As
the son of a Foreign Service officer, I lived three adolescent years
in Washington, D.C., with the knowledge I would be staying in the
States at a boarding school when my parents went overseas again. It
was, I was told, the proper course to prepare for admission to a good
college. I transformed what might have been necessity into a romantic
adventure of taking on adult responsibility early and attending the
same schools as my father—first Andover and then Yale. In September
1958, I bade farewell to my parents and brother at the dock in New
York, envious of their week on shipboard as they steamed toward Dad’s
new post in Rome. I headed for the train station and Andover, arriving
at PA without mishap, but with almost grim concentration.
The courses were hard. Meals were thrust down at a run to minimize
awareness of what one was eating. Virtually every moment not in class,
on the athletic fields or at morning chapel was spent studying. And
you did prepare in every subject every day. In Latin, Dr. Gillingham
might call on you at any moment to translate the next sentence of
Caesar’s Wars. If you were not paying tight attention, or had
not prepared, the rest of the class observed your embarrassed agony.
In English, we were memorizing (yes, word for word) Strunk and White’s
Elements of Style.
My roommate, Jobe Stevens, was new like me, and both of us aspired
to play varsity soccer. A soccer field was one place where I was confident
of my skill. I had first learned in Europe and had played first string
at the Sidwell Friends School the year before. But soccer at Andover
was unlike the game I had practiced in the winter’s mud of Washington,
D.C., essentially uncoached. At Andover, soccer was played in magnificent
fall weather, with over 100 students trying out for the team, many
of them better than any I had seen in D.C. And was there ever a coach!
His name, I learned, was Frank DiClemente. But, in a world where every
adult was a Mr. or Mrs. to students, Deke was Deke to everyone. His
regimen of laps, windsprints and exercises showed him what each player’s
limits were. The drills were serious and really trained you in new
skills. The daily chalk talks taught you the elegance of the game
and made you feel part of an elect circle. During the scrimmages,
you felt his eye on you almost constantly and frequently heard him
addressing you, whether or not you were near the ball. He kept players
constantly rotating in and out of the game, his sotto voce comments
to the bench keeping its denizens alert to every detail and roaring
with laughter. He managed to combine a withering sarcasm through mock
clenched teeth with a clear fondness, all at the service of craftlike
ball handling and perfect team play. He was, in short, a passionate
Italian in an otherwise very Yankee institution.
Jobe and I survived the first cut and then the second, but I knew
I was disappointing Deke. I had picked up some bad habits during my
uncoached years, and I was also, quite simply, afraid of getting wiped
out by one of the bigger players, most awesome of whom was the captain
and center halfback, known as “the Bomber.” One day the
moment-when-reckoning-is-no-longer-enough was suddenly upon me: The
ball was free and the Bomber and I were converging upon it from opposite
directions. The Bomber always emerged from such skirmishes with the
ball; I always shied away at the last moment, hoping to bring the
ball with me. I charged ahead, eyes involuntarily shut, awakening
an eon later to realize the inevitable collision had not occurred.
I had the ball at my feet with an open field ahead.
I was elated. My dreams that night were extravagant. But the following
Monday, the final list of the varsity squad, posted in the locker
room, included Jobe but not me. I found my way to an intramural team––the
Gauls––to play ragged games on ragged fields against the
Greeks, the Romans and the Saxons. I could show my allegiance to the
varsity only by running the lines during varsity games, retrieving
balls and cheering myself hoarse.
When I tried out again the next fall, Deke’s attitude toward
me was strangely different. From the first day, he treated me as if
I was in, my varsity position assured. The impression was that I had
simply needed a different kind of seasoning. And because I had gained
“a certain something” during the intervening year, I have,
every fall since then, taken stock to taste how the past year has
seasoned me.
Our team was very good that year, but there was a strong sense throughout
of building for the following year, since virtually the entire first
team would be returning.
The fall of my senior year we were undefeated. As the season progressed,
Deke suggested we flow rather fluidly among our positions, leaving
opponents perplexed about whom to guard. Our 3-1 victory over Exeter
at season’s end was almost anticlimactic, for we had faced an
undefeated Harvard freshman team the week before, with the unparalleled
Nigerian Olympian, Chris O’Hiri, at center forward. The entire
backfield held him to the two hardest-shot goals I’ve ever been
in the proximity of, while we scored thrice, but had one called back.
That season’s experience deposited in me the understanding, which
I increasingly realize few others share, that human beings can work
to create a dynamic symphony in which each player is continuously
attuned simultaneously to his own contribution and to the quality
of the whole. I played four disappointing years of soccer at Yale,
never again remotely approaching the quality of play to which Deke––hectoring
and honing, teasing and transforming––had guided us.
Bill
Torbert is a professor at the Carroll School of Management at Boston
College. |
Do
you have an interesting memory of a favorite Andover teacher or a
campus anecdote to share?
Please send your account, no more than 750 words in length, to Paula
Trespas at the Andover Bulletin. |
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