Funny way of asking for help

White male rage.

This is from the vault, a piece I wrote last year and cleaned up this week to share. Thanks for reading.

And then there’s the UMass Amherst men’s basketball coach. Guy named Frank Martin. He’s new to the team, new to the state. Born and raised in Miami, a Google search tells me. First taught high school math before getting into the coaching biz. A lucrative career change. He’s now one of the highest paid state employees, making $8.5 million over the course of his five year contract. Who pays him that money? We do, the taxpayers of Massachusetts.

Tana and I took her dad to go see a game last night, and this guy, Frank Martin, stole the show. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a grown man blow a gasket. I’m lucky, I guess. Some people have to deal with such men on the daily.

But now that I think about it, I actually do see male rage every once in a while, sometimes when I’m downtown in a city. It happens suddenly. I’ll hear a man just start screaming. Shouting. Hurling out rage with the full power of his man body. These guys haven’t bathed in weeks, they’re living out on the street, just letting it rip, don’t give a fuck. But those men are unwell. They’re clearly dealing with serious trauma. A funny way of asking for help, Darryl would call it.

What about Frank? Is he well? Was he asking for help that whole time? Sure, it was just a game. It was just a game, right?

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No one within his blast radius was spared. Not the fans sitting behind him. Not the refs. Definitely not his players. His rage was of that old-fashioned, patriarchal style, a full-grown, physically powerful, middle-aged white man allowing his entire body to be unselfconsciously possessed, in public, right there for all of us to see. If I hadn’t felt afraid of him, sitting way up there in section F, row 17, seat 4, I would have felt sorry for him.

Watching the players endure his abuse, I had flashbacks to sixth grade. My coach, Coach Schauble, white, heavy, looming over us, glowering into us, shouting so hard his jowls shook, sticky white sputum literally frothing at the corners of his lips. His eyes, somehow shaded, clouded. His son, who was by far the best player on our team, took the brunt of his rage, but we all took hits. It was like Coach Schauble was in a dream when the rage came. There he was courtside, pacing, sleepwalking in this dream, this nightmare that became our own by virtue of our proximity to him. I remember how mortified I felt when, at one game, my mother stood up, walked over to him, and told him it’s not okay.

My mom is a badass. But that’s another story.

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If you can’t wake up from your own nightmare, you’re liable to pass it on to others, who take it on themselves, take it in. You see your dad raging as a little boy. His raw, unprocessed pain, the pain that is the dream he doesn’t realize he’s dreaming. You take that in, unawares, in the dream-state of childhood. Now it lives in you, in your dream, perhaps as rage, perhaps as fear. Whatever form it takes, it’s yours to deal with now. Yours to heal. Or to pass on, like it was passed on to you. That’s how trauma works. The nightmare, unhealed, is passed down from one generation to the next. That, or you wake up. You heal, so someone else doesn’t have to.

But again, maybe I’m taking this all too seriously. Here I am talking about trauma! It was just a basketball game, for pete’s sake! It’s not like it was real or anything. Plus, someone who’s getting paid millions of dollars surely knows what they’re doing. It was a coaching strategy, surely. Yeah, that’s it. His rage was a well-calculated and precisely executed effort to 1) goad his players into achieving their highest potential, 2) intimidate the other team, 3) display power, which you must do to win.

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Nah.

Times are changing. That power-over shit is way passé. It’s not true power, never was, never will be, and more of us are awakening to that now. We are emerging from the dark ages of the nightmare, of unconscious pain-body lunacy, on the basketball court, in the office, in the bedroom, on the battlefield. Passing on the trauma is not the way to win, not the way to live. The buck stops here, now. In this new dawn of trauma-informed sanity, you take an L when you pass the buck. If that’s how you win the game, you lose. It’s just not cool to rage on someone, unless you’re working something out with the support of your men’s group, or in a carefully guided ceremony, or with your therapist.

Healing doesn’t mean being calm all the time. It doesn’t mean giving up your power. It means understanding your power, integrating your power, and respecting the power of others. We can be passionate without being antagonistic. We can be angry without being harmful. We can fight to win without cutting people down. But that takes real power: to wield power without hurting someone else, especially if they’ve used theirs to hurt you.

One isn’t born raging. One learns to rage. How? By seeing it. Experiencing it. Getting hurt by it and surviving it.

Who did he see raging like this when he was a little boy? Who did he believe he had to become in order to be a powerful, respectable man capable of getting what he wanted? The sad thing is, he wasn’t wrong. He did the thing, became the raging man, and he got what he wanted, that contract. This isn’t the way it should be, not the way it has to be, but apparently it’s the way it is.

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The people behind us in row 18 started talking about him, little murmurs of protest and discontent. Tana’s dad and I looked at each other at one point, eyebrows raised, like, Sheesh. The guy hammered his fist onto the padded scoring table. Walked out onto the court, seething. How did his voice-box survive such voltage? The camera would focus in on him during some of his tirades, and suddenly he’d be up on the big screen above us all, another Frank Martin, raging, raging, raging.

He targeted his players the most, especially his best players. Most of them were Black. Frank Martin is a strapping white man from Florida. He was either entirely unaware of the racial dynamics at play, or just didn’t care much about the history of white men excoriating Black men in our country. The etymology of the word “excoriate” means “to flay, strip off the skin, to break and remove the outer layers of the skin in any manner.” And we paid to see this, as if it were a spectacle. And we’re paying him to do it, every day, with our tax dollars.

Sheesh, indeed.

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“There’s a reason why the greatest season in K State history happened while I was there,” Mr. Martin said in an article. “The winningest five-year period in its history were my five years as a head coach there, and we go to South Carolina, and the two winning seasons in the school’s history happened during my time there.”

He sounds pretty convinced. There may be no waking up for this one. It might be a forgive-him-Father-he-knows-not-what-he-does kind of thing. We know not what we do, when we sleep.

So I can forgive Frank. I can do that by remembering the little boy of him, how that little boy was hurt and never had the support to heal, to integrate the traumas, to become a man who did not have to pass it on to others. I can remember his rage is a funny way of asking for help, that he’s asking for help, that we’re all in some way just asking for help. I can remember that some of us get it, some of us don’t. I can remember to treasure the help I’ve received, the moments of waking. I can wish waking for us all.

What else can we do but wish, hope, pray? Because it’s a grace, to wake up. To be blessed by healing. We work at it, sure, some of us, and pray for it, of course, but who can say how it is that healing comes, and when, and for whom? For those who do get to wake up, even just a little bit, a few days a year, a few moments a day, it’s on us to see clearly, as clearly as we possibly can, especially when the nightmare comes for us.

This time, it’s not too hard to see clearly, for me. For those closer to the epicenter, forgiveness might be a more complicated prospect, but I was far away enough from the rage epicenter, section F, row 17, seat 4. It’s easier for me to see him clearly because I wasn’t hurt by him—I don’t have to see through my own hurt to see the truth of him. All I have to see through is his.

So Frank, I’m sorry, man. I’ve got rage in me, too. It’s not easy. God bless you. God forgive you. Godspeed, brother.

What’s unforgivable, however, is to pay a man $8.5 million dollars to model unhindered white male rage as a form of leadership. To feature, as community entertainment, this kind of psycho-emotional damage and trauma-vom. To display this on the big screen, for all the little boys and girls to see, to teach them that this is behavior we accept, and not only accept, but reward handsomely, with money, fame, and professional power. The little boys will learn that rage is a good way to get what they want, a good way to win, and that they’ll have to endure such rage from the older men until they’re old enough to do it themselves. And the little girls will learn that this is just how it goes, and that they should ready themselves for when the little boys sitting next to them will be the coach, the boss, the husband. 

Damn, and I just found out this guy gets a country club membership as a bonus in his contract. That, on top of the 8.5 mil. What a dream, huh? What a strange, strange dream. Time to wake up.