Hemorrhoids at Halftime: An Insider’S View of High School Athletics

Copyright © 2018 Hank Roth.

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ISBN: 978-1-5320-4083-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-4084-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018901942

iUniverse rev. date: 03/06/2018

CONTENTS

Dedication

Foreword

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1:   The History And Objectives Of High School Athletics

Chapter 2:   The Coach

Chapter 3:   The Athletic Director

Chapter 4:   The School Board

Chapter 5:   The Parent

Chapter 6:   The High School Athlete

Chapter 7:   The Official

Chapter 8:   About Winning

Chapter 9:   Current Trends In High School Athletics

Chapter 10: The History And Emergence Of Women’s Sports

Chapter 11: The Future Of High School Football

Chapter 12: Extra Innings

Acknowledgements

DEDICATION

TO DOM CECERE, ARGUABLY THE most accomplished baseball coach in the history of New York State. Named the National Baseball Coach of the Year in 2015, Coach Cecere recorded a record 737 wins during his fifty-three-year tenure. He won a plethora of league and sectional championships and earned several Coach of the Year honors.

More impressive than his coaching prowess was the essence of the man himself, a bright, personable, charismatic, consummate professional role model with a great sense of humor.

He touched the lives of thousands of student athletes in his home Eastchester School District and in competing districts as well. He was also a mentor to scores of coaches and athletic administrators. Ron Rothstein, former head coach of the Miami Heat and Detroit Pistons, who worked with Dom in Eastchester, may have put it best when he said, Of all the people I’ve ever come in contact with, Dom mastered his craft as a teacher and coach better than anyone I’ve ever known.

I first met Dom in the spring of 1965. We were young baseball coaches competing in the same league, and we soon became the youngest athletic directors in our county, as we were in our twenties.

Dom was a talented public speaker and storyteller. He often served as a guest speaker at the coaching class I taught for sixteen years and at several of my yearly sports banquets. He was a featured speaker at my retirement roast. In June 2016, he became a regular at our monthly retired athletic directors’ dinners. He was a colleague and a dear friend for more than a half century, and his legacy will last forever.

I last spoke with Dom the week before he died. He called me at my ski house in Vermont; his voice was weak, and he was tired. I told him that a few of the guys wanted to visit him the following week. He said that’d be great. Sadly, he died before the visit could take place. Regrettably, I never got the opportunity to tell him that I was dedicating this book to him.

FOREWORD

"WITH INSIGHTFUL CANDOR, HANK ROTH skillfully identifies today’s critical issues facing interscholastic athletics, while incorporating constructive strategies and proven solutions for all those associated with school sports programs.

This book offers a fresh approach that uniquely embodies Hank’s fifty-five years of distinguished leadership in the field. It is a fast moving and entertaining read containing humorous and wildly bizarre anecdotes of incidents guaranteed to make the readers shake their heads, raise their eyebrows and laugh out loud."

Dr. Howard P. Meyer

Former Executive Director of Section One Interscholastic Athletics

Past President of the New York State Athletic Administrators Association

Former Director of Physical Education and Athletics of the Yonkers Public Schools, New York

PREFACE

MANY OF YOU MAY BE amused yet puzzled by the title Hemorrhoids at Halftime. Simply put, the incident detailed in the chapter on officials probably represents the most bizarre and embarrassing episode among a multitude of others during my fifty-five-year career in high school athletics.

This book may serve as a reference for athletes, coaches, officials, parents, and administrators. At the same time, it proves that though the overwhelming majority of those people are highly educated, they are capable of saying and doing some of the most ridiculous and outrageous things. Judge for yourself.

INTRODUCTION

AS I NEARED RETIREMENT, I grappled with when it would be time to call it quits. I had just passed my seventy-sixth birthday, and I had a decision to make. I ultimately decided to retire after reflecting on certain bizarre events that had occurred my past year on the job:

• A parent called my junior varsity baseball coach a cocksucker because his son wasn’t in the starting lineup in the game that day.

• A basketball parent came flying out of the stands to challenge my coach to a fistfight because of his son’s lack of playing time.

• An elderly gentleman with failing eyesight urinated on a ten-year-old boy claiming not to have seen him as he stepped up to the urinal in the men’s locker room.

• A disgruntled lacrosse parent unhappy with his son’s coaches and wanting them fired devised an evaluative tool he distributed to parents and players. It was then sent to the principal, the superintendent, and me.

• A few incidents of students getting drunk at night football and basketball games required the presence of the police.

• A basketball parent offered a player $20 to take a charge in a scrimmage game.

I could laugh off certain of these outrageous incidents; by themselves, they didn’t drive me into retirement. But when the incidents came fast and furious, I realized that an avalanche was made up of a series of issues. These were the tip of the iceberg, so to speak.

My job had become one of crisis management with distractions galore. Each of the aforementioned episodes required meetings and investigations, all of which were time consuming. Somewhere I read that generally when high school coaches and athletic directors announce their retirements and claim they want to spend more time with their families, that’s usually code for The parents are out of control!

It also became tiring dealing with unhappy parents, as well as one particular school board member who was regularly disparaging me and unhappy with several of our coaches. I also didn’t have the same solid support that I had enjoyed with previous school board members, with one exception.

The above incidents and several others helped make my decision to retire easier. It was definitely time for me to leave my school. I was unsuccessful in my quest to get salary increases for our coaches. I was also unable to convince the board of education to restore assistant coaching positions that had been eliminated several years earlier. This was hurtful to many of the coaches in certain sports, including baseball, softball, boys’ and girls’ basketball, boys’ and girls’ soccer, volleyball, and wrestling. The coaches of those sports rightfully protested that they were competing against schools that had assistant coaches and that they were at an unfair disadvantage. I made a pitch for better salaries at a public board meeting, but it fell on deaf ears.

The board was happy to see me go. Admittedly I was probably making a pest of myself and probably at age seventy-five was viewed as a dinosaur. Several schools were looking for athletic directors on an interim basis, and at the risk of seeming arrogant, I thought I had a pretty good chance of landing one of them. And a few of them were paying considerably more than I had been making. I figured I could do it for a year.

However, three of my retired athletic director friends—Joe Delvecchio, Jim Spano, and John Ventura—told me that they were extremely happy in retirement and that I would know when it was my time to stop working. It was simply nothing more than waking up one morning and saying to myself, I don’t want to do this anymore.

I began writing this book at the end of my fifty-fifth and final year as a coach and athletic director in Westchester County, New York. During those five-plus decades, I lived through some enormous changes from the time I grew up in Brooklyn during the 1950s. It was a great place to grow up during the postwar Truman and Eisenhower administrations when the world was at peace.

The early ’50s also saw the birth of rock ’n’ roll. My childhood friends and I fondly remember going to the Brooklyn Paramount to see and hear many of the popular artists, including Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Chuck Berry, as well as top groups like the Five Satins (In the Still of the Night), the Penguins (Earth Angel), the Nutmegs (Story Untold), and the Mellowkings (Tonite, Tonite). Those last four still rank among the top-ten rock ’n’ roll records of all time.

I lived four blocks from Ebbets Field, home of the famed and beloved Brooklyn Dodgers. I couldn’t help but develop a passion for sports. We had three baseball teams plus the Giants of football fame, the Rangers, our hockey team, and the Knicks on the basketball court.

I recall my mother giving me a dollar to go to Dodgers’ games—sixty cents got me into the bleachers, and forty cents was enough for two hot dogs and a root beer. My friends Fred, Marty, Jay, and Mike and I would see maybe twenty games a year—mostly on weekends since in those days most games were played during the day. We did occasionally skip school and spend the day at the ballpark. On the way, we might hop on the back of the Bond Bread Factory delivery truck and pilfer a loaf of bread or a box of doughnuts. On a few occasions, we snuck into the ballpark with the ice trucks in the early morning.

Sixty-five years later, we are still close; we get together once a month in New York at our favorite restaurant, Fred’s, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Their beef chili is the best in the city. Sadly, several of our childhood friends have died, causing us to commiserate and reflect on how they helped enrich our lives, particularly in our teen years.

I went to my first baseball game in 1947 and saw Ralph Branca and the Dodgers defeat Warren Spahn and the Boston Braves 3–1. Sadly, Branca, one of seventeen children who grew up in Mount Vernon, New York, recently died at age ninety. I took my oldest grandson, Ethan, to hear him speak at the Rye Library. I brought along the 1949 baseball autographed by the entire Dodger team and showed it to Branca. He examined the ball, smiled, and said, Believe it or not, my handwriting is still as good as it was sixty years ago.

The Dodger team of the ’50s had five future Hall of Famers on its World Series championship team in 1955—Pee Wee Reese, Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider, Roy Campanella, and Sandy Koufax. Koufax’s best years were with the Dodgers in Los Angeles. There’s probably not a Dodger fan today who doesn’t have some sort of memorabilia of that team, whether a hat, T-shirt, picture, poster, or even scorecard.

When the Dodgers left Brooklyn for Los Angeles after the ’57 season, it was absolutely devastating for those who had embraced the team as almost part of their family. Besides the Hall of Famers cited above were others such as first baseman Gil Hodges, right fielder Carl Furillo (both perennial all-stars as well), and pitchers Don Newcombe and Carl Erskine, who spent their entire careers in Brooklyn. By the way, Newcombe is the only player in baseball history to win Rookie of the Year, the Cy Young award as baseball’s top pitcher, and the Most Valuable Player award—a great piece of trivia for old-time baseball fans.

The villain responsible for this dastardly move to Los Angeles was owner Walter O’Malley, who had been lobbying for a new and bigger ballpark in a better neighborhood. He didn’t want to pay for it and subsequently engaged in a hostile war of words with New York City parks commissioner Robert Moses. To this day almost sixty years later, old Dodgers fans still refer to O’Malley as the pariah who took their team away. Author and journalist Pete Hamill was once asked what he would do if he found himself in a room with Hitler, Stalin, and O’Malley and had a gun with only two bullets. His answer? That’s easy. I’d shoot O’Malley twice.

One of the saddest days of my childhood was watching Bobby Thomson’s shot heard around the world home run off Branca on the final game of the season that gave the Giants the National League pennant. I raced home from school that day to watch the game on our new twelve-inch black-and-white Philco TV. My Dodgers had blown the thirteen-and-a-half-game lead they had had in mid-August 1951. Most people remember Branca for that historic home run when in fact he had distinguished career. He was a twenty-one-game winner in his rookie year and was elected to the all-star team three times.

One of my happiest days came four years later when the Dodgers behind pitcher Johnny Podres pitched a shutout and beat the Yankees 2–0 in game seven of the 1955 World Series, the Dodgers’ first title.

Baseball is still my first love when it comes to sports. Perhaps as an old-timer and a purist, I do have issues with today’s game, not the least of which is the multimillion-dollar-a-year salaries players receive for playing a kid’s game. The opposite end of the spectrum is also true in other countries. I recently visited Cuba, a hotbed of baseball. I learned that all players there received a monthly salary of forty dollars. In terms of salary, there’s no distinguishing between the superstar and the benchwarmer. Naturally, they need to find second and third jobs to support their families. I came away from Cuba feeling a great empathy for the people there who couldn’t have been friendlier or more hospitable. It was probably also the safest country I had ever visited. Why? It’s illegal to own weapons there. Hmmm.

When I grew up, most ball players played their entire careers with the same team, but today, it’s not unusual for players to play for five or more teams. Hall of Famer Mike Piazza played for the Dodgers, Marlins, Mets, Padres, and Athletics. Then of course, the game has been compromised by steroids. Why do so many young pitchers go on the disabled list or even have season-ending arm surgeries and shortened careers? Three weeks into the 2017 season, a hundred pitchers were on the disabled list. Something’s wrong! A good friend of mine whose son played several years in the minor leagues claimed that 75 percent of the players were using performance-enhancing drugs. Now that Major League Baseball has finally cracked down and implemented severe penalties for those who are caught, most previous users have stopped, causing them—again in my opinion—to break down and be less effective.

Just a few years ago, I had the pleasure of meeting the accomplished writer and historian Doris Kearns Goodwin at Dartmouth College, where she spoke about her book on the Lyndon Johnson presidency. In describing her background, she spoke about growing up in Brooklyn and being an avid Dodger fan. She said that she and her father used to listen to games on the radio and keep a running account of the game by creating their own scorecards. Before we got a TV, my father and I did the same thing. I believe she enjoyed chatting with me about those Dodger teams of the ’50s.

I was the only child of working-class parents. My mother worked as a secretary for Alcoa Aluminum, and Dad was a laborer all his life working at an umbrella factory while he also drove a truck for a messenger service. He confessed to me at age ninety-two that when he was in his late teens, he had done a few odd jobs for Arnold Rothstein, the mobster and architect of the infamous Murder Incorporated and a mentor to hoodlums Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano. Rothstein was a frequent visitor to the Roth home usually wearing a suit and a bow tie. My grandmother thought he was an absolute gentleman. I guess it didn’t bother her that he had tried to fix the World Series in 1919 and caused the infamous Black Sox scandal. He was portrayed in the 1988 movie Eight Men Out. My uncle Archie was Rothstein’s personal driver as well as a close friend.

My dad grew up on the Lower East Side and was the youngest of five children. My mother was the oldest of four children. Their parents were Hungarian immigrants. One of my saddest moments was when my father, who was ninety-four at the time, told me he still harbored angry feelings for his parents for never having encouraged him to further his education beyond eighth grade. He shined shoes to help support the family. Sadly, he felt he could’ve done something more with his life and had carried around that disappointment with him for decades.

He died a month before his ninety-sixth birthday of advanced emphysema. He didn’t quit smoking until he was eighty-five despite my having badgered him to quit. My mother died when she was ninety-three. They died well over a decade ago. I miss them and regret that I did not spending more quality time with them as they grew old.

My dad was a good athlete in his day; he played sandlot baseball and had a brief boxing career as a Golden Gloves fighter before marrying my mother. He had ten fights—four wins and six losses, no knockouts, but after his last fight during which he got badly battered and bruised, my grandmother mercifully put an end to his fighting career. I told him I was proud of him and gave him a lot of credit for going in the ring and getting the crap punched out of him.

When I was five, he’d take me to Prospect Park, only about three blocks from home, and pitch and hit balls to me. Sometimes, we’d even go up on the roof of our six-story apartment building and play catch.

One of the advantageous of being an only child was that I was able to attend summer camp at Camp Taconic in Hinsdale, Massachusetts, in the Berkshires with my closest childhood friend, Fred Sagarin. Fred lived down the