The Coach They Fired By Email
Thursday, Marge Holt called me at the house. Marge is 59, has outlasted 4 athletic directors and 2 superintendents in her 2 decades of running the booster club, and she does not waste a sentence.
“I’ve got 214 signatures,” she said, “out of a town of 1,900 people, and that is a lot of folks for one week in October, and I’ve got a booster club bank account with 11 years of pancake-feed money in it, and I’ve got a board meeting Monday night where Dr. Albrecht put your item on the public agenda, and I have never in my life seen a chairman of a school board turn away a full room.”
“Marge,” I said, “I don’t want this to get ugly.”
“It’s not going to get ugly,” she said. “It’s going to get full. There’s a difference.”
I asked her, because I had been wondering it since Tuesday night and had not said it out loud to anybody but Joanie, whether this was even going to work, whether a town standing up at a meeting could undo an email, or whether I was about to let 214 good people waste a Monday night on a man who’d already made up his mind not to fight for himself.
“You let other people worry about the fighting,” Marge said, which was close enough to what Ike had said that I figured they must have been comparing notes. “You just show up Friday and let the boys play.”
I told her about the $9,200 figure, that I had done the math myself at the kitchen table and it did not even cover a single section of new bleacher seating, let alone a program. Marge already knew the number. She told me she’d gotten it from a copy of the agenda packet a sympathetic office clerk had printed for her, and that she intended to read it out loud, slow, in front of the whole room, so that nobody in Caldwell could later say they didn’t understand exactly what 34 years had been traded for.
I almost didn’t go to the game. It felt wrong, standing in the stands instead of on the sideline, 3 games into a season I had started. Joanie talked me into it, said a man who spent 34 years showing up for other people’s hardest nights owed himself the dignity of showing up for his own.
I want to describe that Friday carefully, because I will remember it the rest of my life and I would rather not get a single detail wrong.