The Coach Who Benched My Son

The Tuesday before homecoming, Coach Rusk kept my son after practice, put a hand on his shoulder pad like he was doing him a favor, and told him he would not be starting Friday night. Then he handed the starting tailback spot, the one my son had earned across an entire summer, to Colton Trask, whose father had just paid for the new stadium lights.

I was not supposed to hear the reason. Almost nobody in our town was. But by the end of that homecoming game, four thousand people in those bleachers had heard it in Coach Rusk’s own voice, and so had he, and there was nothing he could do but stand at midfield under Lyle Trask’s brand new lights and listen to himself get caught.

I want to tell it the way it actually happened, slow, because if I rush it you will think it was about football, and it was never really about football.

My name is Kim. I am forty-two years old, and I have lived in this town my whole life, in the same county where I was born, where my husband was born, where our son was born sixteen years ago in the little county hospital out by the highway. My husband, Travis, played tailback for the Raiders when we were kids. Number twenty-two. He wore it four years, and when he died six years ago, a heart that quit on him at thirty-eight while he was changing a tire on the shoulder of Route 9, half the men who carried his casket had once blocked for him on that same field. That number meant something in this town before my son ever put it on.

Bo put it on his freshman year. He asked the equipment manager for it without telling me, and when he came home wearing that jersey the first time, twenty-two across the front, I had to go stand in the kitchen for a minute so he would not see my face. He looked so much like Travis that it took the wind out of me. He runs like Travis too, low and patient, the kind of runner who waits a half-second longer than everybody else for the hole to open and then is simply gone. People who had watched his father run used to stop me at the feed store to tell me they had to look twice.

So you have to understand, when I talk about my son and that number and that starting spot, I am not talking about a game. I am talking about the one thing my boy had that connected him to a father he barely got to know.