Coach Poem by Frank Avon

Why he spoke
those words to me,
I could not know,
why he said
what he did
is still a mystery.

We were walking
down the hall
toward the gym
where, as team manager,
I would build fires
in the cast-iron heaters
to warm the place
for practice
that afternoon.

He was our hero:
captain of all his teams
at DuPont High School,
married to his
high-shool sweetheart,
a Navy man
in World War II,
a GI in college
lettering all four years
in three different sports,
the coach
who led our Bulldogs
to their only championship,
father to a house
of rowdy boys;
his name was Douglas Donal,
his family called him Sonny,
to us he was simply
Coach.
He was built
like a Mack truck,
yet behind his teacher's desk
on the second floor
of our brick building
put up by the WPA,
he would speak softly
and laugh
soundlessly.

Why he spoke
those words to me
that morning,
I could not know:

'Classical music
is important, too,
ya know.'

He could not have known
(I had told no one)
that I spent Saturdays
switching back & forth
between SEC football
and the Texaco Opera Theater;

that Siegfried
came alive to me
and those Volsungs
in Wagner's music,
that crafty Carmen
stole my heart
as she did everyone's,
that those Bohemians
Roberto and Mimi
and the frowsy Musetta
lived life to the fullest
on the margins,
that Madame Butterfly
in her arias
spoke eloquently
of her love and loss,
that the hunchback Rigoletto,
his lovely daughter,
the arrogant Duke,
the killer and his mistress,
filled the theater
of my mind
with Verdi's great quintet.

He could not have guessed.

Yet with those few words
out of nowhere,
just between
him and me,
he gave me permission

to be who I was,
to like what I liked,
to live in another world.

Not all stars
had to run and pass,
dribble and pivot,
and make the winning basket,
or touchdown,
or homerun.

It would be
all right for me
to look forward
to Monday Night of Music
on NBC.