Man Camp

By Daniel Duke

Society today is obsessed with identity--gender, race, religion, political persuasion, and so on. So what does it mean, in this charged atmosphere, to be a man? That is the question that brought ten men from very different backgrounds to the wilderness of Central Oregon. Ten men: ten days of challenges, each designed to test different dimensions of manhood. Imagine, for instance, that you received instructions to spend the morning doing something that you associate with being a man. One of the ten participants in Man Camp, and the central character, is a recently retired coach of a women's basketball team. Why he chose to attend Man Camp and what he discovered in the process await the reader.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 11, 2022
• ISBN: 9781662481390

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Man Camp

Daniel Duke

Copyright © 2022 Daniel Duke

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

Published by Page Publishing 2022

ISBN 978-1-6624-8138-3 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-6624-8139-0 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

About the Author

To Wheat Daniel Duke, my father. A man's man. I wish I had known him better.

Chapter 1

The ringing of the phone at 10:40 p.m. might have startled Don Swain, causing his sixty-six-year-old heart to race and his blurry eyes to search for the receiver, but this humid July evening, Swain had yet to settle peacefully into the lap of lethargy. Sleep simply failed to override his audit of pressing matters. Beside him, Jody, his wife of twenty-three years, snored quietly. She was the one jolted into consciousness by the phone's ringing.

It's Chris, isn't it? she blurted out as her husband lifted the receiver.

Dad, sorry to wake you. Officer Gonzales wants to talk to you. Overhearing her son, Jody gasped.

Coach Swain, I hate to wake you, but I just pulled over your son for failing to obey a stop sign. He appears to have been drinking.

Was anyone else with him? Don asked.

No, sir. Since this is his first offense, I'm going to give him a break, but I won't let him drive home.

Of course, Officer Gonzales. I'll come and pick him up. Where are you?

At the intersection of Hood Avenue and Benson. I'll wait until you arrive.

That's very good of you, and thank you for only giving Chris a warning. I realize it could have been a lot worse. Say, how'd you know I was a coach?

My daughter and I were fans of your basketball team. She's just thirteen, but she dreams of playing for the Steelheads. I was sorry to hear you retired.

That makes two of us, Don said as he hung up.

In the SUV, Don and Jody debated what they should say to their son. Part of me wishes Officer Gonzales had gone ahead and arrested Chris, Don said as he fiddled with the air conditioning. Maybe that's what the kid needs in order to wake up and become an adult.

Jody listened to her husband's familiar rant, unsure of whether to vent her true feelings on the subject of Chris's behavior. Deciding that the time for truth, at least her version of it, had not arrived, she instead asked, Why do you think Chris is struggling to get his act together?

Here she goes again, Don thought to himself, trying to calm me down with a question. He was about to take the bait when he spotted an approaching vehicle and switched to low beams. To start, he has no goals, nothing to work hard for. I guess we gave him too much. We were too understanding when he decided not to go to a real college. Then, against my wishes, you allowed him to stay at home when he dropped out of community college. He pays no rent. We cover his health and car insurance. Not a bad deal, I'd say.

Donnie, growing up these days is not like it was when we were young. Kids are bombarded with all sorts of subliminal messages: Be all you can be. Live the life you choose. Don't be like your parents. It's got to be confusing.

Oh! So now you're a psychologist. You're always making excuses for Chris. I believe the proper term is enabling.

Don spotted the police cruiser and Chris's Camry a hundred yards ahead.

Don, let's not start arguing. Just thank Officer Gonzales. I'll drive Chris home in the SUV. You can take the Camry. We really should wait until morning to work through all this.

Don didn't challenge Jody's suggestion nor did he say anything to Chris when he arrived. Chris offered an embarrassed apology that Don acknowledged with a grunt. After thanking Officer Gonzales and shaking his hand, he took the car keys from him and lowered his six-foot-three-inch frame into the Camry. The twinge he felt in his back as he adjusted the seat did not help his mood. As he pulled away, Don noticed Jody speaking to Gonzales while Chris silently looked on.

Driving home, Don started to consider what he would say to Chris in the morning, but his thoughts quickly shifted to his own childhood. How come, he wondered, had I avoided Chris's aimlessness and irresponsibility? It wasn't as if Conrad Swain, his father, had steered him in the right direction. An associate professor of English at Portland's Reed College, the elder Swain's impact on his son's life had been marginal at best. He died of a heart attack when Don was in junior high school. Later in life, Don told a close friend that it required a heart attack to prove his father had a heart.

If there was a dynamic force in Don's young life, it had been his mother, Deloris. Twenty-five years younger than Conrad Swain, she combined energy, grace, beauty, and ambition. It was Deloris, not her husband, who attended parent-teacher meetings, supervised homework, and watched Don play basketball. There was never any question in her mind about Don going to college.

On the way home, Don passed the public courts where he used to play pickup games with his neighbor friends and tough kids from North Portland. Always more of a finesse player than a bruiser, his idol was Bob Cousy of the Boston Celtics. The guy wasn't especially tall, but he was speedy and an absolute magician with a basketball. Don loved watching him on television dribbling the ball between his legs and flipping behind-the-back passes that caught opponents flat-footed. Where Don's passion for basketball came from remained a mystery, but the important thing was feeling passionate about something. If only Chris did.

As Don turned into the driveway of his Craftsman-style home in one of Portland's older but well-maintained neighborhoods east of the Willamette River, he concluded that he and Jody had been diligent parents, doing most of the things that good parents should do. Was it their fault that Chris dropped out of Valley View Community College? Did they threaten to kick him out when he asked for time to get his head together? Did they demand that he look for a full-time job when he insisted that a part-time job was necessary so he would have time to explore his options?

As Don inserted his key in the front door lock, he asked himself one last question, Why have we been so understanding?

Meanwhile in the SUV, Jody tried to explain to Chris that his father was going through a difficult time with being retired. As she put it, he wasn't quite ready to hang up his sneakers. A man like your father, who's very competitive and used to working hard to provide for his family, she told Chris, is at a loss when his career ends.

No sooner had these words been uttered than Jody regretted them. She hoped Chris's feelings hadn't been hurt. What I meant to say, she added, is that your father may get upset more easily than he used to.

Sounds like you're giving me an advanced storm warning, Chris muttered.

Don considered staying up and having a heart-to-heart with Jody about their son, but an odd kind of weariness bore down on him, less the kind that demanded sleep than the kind that required solitude. He heard his wife and son arrive, but he decided not to go downstairs and greet them. Instead, he reclined on the old couch in his study, fully clothed and head propped up on the armrest. When Jody came upstairs and stuck her head in the doorway, he admitted to preferring to remain where he was in order to mull things over. She kissed him on the forehead, shut the door, and went back to bed.

As Don rested on the couch, listening to the first drops of rain hitting the porch roof, he reflected on his disappointment in Chris. Disappointment was a familiar emotion in his life, probably in most people's lives, he reckoned. Perhaps Chris was disappointed in himself.

No one teaches us how to deal with disappointment, he mused. We all have to learn the hard way, by experience. No one made it in sports unless they learned to deal effectively with disappointment—that much Don knew for certain. This acknowledgment prompted Don to review his own undulating athletic career.

In his junior year in high school, Ray Fellows, his basketball coach, pulled Don off the bench with thirty-five seconds to go and the game with crosstown rival Wilson tied 78–78. Fellows told Don that no one would expect him to take the last shot. Go to the arc and pull up, take the jumper, he instructed. That's exactly what Don did. He had hit that shot a thousand times. Only this time, the ball clanked off the rim into the waiting hands of a Wilson forward, who lobbed a long pass to the point guard for an easy layup and the W.

That missed shot stung for a long time. Don had disappointed his coach and himself, not to mention his teammates and fellow students in the stands. But sports can give as well as take away. As starting point guard in his senior year, Don led the Marshall Statesmen to the city championship and runner up for the Oregon state championship.

Euphoria over his team's impressive season soon yielded to disappointment when Don failed to receive a basketball scholarship to the University of Oregon. The Ducks' coach had led Don to believe that he was a perfect fit for his offense, but in the end, a six-foot-five-inch point guard from California got the nod. A week after receiving the bad news from Eugene, Don learned that Northwest College offered him a full ride to play basketball in Portland.

That pretty much sums up the trajectory of Don's experience—ups and downs. After setting the single-season scoring record at Northwest, there was talk that he might get an offer from the pros. Such talk, however, was silenced two weeks later when Don fractured his right foot in the first round of regional playoffs. He went on to earn a master's degree in sports management. His plan was to coach a college men's team for a while before settling into the role of athletic director at a midsized university. The plan was abandoned when he was invited to coach the Northwest women's basketball team after the coach unexpectedly retired.

During his thirty-nine years coaching the Steelheads, Don amassed an impressive record of victories, including seventeen seasons as runners-up in the tough Cascade conference. Still, the most coveted prize, a conference championship, eluded him. At times, he wondered if it was a blessing or a curse to get so close so often.

Don's most recent disappointment still gnawed at him. At the end of last season, a season in which the Steelheads reached the division semifinals with a 21-and-6 record, Northwest's athletic director and Don's best friend, Allen Lundquist, invited him to lunch. Expecting to be congratulated for a fine year on the court, Don instead was asked to consider retiring. In not-so-many words, Lundquist indicated that times were changing and Northwest was the only college in the division that still had a man coaching the women's basketball team. Several members of the Northwest board of trustees had approached Lundquist and made it known that they expected him to appoint a woman head coach.

Don considered refusing to retire, but given the circumstances, he suspected he would lose in the end. As Jody put it, Why not retire with dignity rather than get fired? Truth be told, Don believed that women should be coaching women. His team had lost to teams coached by women who clearly understood the game and how to elicit top performances from their players. The real issue was simply that Don was blindsided. Retirement, in his mind, was still at least a year or two off. He wanted to make it to forty years coaching the Steelheads, then he planned to hire a hotshot female assistant coach and mentor her to replace him.

When the first lines of sunlight appeared through the office blinds, signaling morning, Don lacked the motivation to face the day just yet. His restless ruminations on disappointment were not quite finished. He had only covered his experiences with basketball. Men, in most cases, he reasoned, are apt to think of work first before considering other aspects of their lives. Still, it did seem a bit odd that his reflections on disappointment, up to that point, had omitted his divorce.

He and Valerie were so young. From his late-in-life vantage point, their relationship seemed more of an infatuation than true love. Both of them harbored compelling dreams. Valerie aspired to be a pediatrician. After Don's shot at the NBA evaporated, his sights were set on college coaching. The problem, as he now saw it, was that neither he nor Valerie dreamed of building a strong marriage. They just assumed it.

When Don accepted the coaching position at Northwest in 1974, he spent almost every waking hour watching game films, running practices and summer camps, recruiting, scheduling, and managing team affairs. Not until 1987 did he get a full-time assistant coach. Valerie's life, meanwhile, was a blur of classes, clinics, boards, and finally, supervisory responsibilities. By the time Don and Valerie parted ways, both agreed it was for the best.

Disappointment over Chris, however, could not be explained away so easily as the divorce. It smacked of out-and-out failure, Don's failure to be a good father. Disappointment depended on expectations. Don't expect anything and you won't be disappointed.

Though still reclining on his office couch, Don was fully awake now. When he considered what he expected of Chris, he thought about the relationship between a coach and his players. I expect my players to learn from their mistakes. I don't expect them to be perfect, but I do expect them to care about improving. What I can't stand is giving up on getting better. No sooner had Don expressed this thought than he asked himself if he had given up on Chris.

Okay, Don said to himself, perhaps my expectations for Chris were too high, but is that worse than having no expectations at all? He pictured his father sequestered in his tiny home office, smoking a pipe and rubbing his forehead, as remote as Pitcairn Island. When Conrad interacted with Don, which was not very often, it usually involved some expression of disappointment. Sometimes Don was the source—his mediocre grades, his devotion to basketball, his reluctance to spend time reading. Other times, Conrad conveyed disappointment with himself—poor sales for his only book, a study of three Northwest novelists, his failure to be promoted to full professor, a salary he regarded as not befitting his level of education.

Conrad's expressions of disappointment in Don, oddly, were rarely accompanied by any reference to specific expectations. If he didn't want Don to concentrate on basketball, what did he want Don to do? If he wanted Don to embrace reading, what did he want Don to read? Looking back on the dozen years Don inhabited the same residence with Conrad, he could not remember a single serious conversation about expectations with his father. These recollections offered Don one possible explanation for feeling like a failed father for Chris.

Hearing Jody climbing the stairs, doubtless armed with her first cup of coffee, Don decided the time had come for them to discuss Chris. He rose from the couch, bent over to stretch the tightness out of his back, opened the office door, and invited Jody to join him.

Do you think I've given up on Chris? Though he didn't tell her very often, Don really valued Jody's advice, especially on family matters.

Jody closed the office door and joined Don on the couch. No, I know you haven't given up on Chris. She laid her free hand on Don's knee. I just feel you don't understand him very well. You've always been so motivated, so clear about what you wanted. Chris is still searching.

Don looked up at Chris's high school graduation photograph on the bookshelf. The boy had everything going for him when he finished high school. His grades were good. He was a fine soccer player—not Division 1 material but good enough to get a scholarship somewhere. I had such hopes for him, Don thought.

What are you thinking, Donnie?

I was just looking at Chris's graduation picture. Thank goodness he got your looks.

That's not what you were thinking, was it?

You know me too well. Don kissed Jody on her cheek. Is there a point where we should be concerned about Chris?

Donnie, please don't think I'm not worried about Chris, especially after last night. Of course, I'm upset. It's just that my instincts tell me that getting angry at Chris, laying down the law if you will, won't accomplish anything good.

So what will?

You know how much I love you. I don't mean to hurt your feelings, but you did ask my advice. It's been a long time since you and Chris spent any quality time together.

Don thought to himself, I know where this is headed.

Even when Chris was in grade school, you were always so busy. I realize that you had to be, given your job, but Chris was on his own a lot. Do you think he knows how much you love him?

Don felt embarrassed. He didn't know what to say.

Look, I'm as guilty as you are, but at this point in Chris's life, he needs you more than he needs me. Isn't there some way, now that you're retired, that you could spend some time together, get to know each other?

Don and Jody continued to discuss Chris for a while, but Don had locked on to Jody's suggestion that he and Chris spend some time together. Several possibilities came to mind: a fishing trip to the Snake River and hiking in the Cascades. Don knew he no longer had the legs and stamina of his youth, but he believed he could keep up with Chris.

As Jody was leaving to get another cup of coffee, she tendered a final suggestion, Maybe you should go see Allen. Remember, his youngest son was a handful—drugs, as I recall. The boy seems to have straightened out, at least from what Sheilah tells me.

You know how I feel about Allen.

Donnie, he didn't have a choice in the matter and you know it. It's time you mended a few fences. Start with Allen.

Six months had passed since Don retired, and in that time, he had seen Allen just once, at the retirement dinner organized by a group of former players and several Northwest coaches and faculty. Becky Albright, probably his best power forward, had married a young winemaker and he contributed three cases of terrific Willamette Valley pinot noir for the occasion. A few players shared humorous stories, including the time Don forgot to knock on the locker room door before rushing in to call an emergency team meeting. Allen Lundquist, who sat next to Don at the head table, rose to deliver reflections on Don's career and present him with a rocking chair embossed with the Northwest College seal and Don's name. Don thanked Allen, hugged his former players, and walked out of the banquet hall with Jody, leaving behind the rocking chair to be retrieved later. He recalled feeling disoriented as they reached the parking lot, a feeling reinforced by forgetting where he parked the SUV. Don had not spoken to Allen since that evening.

As he debated what he would say to Allen, Chris tapped on the open office door, still in his boxers and T-shirt. His short blond locks looked like a bird's nest, but Don had to admit the boy was handsome. He had Jody's blue eyes and thin lips and Don's square jaw and husky build. At six four, he stood an inch taller than Don, though it didn't always seem that way because Chris often slouched. Girls found the boy attractive, though Don suspected they avoided pursuing a relationship because of Chris's lack of ambition.

Sorry for last night. I know you're pissed, and I don't blame you one bit.

Don had not expected to see Chris so early, so he was uncertain about what to say. He had planned to work out his lecture after breakfast in consultation with Jody.

Are you okay, Dad?

For some unknown reason, Don suddenly flashed back to the 2010 division championship game against the College of Spokane. Northwest led by eighteen points at halftime. His players were doing everything right—accurate passes, smart shots, and only three fouls. In the locker room, Don told the team to keep doing what they had done in the first half and the game was theirs. The Steelheads went back on court and continued working the ball to their six-five center, Heidi Ryan. Only the College of Spokane had made an adjustment at halftime. Two tall forwards were assigned to shadow Heidi. They converted one steal after another into points until the lead and eventually, the game were lost.

Don had made the kind of error rookie coaches often make. He failed to anticipate the adjustments a rival coach surely would make in the face of a sizable deficit. Now he thought to himself, Should I be making some kind of adjustment with Chris? Whatever I've been doing so far hasn't worked. Chris probably was expecting Don to say how disappointed in him he was and how he needed to stop wasting precious time.

I hope you know how much I love you, Chris, Don said, looking Chris in the eye. I am so thankful you weren't in an accident last night.

Chris gave Don a puzzled look. Clearly, his father's words were unexpected.

Don enjoyed the sensation of catching his son off guard.

I really didn't have that much to drink. Baker and I went to a private wine tasting. I hadn't had much food or water since lunch. I guess I was dehydrated. Anyway, I didn't see the stop sign until I was halfway through the intersection. I'm sure thankful Gonzales knew you.

Well, it could have been worse. There could have been another car involved. You might have been high on drugs. Don did not mean for his response to sound as sarcastic as it came out.

I'm no druggie, Dad. But I do like wine.

Just so long as you understand that the next time you drive after drinking, you might not be so lucky.

Chris left and Don congratulated himself on remaining calm. Jody was right. Getting upset accomplishes little. He decided to follow this approach when he phoned Allen. Don went to his desk and dialed Allen's number. Acting as if there had not been a six-month gap in communication, Don asked Allen if he was available for a drink at Tilly's. The two men and their wives used to meet at the sports bar after Steelheads home games to toast success and drown disappointment.

Allen asked if everything was all right. Don replied that he hadn't committed suicide yet, but he was finding the adjustment to retirement difficult. Then he quickly changed the subject so as to avoid saying something he might regret.

I could use some advice concerning Chris, Don said in a low voice, not wanting Chris to overhear. You've known him since he was a baby. He loved playing Little League with your son when you were coaching. Other than Jody and me, I'd guess you know Chris as well as anyone.

The next afternoon, Don and Allen met at Tilly's. Don thought about asking how his replacement had handled recruitment since the Steelheads had graduated five seniors, but he elected to keep the focus on Chris and avoid potentially touchy subjects. After updating Allen on Chris's encounter with Officer Gonzales and his decision to drop out of community college, Don shared Jody's advice.

Sheilah and I always said that Jody understood human nature better than any psychologist. Allen wanted to add that Jody would have made a great coach, but he felt Don's feelings might be hurt.

"Do