One Way Ticket to Anywhere by Rich Ochoa

Author:Rich Ochoa [Ochoa, Rich]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781461142997
Publisher: CreateSpace
Published: 2011-05-03T00:00:00+00:00

March 30, 1981

The locker room. Today, when I walk in, I hear reserved voices that don‘t fit here. This is a place where seventeen-year-old boys are normally seen popping one another with towels and heard fabricating stories of sexual conquests that never actually happened. Today, my teammates are partitioned into several huddles. Serious discussions are going on. Single words, not sentences, reach my ears: shot, chest, President.

President Reagan had been shot. Everything else I hear is supposition.

I think about the Kennedy assassination, about the film of it that we watched in our History class just last week. I was one month old when it happened. Has my life seen its second presidential assassination?

Coach Robinson comes out into the dressing area and breaks the mood. ―Let‘s go you pansies; the President wants you girls to run today.‖ Pleased with his creative wit, he smiles and retreats to his office while we slowly begin getting dressed for our workout. Robinson is like that; the only time he smiles or laughs is when he amuses himself, and I have no idea he‘s about to do that in a depraved way that I will never forget.

Wendell Robinson was the head football coach and athletic director at Lindale High School. An unsightly man, he was widely known as Block not only because his head was shaped like a cinderblock, but also because his acne-pitted face resembled the texture of one. He was gargantuan—6‘2‖ and 300 pounds of relentless, ruthless ass.

Every kid who came out made the team; that was school policy. To circumvent that rule, Block tried to get kids to quit football on their own. When he wanted a kid gone, he employed a host of public humiliation tactics to persuade him to quit. If the other marginal athletes didn‘t jump on the bandwagon and join him in ridiculing those he wanted off the team, they risked becoming targets themselves. A lot of team members picked on the weaker guys as a survival tactic. If Robinson saw you were tough enough to be a bully yourself, you were spared his bullying. Many young men of higher principles simply left the athletic program rather than deal with his intimidation.

When two guys got into a disagreement, Block often insisted the boys put boxing gloves on and fight it out in front of their teammates. His idea of building boys into men was to let them beat the hell out of each other to toughen them up. The fights wouldn‘t end until he declared it over, or until the weaker boy was physically unable to continue. To play, you had to be tough. To prove you were tough, you had to fight. Declining to fight would be the ultimate act of cowardice in the testosterone-filled environment, and a sure way to find oneself on the end of the bench, and as the object of ridicule. Accepting and getting the hell beaten out of you was the only way to salvage self respect, and to stay involved in the high school sports.

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