My high school soccer coach was a Guatemalan immigrant who had made his way to the States when he was in his twenties. At first he’d earned his living as an Arthur Murray dance instructor, but that phase of his life, at least to those of us he coached, had faded into an unlikely myth. Now he was an overweight man in his late 40s, dark-skinned, with white dandruff sprinkled over the shoulders of his worn tracksuit. He had a few different jobs, including one as the night-shift security guard at the local mental hospital, or so we’d all heard. But his passion was coaching soccer.
One late summer day, near the end of a preseason practice, Coach called me and a few of my high school teammates out to his car—an old maroon Chrysler, the trunk of which was filled with mismatched shin guards, broken whistles and a kind of Jackson-Pollack-like scattering of different-colored mesh practice jerseys—and asked for our help bringing in some boxes. The whole team knew what was inside the boxes. We knew, but we didn’t know. The packing tape that sealed the cardboard tops shut would soon be delicately sliced through, and Coach would reveal to us the crucial specifics of our uniforms, the numbered jerseys, shorts and socks that we would wear in every game we played, home and away, during the upcoming season, and the following season, and probably the season after that as well. The contents of the cardboard boxes my teammates and I hauled into the locker room would dictate the way we looked, individually and as a team, for the rest of our lives, in a way. It would influence how we remembered one another.
There was (and probably still is) a code of fashion excellence in the small town high school soccer world. Every capable player was expected to have a good pair of brand-name cleats, real leather, manufactured in Europe by companies like Adidas, Puma or Diadora. Though you had no control over it, the unspoken code extended to the style of your team’s jersey, whether it had a collar, if it was long-sleeved or short-sleeved, how the insignia was stitched onto the left breast. High school soccer players, all of us, noticed these details. The brand, the material, the newness of our soccer clothes could distinguish us.
After we hauled the boxes in from his car, Coach asked to see me in his office. Lately he was calling me into the office more and more often. Since his son had left for college the year before, I felt like I’d become our coach’s surrogate son… he’d made me a team captain and often asked me to lead practice drills and stretching before games. As I made my way past several half-naked teammates to that cramped, sad office near the rear of the locker room, I prepared myself for another awkward exchange with my unnecessary auxiliary dad.
Coach Aragon’s office, which he shared with the JV coach during soccer season, was stuffed with orange rubber cones, empty clipboards, frayed goal netting, stopwatches and old airhorns, all of these objects stacked or shelved haphazardly, crowding around the desk in the center of the room. In short, the office looked like Coach’s car-trunk, but on a grander scale, able to hold more chaos. I sensed that this was a part of Mr. Aragon’s tragedy—the thing he loved to do required him to create order and discipline, when in truth he was not an orderly person.
He sat waiting for me in his navy blue tracksuit, the one he wore to nearly every practice. He’d already opened one of the cardboard boxes; it overflowed with bright soccer jerseys, and I could tell at a glance that the shirts were same tacky, garish things we’d worn the year before. The rumor that we might get fantastic new uniforms for the upcoming season was a lie. Our team’s collective dream of a worthy uniform was dead, and I was the first to know it.
“I wanted you to have first pick, Captain,” Mr. Aragon told me, smiling. His chair was swiveled to the side; his legs couldn’t fit under the desk because that space was occupied by a box of dusty junk. “What number do you like?”
He turned to a fresh page of his yellow legal pad and wrote down my name, then looked at me expectantly, waiting for me to pick a team jersey so that he could record its number.
“I had 20 before,” I said. “So I suppose that’ll work.”
The coach dug a white shirt out of the home jersey box, held it up under the fluorescent light from the ceiling, and I noticed all the damning details: red and blue elastic stripes on the sleeves, a limp blue polyester collar that sprouted from the V-neck like a wilting flower. Coach Aragon tossed it to me underhand, the shirt unfurling a little in the air between us before it reached my hand. I clumsily caught it. “The armor of a warrior!” Coach said, as a grin spread across his wide face. “You’re going to win a lot of battles in that shirt.”
“All right,” I said, trying to smile. I often felt uncertain about how to speak to him, how to act in his presence. Did he want to be a father to me? A brother? Was he my comrade or my coach? I’d seen him lose his temper with teammates plenty of times, but I couldn’t remember a time he’d been angry with me. He was an undisciplined disciplinarian, inconsistent, always playing favorites. And I didn’t seem capable of losing his favor for some reason. On some level I sensed that this was because I was, even as a teenager, constitutionally incapable of talking back to authority figures; I smiled and nodded silently, let a lot of verbiage pass by me without calling it into question. It seemed in no way worth it to contradict this man, although his favoritism pained me. I knew about my teammates’ disdain for his authority as well. I was the go-between, the confidant. That meant Coach Aragon could project his own hopes, his own former Arthur Murray glory onto me.
I was not the man’s son, but I knew he cared about me a great deal. And I cared about him, even felt protective of him sometimes when my teammates made fun of his weight, or his dandruff, or the accent he’d brought with him from Central America. At the same time I was embarrassed by our coach, embarrassed by his affection, his efforts to reach out to me. I knew that I owed him. But I never figured out how to pay him back.
