Mark and Zach left the showers. There was no conversation. Mark toweled off and quickly got dressed. He stormed toward the office hoping that Coach was still around. He approached the door and gave it a knock. He heard a voice say, “Come in, son.”
Mark walked through the door trying to figure out what he wanted to say. Just as he got ready to speak, Coach said, “I’ll bet you have a lot of questions for me right about now, huh?”
Mark jumped in, “Yeah, I do. I have a lot of questions. What in the hell is going on around here? I feel like I am being set-up and I am not going to be anybody’s pawn. Not anymore.”
Coach said, “I know that you aren’t. And that’s why I admire you. Just give me a chance to explain myself, please. Every member of this team and staff is here because they either have or had repressed homosexual urges. I recruit young men and create a safe space for them to explore their sexuality so they can leave here and have a healthy life going forward. And, sometimes, we play basketball.”
“So, I am here because you knew that I was gay? It didn’t have anything to do with basketball?” Mark asked.
“Well, to be honest, not really on both accounts. When I visited your school, I could see how deeply repressed you were. I can see it from a mile away, mostly because I have lived it. To be honest, I didn’t really know if I could help you. I thought that you might be too far gone, but I was wrong, as wrong as I have ever been about anything or anybody. You have already come further than I thought that you ever could. And, yeah, I am sorry to say that it had nothing to do with basketball, but sometimes you get lucky and stumble into a player like D.J., or Zach. I have also had some years where it was a total shit-show out there, so I’ll just sit back and enjoy the fact that I have a competent team,” Coach explained.
“I guess that I don’t understand why you do this. Why are you wasting your time trying to get a bunch of college students to explore their sexuality?” Mark asked.
Coach hesitated for a minute. He started to speak and then stopped. He began to cry and tears started to flow down his face. He was shaking visibly. “Coach, are you alright?” Mark asked nervously.
After a minute, Coach started to speak as tears continued to stream down his face, “I used to be a basketball player here, just like you. I was pretty good too. I was probably just dreaming, but I really thought that I could be a pro someday. I was also a repressed homosexual.”
“One night after we finished playing a game, I was in the showers with several of my teammates including the team captain, Mike. He was a sexy-beast of a young man, not terribly unlike your friend Zach. Unfortunately, he caught me staring at him and he called me out in the middle of the showers. I lied and tried to act like I wasn’t staring, but they knew.”
Coach was struggling to speak but he continued on, “They called me such…such horrible things. Then they all beat me down. They bound my wrists and ankles with athletic tape and…” Coach completely broke down. He was clearly unable to speak about what had happened to him, even though it was many years later.
“A janitor found me unconscious and taped to a bench the next morning. He called for an ambulance. I had several emergency surgeries that day. I had to have both of my testicles amputated from lack of blood flow from the athletic tape. My penis remains but is severely disfigured and discolored. I also had to have surgery to mend some injuries that were causing internal bleeding.”
Mark was in shock. He felt like he had just been very selfish in demanding an explanation from Coach. Mark tried to back away, “Coach, I…I had no idea. I don’t know what to say. That is fucking horrible. What did they do to them?”
Coach sighed, “They didn’t do anything to them. Back then nobody cared if some ‘queer’ took a beating. A lot of people felt that I got what I deserved. I could count on one hand the number of people that offered me encouragement. But that was many years ago. I know that people are much more accepting these days, but I also know that there is still a lot of hate in this world.”
Mark asked, “So what did you do then?”
Coach continued, “I dropped out of school and it took me more than a year to reasonably recover. When I did, I made an appointment with the athletic director here. I told him that he was going to make me the head basketball coach here, so I could make sure that nothing like that ever happens again. He fired the old coach and gave me the job, I’m sure trying to avoid a lawsuit. They give me a few scholarships to hand out every year and as long as I keep to a tight budget, they don’t pay any mind to what goes on around here. The school never made any money on the basketball program before, so they weren’t really out anything.”
“God, you must think terrible things about me and my recent…escapades,” Mark said shamefully.