Читать книгу Rage. The Legend of "Baseball Bill" Denehy онлайн

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Coach Sullivan and I had never had much of a rapport, and we never would.

My senior year at Woodrow Wilson we had three players who were six foot three or taller, and we won the conference basketball championship. We should have won state, too. The ego and pigheadedness of our coach kept us from going all the way.

The first time we played rival Middletown High School, we won by twenty points. Middletown High was a much faster team. Before our second meeting I went to Coach Sullivan and said to him, “Listen, we’re a big, bullish team. That’s why when we play small teams, we kill them, because they can’t run with us and they aren’t as strong as we are. Middletown is a small team, and the next time we play them, instead of playing our usual offense, why don’t we bully them?”

Coach Sullivan, once an excellent finesse player in his own right, wasn’t comfortable playing rough, and he wasn’t about to play the game that way. “I’m the coach,” he told me. “I know you went to basketball camp for a couple of years and you think you know basketball, but I’m the coach, and we’re going to play it the way I set it up.”