Bully

How bad do you have to be, without being a murderer or a rapist, to have people glad that you are dead? People who normally get along with people and just want to go about their lives. My best friend is a dedicated high school teacher and very successful basketball and volley ball coach. Two years ago she was the South Carolina State coach of the year. She played NCAA volleyball and basketball and she is a beautiful blond who retains her physical prowess and her teenage figure well into her thirties. The problem with such people is that they engender jealousy and pettiness in smaller people. When she added volleyball coaching to her already busy life, she had an idea that was brilliant in its simplicity and changed the color, literally of sports at our school. I was lucky enough to be her sidekick in much of what she did coaching wise and so I saw the implementation and the benefits of her plan.

In Charleston, South Carolina Basketball is largely a Black sport and Volleyball is largely a White sport. To keep her basketball team in shape and reverse the volleyball team's losing record, she encouraged her basketball players to try out for volleyball. With similar logic, she encouraged her volleyball players to consider trying out for basketball. This altered the complexion of both sports and somehow she was called racist by parents of both races. Volleyball parents said she favored Black players and Basketball parents said she was favoring white players. Of course, most parents just let things be and were wise enough to see that both teams benefited from the Coach's unorthodox approach.

If this were another story about race relations in South Carolina, you'd have all the facts you'd need to take sides. The complicating factor is that the disgruntled parents, Black and White were organized by a wealthy White man who was upset that his daughter was losing court time in both sports. Let's call her Kara. Kara's dad thought she deserved to be in the starting line up for the basketball team. Among my duties as sidekick to my best friend, I was the one who announced the starting line up, and Kara was rarely on it. The truth is that Kara was a coach's nightmare; loads of potential but no fire. Kara was tall and attractive with a lean athletic build. I was only one of many who noted that she was physically identical to Coach herself. But, where Coach did everything to realize her potential, Kara thought being young and pretty was enough. And her father agreed. He managed to rally a small but vocal group of parents to complain about everything they could think of.

Coach was a racist. It didn't matter that both races were throwing the diametrically opposed grievances.

Coach was unapproachable. It didn't matter that she had given every player and parent her cell number.

Coach coached like a man. It was hard to imagine what that meant, but her male athletic director actually demonstrated two different ways of hugging female players. And he demonstrated it on Coach herself in front of the principal in the principal's office.

The district superintendent got involved and said that changes needed to be made because the athletic director, who had more authority almost than the principal, had said that both the volleyball and basketball programs were in disarray. Kara's dad was telling the entire community that he'd offered to buy the school two new score boards provided they fire Coach. Rumors of her impending firing were without foundation, but they flourished and that emboldened parents to speak in public about what a lousy coach she was and how the school should do something about her. That her winning record was unparalleled at that school didn't seem to deter this group of liars.

Coach coaches hard and cares for her players like they were her children. She believes that sports is a way of truly defining and revealing character. She loves to win, but she loves to see her players grow as young women even more. For all that, I am one of the few people outside of her family who ever get to see her vulnerable side. And so it was that I sat with her one night on her couch and she rested her head on my shoulder and said that she wondered if she should just give up. It was difficult because I was only three months away from moving back to Canada with my kids, a move I was reluctant to make, but was really powerless to avoid. However, I gave what comfort I could and told her that she was the strongest person I know. Summer came and we had a month to have our kids together before I left. The school was strangely silent about the whole affair and Coach was not going to stir things up.

I moved July 1. Our friendship became a daily phone call that could last as much as 2 hours. We talked of her divorce proceedings, my search for a job, any number of things that had to be worked out and that needed support and an ear. Then she called to tell me that Kara's dad had died of a heart attack. He'd been a rich contractor. His company built the school our kids attended. He'd also been a cocaine dealer when he was young and it turned out that he'd never really left that behind. The IRS had seized his assets, law enforcement was closing in ,and finally Kara's dad's heart gave out.

"You're glad aren't you?"

This conversation was late at night and I was on my cell, walking along some train tacks near my house.

She was hesitant to answer.

"It's okay," I assured her. "It's just me. You coached Kara and those other girls for several years and gave them everything. And then her dad decided to take you down with no other authority than wealth. He tried to take away the means to feed your kids. He was a bully. And nobody mourns their bully."

"I talked to my Mom," she said, "I never really told her the whole thing, but I told her that I felt nothing at hearing that he was dead. Then I kind of felt relieved."

"And now you are kind of happy aren't you?"

"I think so."

"Now you know how I felt when Dr. Hooper died."

Dr. Hooper had been the principal at my first school in Charleston. I have never met a woman able to destroy so thoroughly. She bullied people until they walked away from their teaching careers. In one case, a sixth grade history teacher went home on a Friday and just didn't show up ever again. An art teacher vowed never to set foot in a classroom again. This woman was so bad that we had to have a special team of professional mediators come to the school to help "heal" the rift between the faculty and the administration. Of course, that made things much worse.

A few years later, when she died and I read about it in the paper while I was helping out in the library at my next school, I ran down to the classroom of another teacher who had spent two years under Dr. Hooper and who had looked like an abuse victim when I first met her.

I burst into her room.

"I already heard," she said with a big smile on her face.

"Really?"

"I had four voicemails on my cell singing, 'Ding Dong. The witch is dead.'"

Later I called my mom and said that as a good Mormon boy I was struggling with the joy I felt at this woman's death from complications of lupus. My mom said that she was a bully, and no one mourns their bully.

And that was the truth that I passed on to Coach. No one mourns the person who made their life hell just for the fun of it.

Coach was relieved to hear my perspective. And then we rehashed the previous four months of misery that she'd been through. The next night during our late night conversation, she began to tell me how all of this had made her wonder what kind of a person she was and how she could be both better able to protect herself from another such blindsiding and how she could make sure that she treated people better from that point on. It was just like Coach to take that kind of persecution and use it as a reason to examine her own life and improve from it. I guess that is the difference between her and her bully. My guess is that Kara's dad's funeral was attended by people pretending to mourn. When Coach dies (many, many decades from now) they will likely have made a movie about her and named a school after her.