“Holy sh–, look at that fat bastard run,” my teammate riding shotgun said as I whipped my ’77 Chevette into the narrow and icy alley at nearly 40 mph.
It was our junior year of high school, and it was our god-given right, we believed, to haze all the young eighth-graders who would be freshmen the following year on our football team. It had been done to us, and now it was our turn to return the favor.
We had been waiting outside the weight room for almost 30 minutes planning our attack. The pimply-faced, 300-pound 13-year-old tried to spoil our plans, however. As soon as the door opened, he made a beeline for his house, which was probably 300 yards away, across the practice field and down an alley. He looked like Butterbean ice skating on crack as he moved ferociously across the field.
One of my buddies in the back seat pointed out that we had no chance of catching him unless we drove straight through the practice field, which we did at a very high speed. I punched the gas pedal to the floor and the chase was on. We really had no idea what we were going to do to the kid. We had floated a couple of ideas around while staking out the building, such as locking him in the weight room freezer while we worked out or dropping him off miles out in the country on a remote road long enough to scare him. Nothing too heinous. All in good fun. Hell, we would have probably taken him out to get drunk afterward, but it wasn’t to be.
The icy alley proved to be too much for the bald-ass tires on the trusty Chevette and we spun in the opposite direction, taking out a few trash cans, while Butterbean scrambled into his house safely.
Looking back, our attempt at hazing was dumb and mean. But by no means were we planning on doing something that could possibly cause irreparable psychological harm to the poor kid, like say, hold him down and shove a fist up his ass. No, that would be wrong – and a felony in most states, I imagine. None of us were prepared to go to prison for that.
But, because of high school hazing, there was a witness intimidation trial that just concluded for two Dublin Coffman High School lacrosse coaches, while a rape investigation is also ongoing in Memphis, Tenn., where the incident allegedly occurred while the team was playing in a tournament. One assistant coach, Frank Simpson, was found guilty while his son, Brian, was acquitted.
The accused coaches had vehemently denied the allegations. One of the coaches was even quoted from an excerpt of an e-mail that appeared in the Columbus Dispatch saying that the allegations come from “a few angry young men (players) that either dislike the coaching staff or aren’t getting any playing time and resent us.”
Now I’ve had a coach or two that I didn’t like in the past. One in particular was such a d— we dumped two-months worth of dog sh– on his back porch. Accusing the man of committing acts of sodomy on me or one of my teammates, however, never crossed my mind. Maybe I’m just not creative enough?
This isn’t to say that these men are guilty, just that something that should not have occurred probably did. Hazing is a problem in the sports world today, and it needs to be brought to the public’s attention. It is a dangerous problem, especially when involving rubber gloves, coaches that are supposed to be role models and virgin rectums.
Dustin Ensinger is a senior in journalism and political science. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].
