broad brush, sure. But it also colossally sucks that it’s impossible to know where to even aim the brush, or even a calligraphy pen.