Coach Donnie: Putting the F.E.A.R. into Cross-Country

A needless story that needs no prologue, but has one anyway.

Prologue

The teenagers milling around on the grass had no firm expectations of the man who was now emerging from the passenger side of a 2005 Ford Taurus two hundred feet away in the parking lot. He was fat and on the grim side of 40, like most every adult put in charge of their fortunes. Nothing especially bad was likely to come of another new coach, who represented the Biglee High boys' cross-country team's third regime change in four years. The Chippies might even place higher than 15th in the Division II state meet in a couple of months, a feat they had not managed since roughly who the fuck cares. There were seventeen or eighteen teams in D-II, so trips out of the statewide basement never rose above the first couple of creaky, unpromising steps.

John Donaldson, a middle-age trust-fund heir and serial scofflaw from the Philadelphia area, had startlingly offered to take over the team after seeing the vacancy posted on Twitter, where the job was never in fact posted. He told the school's officials that runners in general were "tired of the usual training that loses," offering no further details or background but asserting that he wanted to get off his ass and "help the real running community" at this traditionally all-white institution. The school was puzzled by his incoherence, but Donaldson's bluster at the interview was confident, and for what it might have been worth, he claimed that he would decline to take a salary if he were not hired, which confused everyone because it was uncertain whether he meant what he said or meant the exact opposite.

The staff ultimately made Donaldson a part of the Biglee community on the basis of, more than anything else, a simple hope: He had successfully concealed almost all of his shitbag behavior so far, so he could be counted on to not jeopardize these secrets with new episodes that might explode into view the decades-long depth and scope of his shitbaggery. The error of these administrators is perhaps forgivable, but it is not forgettable.

Donaldson registered his first official complaint about the job when he learned the name and nature of the school's mascot, evidently for the first time, three days after he was hired and the day before the team's first late-summer practice. He phoned this Biglee bitch in to the director of athletics, an imposing closeted (or so) lesbian.

"Chimpwads is a faggy name!" Donaldson complained. "Can we change it to Tigers? Or the Biglee Huge? Some teams don't have an 's' on the end, you know. The Heat, the Jazz, the Met."

"It's 'Chippewas,' Mr. Donaldson," the A.D. returned drily, "and I can assure you it's been popular forever because of the—"

"It's an insult to Indian Americans," he declared, smoothly picking up on the fact that the mascot was named after a well-known Native tribe. "Things like that, the using of it, it's why those people drink. Also, call me Coach Donnie. Everyone does and should."

With that, Donaldson hung up. Nothing else came of the conversation, for a few months.

Now, Coach Donnie strode across the grass toward his new charges, and they assessed him with one basic mind: A tall, portly, ungainly man in a bright green baseball cap that had four weird characters on it none of the boys could interpret in full. He had no clipboard or other apparent equipment with him. He had an iPhone in one hand and a young female companion (a teenage daughter, perhaps, thought the suddenly longing throng) in his wake.

He stood before them -- two seniors, six juniors, three sophomores and two freshmen -- and said a few short things, and then spoke four words no one would ever forget, including many thousands who later claimed to be there because by then lying was indistinguishable from copulating: You did both when you could get away with it and threw a match over your shoulder if needed. He said the words with a wannabe-roar that came out sounding firm yet breathless: They were, of course,

Chapter 1

Donaldson's background in sports, as a fan, was extensive. As a participant it was limited to the kind of things generally unfit guys over 50 could do, often quite well: Golfing, bowling, fishing and occasionally skiing. His best sport was golf, as he had once shot just under 90 for 18 holes with only four mulligans and maybe a few out-of-regulation ball drops.

He rooted for whatever professional sports teams were good at the time, usually feigning lifelong and unwavering loyalty to these clubs only to drop off the bandwagon once the team's fortunes were on the decline. Because he was always aligning himself with winners, he believed that this meant he had a great nose for success. What it really meant is that he was capable of reading the standings in the paper and listening to the loudest ESPN personalities on any subject.

Donnie had run a mile for time, once, in college, some three decades earlier. He had attended a well-known elite-style institution in the U.S. Northeast, not at all on his academic or other personal merits and entirely because his father was an alumnus and wealthy donor. There he mostly drank and cheated and womanized, but in a nod to the standards of young men of his day, he had also worked out some. He had competed this mile during as part of a fund-raiser for a local children's hospital hosted by his fraternity, which had funneled about 80 percent of the meager profits into its own beer fund. Donnie had run a little over six minutes, not terrible for a 200-pound kid with the natural grace of a recently tased hedgehog. He had not thought about this "race" much over the years, but now, having taken on the role of a mentor and aiming to earn respect, he believed it would be best if he revised his time down by a minute or two. 

He was still working on the particulars of this embellishment when he found himself standing in front of the quiet throng of kids, not quite knowing for a fraction of a second why he was there. Then it came to him, partly because his young distaff assistant tapped him lightly on the back on the head. On the hat. The hat.

"Boys," he you've never heard this before, and I shouldn't have to be the one to say it.

"Fuck 'em and run!"

Heads swiveled. The boys had heard casual and in some cases quite belligerent profanity before, most often from their fathers and occasionally from coaches. This, however, had invariably transpired in the context of some established level of intimacy. In that Coach Donnie and his runners were not yet one bit acquainted, his behavior did not present as normative.

"The fuck?" muttered Brendan Josh, the captain. He said it without irony; Josh was the most foul-mouthed Chippie of the bunch, with a disposition to match. No one could really figure out why he even ran cross-country at all; that he was fairly good at it lacked explanatory power, because Josh seemed to hate anything that demanded structure of him, as attending practices and meets did.

And with that, without its own knowledge or permission, the team began its first serious run for a conference title in two decades.