Another Round at the Say When: Reaching the Boy

A journalist moves to the small town of McDermitt, on the Oregon-Nevada line, to learn about why the high school football team never wins, and about the townsfolk who cheer them on.

One in a series.

A question has vexed me since I arrived in McDermitt several weeks ago: How do you read the mind of a 17-year-old boy?

Those white sons of ranchers and farmers, not to mention the Native American boys, who together populate the local football team. Few of them seem prone to open up to an outsider like me.

So how do you reach them?

As a journalist, I’ve interviewed all kinds of people, from all walks, but most of them were adults. I know how hold truck with those types.

But cliquish teenagers are a different story. 

I grew up in the Eastern suburbs, lived mostly in big cities, adopted their politics. 

These kids are decidedly Western. 

Small town. 

Country.

Good kids, all of them.

Still, to them, I am an alien.

For one thing, I’d never played football in high school. 

Instead, I played golf, as non-contact a sport as you can get, along with a little bit of basketball. I’ve been in a few fights, gotten my face punched, but I’ve never thrown my weight at tackle dummies or faced down a 240-pound opposing running back.

These kids have.

One day at practice, as I watched the players go through their training motions, I noticed that they interacted with the coaches in one way, but talked among themselves in quite another. 

When they took breaks on the grass and caught their collective breaths, they broke down things in confessional voices: girls and grades for the seniors; pickup trucks and hi jinks for the others.

Left among themselves, even their postures were different; more slouched, as though letting go, this emerging tribe left to its own devices.

“I’ve never been a parent,” I told Richard Egan the head coach of the McDermitt Bulldogs. “I’ve never even been a coach. How do you reach these kids. How do you know what’s on their minds?”

Richard is not only a veteran coach, he’s a father and grandfather.

He knows.

When I was these kids’ age, I don’t think that adults even mattered to me.

I limited my contact with them, shut them out — teachers, cops, after-school bosses, parish priests — preferring my own kind, kids my own age, who got it, a clan with whom I could be myself, and if I knew them well enough, spill my secrets and my doubts.

There’s a quiet boy who has at times approached me, rather than enduring my intrusion and questions and comments, like I feel many of the others do.

He talked about living on a ranch just outside town, about baling hay at 5 a.m. and herding cattle and about killing an aggressive snake one day.

The wall between this boy and me, this stranger who had descended upon his football practices, asking personal questions, had fissured, if just a bit.

One afternoon, I passed the boy on the yard just outside the locker room. I asked him if he was coming to practice that day.

He walked away without answer.

It felt like a dismissal.

I was walking alongside a well-seasoned senior. Two days before, I sat on the front porch of his house, taking notes and asking questions about his life.

I asked about being on the team, enduring life in a small town where there was nothing to do for teenagers. 

As journalists always do, I asked direct questions, and he didn’t flinch at talking about what it was like to attend a high school with only 28 students, more than half of them boys.

I drove away that day, feeling as though I’d made a breakthrough. 

He had agreed to give me a tour of his world in the coming weeks, taking me to places where he played as a boy, the landscape through which he takes his long evening runs to stay in shape.

But that day at school, the door that separated us seemed to slam shut again.

“What’s wrong with him?” I asked the senior, motioning to the newcomer.

He shook his head and shrugged.

“You have your own issues,” I said, continuing to talk, back-peddling. “You can’t be worried about everybody else.”

He suddenly turned on his heels.

“I forgot something,” he said, walking back toward the locker room.

I couldn’t comprehend his silence as I walked out to the practice field by myself.

Later, I asked Richard about the newcomer.

He smiled, this coach who has guided untold numbers of moody, mercurial teenage boys, coaxing them along the road to manhood, showing them how to take hits on the football field, how to get beaten badly, time after time, and then get up again.

“Aw, he’s got girl problems,” Richard said.

Now, that made sense. 

First loves can throw anyone into an emotional tailspin. A missed call or a misinterpreted text and the unstable walls of a teen's emotional life come crashing down.

It wasn’t about me and my nosiness. It was about a kid dealing with a personal weight he’d never before encountered.

Jack Smith, the team’s assistant coach, had arrived by then. Jack is long-ago divorced and childless, but has coached basketball and football for more than three decades.

He knows the playbook on dealing with these kids.

I do not.

"I realize something,” I told both men. "I can’t try to be friends with these kids. I can’t try to impress them."

Just a few days before, I had asked one senior for some tips on reaching his teammates.

"Just be yourself,” he said.

At the end of practice that afternoon, as the boys rallied around their coaches for a last-minute word, I noticed they were staring down at the grass below them.

A praying mantis perched below them.

“He’s a big one,” somebody said.

“Do you know what happens when a male praying mantis mates?” I asked, choosing my words carefully. “Afterwards, she starts devouring him from the head down.”

After a moment of silence, a sophomore spoke up.

He made an off-color joke.

The boys laughed. So did the coaches.

“I was waiting for that,” Richard said.

The young Bulldogs broke their huddle.

Maybe they weren’t such alien creatures after all.