How I Got to Be Whoever It Is I Am (19 page)

A father of one of the boys on the team asked to meet with our committee. He sat at the table and read a letter he had written
beseeching us to give his son more playing time. He then got up and left. It was touching to hear, and then the parents of
other kids not in the starting lineup who weren’t getting much playing time petitioned our committee to address this, and
we foolishly put in a rule that all the kids had to play at least eight minutes a game.

Now parents of the kids coming off the bench would sit in the stands with stopwatches to determine if their kids were getting
their eight minutes! Often they didn’t, and that’s when the real anger toward the coach and the oversight committee began
to surface. I spoke to the coach, and the situation got somewhat better but was still not what was promised—those eight minutes
for
all
the kids coming off the bench. Anger was building in our town of 18,000. Many people were no longer speaking to each other,
or just barely. Mothers were crying.

When the team got to seventh grade, the eight-minute rule was done away with as we investigated and found that none of our
travel team competitors had that requirement. But totally unforeseen by anyone, the situation became even worse.

To coach the seventh-grade team, we brought in a man who had done it many times before. He seemed a pleasant fellow, but as
I see it, this character appeared to have an agenda. He planned to leave his position to coach another team, the one we ended
up playing in our opening game. It was somewhat shocking to see
our
coach coaching our opponent. He had turned the team over to his two assistants, a plan he’d had in place all along. They
were both from the area and had played for the high school team years earlier.

Early on, some of our best players were not starting, and not getting substantial playing time, and the team wasn’t winning.

I took the two young coaches out to lunch and showed them some newspaper clippings from our previous year when we won a big
championship. I didn’t want to get in their face. I just showed them the clippings, hoping they’d notice that some of our
star players were sitting on the bench. It worked. One fellow said, “You see the same names over and over.” I said, “Uh-huh.”

One was a very pleasant, laid-back fella, but the other was more of a tough, somewhat surly man. Very early on the pleasant
fella moved on, as his work took him elsewhere, so the rough guy was in charge, and he took over in an aggressive manner we
hadn’t seen before. Again, these were twelve-year-old boys who loved to play and had been wildly successful the past two years.

Now, this hostile coach, for reasons I’m not qualified to even give an opinion on, was telling one of our best players, as
nice a kid as I ever met in my life, to “get off my f— floor.” Everyone seemed to be losing their love of the game. It was
so bad, I tried to have him removed. I contacted two families who were friends of ours who had boys on the team to support
my effort, but they declined. One later wrote me and apologized, belatedly realizing I was right.

Instead, a meeting was called where the coach spoke to the parents. I was so angry I not only didn’t speak at the meeting,
fearing what I might say, I couldn’t even look at him. I do remember him saying, “I coach the way I was coached,” and then
quoted some horrible stuff a coach had said to him. He did allow how maybe his methods weren’t age appropriate, but the hostility
and anger from the coach and toward the coach remained in the air.

I really fault myself for not confronting him, since he had the gall to call a meeting. In certain situations in the future
I’m going to become more aggressive.

In one game my son was noticeably injured and was limping up and down the court. The coach either didn’t notice or didn’t
care. I walked over to him, said something, and he took my kid out of the game. My boy later was on crutches for quite a while.

The coach continued with his difficult practice exercises, running the boys in what are called suicide drills, where they
had to run as hard as they could up and down the gym. In one instance they had to do this five times for every point the other
team scored above twelve.

In one game we were ahead by forty points, and all the starters were kept in! Clearly, this guy not only wanted to win, it
seemed he wanted to dominate and humiliate the other team.

On other occasions our best players were benched, including one who now plays for a Division One college team. Division One
includes the best teams in America. At one point this boy had a couple of games where he wasn’t up to his normal level, and
the coach chose to read his statistics for those games to the team. Several of the players’ attitudes went from “He’s okay”
to pure hatred.

At another point this strange coach announced that he and the high school coach were going to scout the intramural teams,
saying, “I don’t know how many of you could play in high school.” My son barely played in high school, even though he played
for the number-one-rated AAU team in the state that went to the national finals twice. He even won an award.

We were fortunate to get a great guy as eighth-grade coach, but by that time there was so much resentment in the town that
some parents just pulled their kids off the team and started another team, weakening our regular team.

The aggressive seventh-grade coach emerged once more in high school coaching girls, and from what I heard, nothing had changed.
I sensed that many simply lost their passion for the game and stopped playing.

Abusive coaches who drive kids out of sports aren’t unusual. What a disgrace that these apparently unhappy people are put
in positions of power—over kids! And they often have no awareness of how inappropriate they are. In fairness, I don’t believe
our abusive coach realized it, as I’ve heard that he’s a very nice guy when he’s not coaching.

Mistakes can be made. The wrong people can be chosen to coach. The real disgrace is that it’s allowed to continue once it’s
recognized, because people didn’t stand up and say, “Enough!”

A postscript: In eighth grade the fellows who ran the Parks and Recreation Department of the town who oversaw everything sports-related
through eighth grade decided that one of our starting players couldn’t play since he was unable to come to the tryouts because
of a football injury. I called them and made a case for him, but they said, “If you don’t come to the tryouts, you can’t play—no
matter what the reason.”

By then I’d had it! I called a meeting of town officials and the Parks and Recreation people. The eighth-grade coach came
and supported my position that the boy should be allowed to try out when his injury had healed. The high school coach came
and also agreed with me, as of course did the boy’s father.

The Parks and Rec people said about me, “He wants this boy to have another chance to try out because he’s one of the stars,
but he wouldn’t be for it if he was just another kid who was injured, and a rule is a rule.” I said, “I’d be for giving
any
kid a chance to try out if he was injured when the tryouts were held.” It was a standoff. The town officials said they’d
let us know of their decision in a day or two.

I then got in my car and headed to New York where I was working for
60 Minutes II
. Driving in, I thought to myself I could have made a better case, so from my car I called my assistant and dictated an e-mail
I wanted her to send to the town officials. In it I told the whole story of the past three years and the drama and trauma,
and basically said, “Enough is enough!” They decided to let the boy try out. He made the team and had a great season! I guess
all’s well that ends well, but not really.

I
once worked with a star actor who replaced another star in a play I was featured in. After the stage manager ran through
a rehearsal of a scene with the two of us, the actor asked me what I thought. I said I didn’t think it was appropriate to
comment on what a fellow actor was doing.

He said, “I’m
asking
you!” I replied, “I think you’re coming off too angry.” He said I’ll give you a buck for every laugh (and then he said the
star’s name he was replacing). “I’ll give you a buck for every laugh I don’t get that he got!” Well, on his first night in
the scene with me, he didn’t get one laugh, and then he was angry at
me
for the rest of the run, and I didn’t even ask him for some bucks!

Another star who followed that actor in the play once told me he wanted to see me in his dressing room after the performance.
He was livid as he circled me—I was standing in the center of the room. I had no idea what was going on and told him so. He
said, “You’re trying to make me look
gay
! I told him I honestly had no idea what he was talking about. I think he saw I meant it, and amazingly, he immediately dropped
his anger and walked away.

I later learned that irrational outbursts were not unusual for him.

One of the strangest experiences I’ve had came early on in the first play I wrote. It was done in Nyack, New York, in 1971,
and all the actors were asked to wear their own clothes, as if they were going to a social gathering.

One actress showed up at dress rehearsal with a dress that looked as if it were made of a hundred shiny mirrors shooting light
in every direction.

I drove most of the cast from New York City to the theater in Nyack and back. On the way home after the dress rehearsal I
said to the actress, who was sitting in the backseat, “Would you wear a dress that’s, uh, a little more conservative?” She
said, “That’s the only dress I have.” I said, “That’s your only dress?!” She said, “That fits. Yes.” I said, “Buy a dress,
and I’ll pay for it.” She said, “There won’t be time for alterations.”

I suddenly felt I was in the middle of some neurotic game, so I stopped talking about it. When I dropped her off at her building
she said, “So what do you want me to do about the dress?” I said, “I’ve said everything I can say.”

At the next rehearsal, she showed up with exactly the kind of dress that was needed.

Ironically, this actress went on to become quite famous, but recently when I mentioned her name to another actress, she just
about turned white. I chose not to pursue the conversation, but I’m sure I’m not the only one, for reasons best known to the
actress with the mirrored dress, with whom she chose to play strange games.

I recently looked up my name in a memoir she wrote, and her description of the play was that it was written by the actor Charles
Grodin, but the money wasn’t there to take it to New York, which I took as a subtle dig. I’d never had a thought about New
York at that time. Again, it was my first play. Ironically, twenty-one years later it
did
open in New York and was very successful, with a good review from the
New York Times
, which she chose not to mention in her memoir. In fairness to her, she may not even have known that.

One leading lady was going through a difficult time with her boyfriend during filming a movie and barely spoke to me or anyone
else for months. Not fun. I was the writer and male lead of the movie, and one day the leading lady, whom I had chosen for
the role, said to me, “Why do you have all the lines in this scene?” They were expository lines that were needed to explain
the complicated plot. I said, “Would you like them?” She said yes, so I gave her all the expository lines, and when she saw
herself on the screen looking at the dailies (the previous day’s shooting), she looked at me like I had pulled a fast one
on her. In fact, I was just trying to get through the day with her.

I was on location in another country with a most unusual director on a movie. He always seemed angry and agitated. One day
I asked him what was bothering him. He said that I and the other two leading actors had motor homes, and he had something
significantly smaller. I said, “You can use my motor home anytime you want.” I didn’t sleep in the motor home, so I had no
problem sharing it, particularly if it would calm him down.

Sometimes when I would be in my motor home with someone, he would burst in, not speak to anyone, open the refrigerator, guzzle
down a large bottle of juice, then storm out, still without saying a word.

We once had a scene where there was a violent shoot-out. There were explosives rigged all over the bedroom as Farrah Fawcett
and I crawled across the floor—Farrah, bare-legged. I said to the director, “This feels a little too violent.” He said with
disdain, “It’s in the nature of the shot.” Farrah ended up bleeding from about twenty places on her legs.

At the party to celebrate the completion of filming, the director brought a woman who was dressed as though she might be a
prostitute. He danced wildly with her while holding a bottle of scotch, like in a bad movie. Then he joined the producers
and their wives, the other actors, and me at a table with his date, still not speaking. Not exactly the boy next door, not
even close.

For reasons known only to him, he would say to his assistant, referring to me, “Ask our star to come to the set.” In a fight
scene an actor accidentally broke my nose. It didn’t really hurt, so I said, “Let’s keep shooting.” He said, “You’re showing
me something.” I have no idea what I showed him before that, but he stopped referring to me patronizingly as “our star.”

Then there was the producing couple who said about a movie I’d written, “We’re going to do your movie.” Two weeks later I
heard they weren’t going to do my movie. I phoned and said to the guy, “I thought you were going to do my movie.” He said,
“When we say, ‘We’re going to do your movie,’ that doesn’t mean we’re going to do your
movie
.”

I once read an entire movie script I had written to a producer at his home. I played about thirty roles, men and women. He
fell asleep about three-quarters of the way through, woke up at the end, and proclaimed, “I’m going to make this movie!” Later,
when he became head of a studio, he
did
make the movie. My agent, who was negotiating the deal on my behalf, suddenly left the agency business and joined the studio
that he’d been negotiating with. He then proceeded on more than one occasion to be openly hostile to the movie. When it was
finished, I heard that he told the studio head, my former producer, that the movie was a catastrophe. Happily, when the studio
head saw it he loved it.