In my narrow mind, I'd been embracing the costly procrastination so that the class of '06 would be allowed to get through four years without disruption or relocation. I knew that plans for the new building would obliterate Newton North's on-site, fenced-in baseball field and its cozy power alleys. Howard Ferguson Field and its fences had been good to Sam. And every high school athlete should enjoy the comfort of practicing and playing games on their own campus.
It was clear in the first couple of weeks of the 2005–2006 season that the North football team was going to be strong. The Tigers were loaded at the skill positions—all seniors who'd been part of Sam's world for twelve years. Sam had played as a freshman, and the team went 10-1 under the fine tutelage of one Tom Giusti, a gym teacher/football coach lifer who can work up a sweat just talking about football. Sam dropped out of football after the training camp of his sophomore year. He didn't like the game, even though he was built for it. His classmates went on to considerable success, and in the autumn of '05, North was ranked as one of the top ten teams in eastern Massachusetts.
While his classmates blocked and tackled, Sam was playing baseball. The college process was accelerating, but as his file of letters got thicker, his choices narrowed. By the middle of September, he'd trimmed his options to Boston College, Notre Dame, Holy Cross, and Connecticut.
His first official visit was to Boston College in mid-September. The campus is located less than three miles from our home, so BC didn't have to worry about any flight or hotel expenses. As we were leaving the house, I noticed Sam was wearing a T-shirt bearing some inane slogan across the back. Nice try. Go put on the polo. This turned out to be a good move. There were seven other recruits at the initial meeting and five of them wore pololike shirts, most with the collars turned up.
I stuck around for the afternoon tour. The boys first listened to a strength and flexibility coach, who explained the rigors of training for Division I athletes. Clearly, the weight room was going to be homeroom for some of these guys. The strength coach was smart and energetic, and he really got my attention when he said, "If you get hurt, you're no good to us. You're here to play baseball."
This was different. Nobody had said that to Sam on visits to Williams, Tufts, Dartmouth, or Holy Cross.
I noticed another difference when listening to the young woman from the BC admissions office. She explained that BC gets 24,000 applicants for each freshman class of 2,250. In New England, this is known as the Flutie Factor. BC's been a hot school since Doug put it on the map with that Hail Mary pass in the Orange Bowl in 1984. It's not as selective as the Ivy League, but it's become increasingly difficult to gain admission. In my day, going to BC was like signing up for gym class. Certainly my 1971 BC application—routinely accepted by the board of admissions—would be quickly dismissed today.
I was taking notes while the admissions woman spoke, but the longer she talked the more I realized that gaining admission to Boston College was not going to be an issue for the young men on this official visit. Their transcripts had been run through the admissions department and all had been deemed admissible—or they would not have been invited for the visit. They were in. The admissions woman was not telling these guys what they had to do to qualify for Boston College, she was selling Boston College. Again, nothing like Sam's Williams College visit, when the admissions process dominated most of the interview. Hitting high school home runs is easy. Gaining admission to Williams is scaling Kilimanjaro.
It was time for me to leave after the admissions discussion. Sam was assigned a weekend roommate, a tall pitcher from central Massachusetts, and we agreed to meet the next afternoon when Sam had his exit interview with Coach Peter Hughes.
Coach Hughes is a no-nonsense guy. He and his wife have five kids aged 1 to 8. He'd been adding on to his house, and I took this as an indication that he was staying at Boston College. He was investing in a plasma TV, always a sign that a guy is going to stick around. However, the BC baseball diamond doubles as a tailgating mecca on football weekends, and Boston College was set to play mighty Florida State on national television when Hughes was walking his recruits around campus. Acknowledging that there would be cars parked on the infield the next day, the embarrassed coach assured all the recruits that they'd be playing in a new, $15 million facility within a year or two of their arrival.
Marilou and I were still dubious about BC's interest in Sam, and more than once I said to the coach, "We just want to make sure that you are recruiting him and that he's not recruiting you."
"Absolutely," Hughes assured us while Sam was sitting right there. "We think he'll hit in the ACC."
Hughes kept talking about Sam's impatience. I could tell that Sam reminded him of himself a little. He said the only thing that worried him was Sam sitting and stewing on the bench for a year and a half. He was concerned that Sam couldn't handle waiting his turn to play. Mindful of other options, Hughes said, "Go to Holy Cross, Sam! Go ahead! You'll play right away! But if you come here you'll become a better player, and you'll play against the top competition in the country. You're just probably going to have to wait a little longer."
I remember something Sam had said to me earlier. He said he'd rather be the small fish in the big pond. He said he'd never had more fun than he did when he was 15 years old, batting in the number seven hole on a Legion team stacked with boys of 17, 18, and 19 years old. Bottom line: "Dad, I'd rather go to BC and suck than go to Holy Cross and suck."
Sam appeared to be in good shape when I picked him up Sunday morning. His roommate was still with him when I wheeled onto campus, and neither of them appeared to be hung over from the big Florida State game night. That said, any parents who think they know what their teenager is doing are delusional. We can't know everything, nor should we, yet I am amazed when I hear parents state, "I know my son and he would never do that. I know everything that he's up to."
No way. As a parent of a teen, your best bet is to set an example, show them the way, and then pray that nothing goes drastically wrong. Set up your household so that you are headquarters and all the kids want to hang out in your home. If this means a hot tub and Ping-Pong and plasma TV with high definition, go for it. Think of the expense as insurance against trouble. Keep the kids at home and out of cars as much as possible. But realize that when they are out of your sight, you have no idea what's going on. When he went off to college, my rules for Sam were the same as they were for the girls: don't get pregnant (or in Sam's case, don't get anybody pregnant), don't flunk out, and don't tell me what's really happening. I was there thirty years ago, and I know what this time of life is like; you're going to have to learn to get around the bumps and land mines by yourself.
The good news is that Sam is a man with a plan and he'd surrounded himself with kids who seem to be pretty levelheaded. Sometimes sports helps. At the 2006 Super Bowl in Detroit, the Seattle quarterback, Matt Hasselbeck, a product of Xaverian High School in Westwood (and later Boston College), told me, "I've said many times, had I not gone to Xaverian and been with the friends that I had there, I don't know that I ever would have earned a scholarship to college and I certainly wouldn't have been here. At a time when kids are getting into drinking and smoking and other stuff, my friends were into trying to earn a scholarship for sports. That's what Xaverian did for me. On Saturday night when some kids were going out to do who knows what, hang out at the movie parking lot, we were driving around looking for hoops to practice slam dunks on—nine-and-a-half-foot rims. That's what we did for fun. It was a great way to grow up and I feel very fortunate."
Of course, there's no such thing as an incident-free senior year, and I got one of those late-night phone calls on a warm Friday night just after high school classes started. Sam sounded alarmed. He said he'd been in a car accident and the police were there and could I come to the scene.
Your heart stops for a moment at times like this. Clearly, it was good that I was getting this call from my son and not from the authorities. Sam was able to tell me t
hat no one was hurt. He was also upset with the people in the other vehicle involved in the crash, but I told him to just keep quiet and wait until I got there.
The incident took place at a notorious intersection about a half mile from our house. It's where the Massachusetts Turnpike meets Newton Corner, a confusing and circuitous web of roads that the locals have dubbed "the Circle of Death." There hasn't actually been a fatality there in many years, but it routinely ranks among the regional leaders in annual accident reports, and in our family we've always called it "the Rapids." If you can learn to navigate the Rapids, you'll be able to drive anywhere.
When I got to Newton Corner, Sam was sitting on a curb with one of his girlfriends. A fifty-something woman was standing over him, scolding him in Russian. She was with her husband and the police were on their way. I explained that I was Sam's dad. She said he had tried to "escape." That killed me. It turned out that the Russians had caused the minor crash because of their unfamiliarity with the unusual lane flow of the Rapids. I explained to her that Sam was not trying to escape when he continued through the intersection after the crash and pulled over at the next traffic light. She was having none of it. When the police arrived, I reminded Sam to be ever-polite with the men in blue. I also reminded him how much worse this would be if he'd had even one beer during the course of the evening. The police arrived, we exchanged papers, and Sam took his girlfriend home. Sam knew we wouldn't be paying for any body repairs on a 10-year-old Toyota Corolla, but he seemed relieved and comforted that I hadn't yelled at him.
I knew why. I was channeling a calm voice that I still had in my own head.
It didn't take long to find the entry in my high school diary. I knew it had happened on a weeknight during basketball season of my senior year. I'd been driving home from practice, a half mile from home—going the wrong way on a one-way street because it was a short cut and we did it every night—when I drove too fast across some black ice and sat powerless with my foot on the brake as our blue, four-door, Ford Custom 500 slowly skidded into a tree.
January 28. Thursday..."I hit a tree coming home by the elementary school. Skidded. I was helpless and sat there and watched it happen. Told Dad. We looked at it. Told Ma. I'll remember how nice they were to me about this. Unreal. They both comforted me."
And so Sam Shaughnessy was spared the speech the night it happened to him. I hope he'll remember that when he gets the call late some night in 2041.
Sam the senior is nothing like his dad the senior in 1971. Sam doesn't read the newspaper. He hardly reads at all, except in front of the computer. He's a good athlete and has always had an easy time getting dates, or whatever they call it now. He hasn't had to work the way I worked, and as a result he has a totally unrealistic concept of money. He's seen us throw money at trouble to make it go away. He doesn't worry about ordering steak off the menu when we go out to eat, which is often. He's got a soft side (don't tell anyone, but he still sleeps with the stuffed Curious George he got when he was 4 years old). And he's also more generous and thoughtful than I was at the same age. In the spring of Sam's junior year, a few months after the epic Asian tsunami disaster, he walked into my office late one night and dropped $300 onto my keyboard as I was typing.
"Tsunami," he said. "You know what to do."
And then he was gone. Back to his computer in the hallway of our second floor. I sent the money to the Red Cross and we never talked about it again.
Newton North football played its annual "Friday Night Lights" game late in the month. The Tigers rolled over a surprisingly tough Norwood team while Marilou and I visited with assorted teachers, coaches, parents, and school administrators. Inadvertently, these are the nights when you find out about your kid. Under the rented lights, the athletic director, T. J. Williams, told me, "Sam came into my office with some last-minute paperwork today. I told him he's the highest-maintenance male in the high school. We've got a lot of girls like that, but he takes the cake for the boys."
Typical. There's never a semester without academic warnings, and everything from trash to homework gets done at the last minute.
My high school did not have a football team. Football was proposed at a town meeting early in the Kennedy administration, but the townsfolk voted against it and nobody ever missed it much. I remember occasionally going to watch football games at Groton School and Lawrence Academy, two prestigious prep schools in our town. One year, the Groton School boys somehow got to "borrow" our basketball cheerleaders during football season. I'm not quite sure how this happened, but they didn't have girls and we didn't have football and somebody decided it was a nifty idea. It gave us an incentive to go to some of the games.
In 1969, Senator Ted Kennedy came to visit his nephew, Joe Kennedy, who was a lineman for Milton Academy. This was just a few months after Chappaquiddick and Teddy had to have a driver. Nobody bothered him except me. I introduced myself as he stood on the sideline, and I'm pretty sure I offered him some of the Sugar Babies I'd bought at the concession stand. It was a moment.
The other thing I remember about those games was the spontaneous football played by little kids in the open spaces beyond the end zones: mini-footballs and mini-players with no pads, no rules, and nothing but joy in their shoes as they ran pass patterns and crashed into one another. Probably they don't do this in Odessa, Texas, or pockets of Ohio and West Virginia where high school football is more important than property taxes and school budgets. But in New England, you almost always see the little brothers of the ballplayers enjoying their own games and ignoring the heroics of the letter-sweater winners on the gridiron. At Newton North, the space behind the west end zone is most conducive to Nerf footballs. Like a lot of high schools, the football field is encircled by a quarter-mile track and the pole vault and long jump pits are carved inside the oval, beyond the west end zone. The pits double as sandboxes for tiny tots.
A few nights later, we were back at the high school for Senior Night—the annual evening in which parents of twelfth graders get the hell scared out of them by high school counselors. This is the night the counselors start talking about putting together a senior packet and making a game plan for the college application process. I have seen first-time attendees become physically ill during these sessions. The college application drill is made to sound only slightly less difficult than learning to play Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2 without sheet music. Sam's counselor, Jim Burstein, did his best to calm the newcomers but made no attempt to downplay the stress of the next few months. He recommended that students apply to somewhere between eight and twelve colleges. He warned parents to make sure their kids applied to some "safety" schools and told them to prepare for the wounds of rejection letters. At one point, he mentioned that a Newton North student one year earlier had set what was believed to be the school record by applying to forty-seven colleges and universities. Naturally, the young man was accepted on early decision at his first choice.
We did not have personal collegiate counselors when I was a senior at Groton High School in 1970. There was a single guidance counselor and the objective clearly was "Aim low." I remember leaving the guidance counselor's office with applications to several nifty state colleges. I had Boston College on my list only because my dad had gone there and it was something of a lifelong plan. When my mom saw my pile of paperwork from Keene State, Framingham State, and Salem State, she said, "You'll apply to Holy Cross. That's where the LaVigne boys go and it's a good school like Boston College."
And that was that. I applied to Holy Cross and got accepted and one of those nice LaVigne boys walked me around the gated Worcester campus for an hour and I got a small scholarship and that was the end of the college search. It didn't require the time and preparation that went into the Marshall Plan. It was simple and relatively stress-free.
Eileen McNamara, a Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist for the Globe, has a story that speaks to the simplicity of those days. She was a bright student at North Cambridge Catholic High School in 1970 and plan
ned to attend an Ivy League institution. When the guidance counselor/nun saw Columbia at the top of Eileen's college wish list, the kindly sister asked, "Dear, why would you want to go to school in South America?"
Aim low, remember?
Fast forward to Newton, Massachusetts, 2005, and you have an alternate universe, one with parents prepping 6-year-old kids for their eventual ride to the Ivy League.
In the April 23, 2006, New York Times, Paula Marantz Cohen wrote, "Attending certain colleges these days is not just conspicuous consumption; it is also conspicuous achievement—accomplishments displayed as a sign of social status. And children are the favored vehicles ... To fail at landing a seat in an elite college is to fall behind in the race that began with potty training ... The child-centered culture that has emerged the last several decades can be understood as an outgrowth of the creative self-expression of the 1960s. Parents came to see themselves as artists and their children as canvases or lumps of clay."
It's competitive, and it can be ugly and awful. It dominates too many conversations, and high school seniors around our town want to spit on the ground every time they are asked, "What are you going to do next year?"
Child-centered parent that I'd become, I initiated one call to a college for Sam. Harvard. Why not? I figured if Sam was good enough to play at Boston College or Notre Dame, he must be good enough to play at Harvard. Having navigated the Ivy minefield when Sarah was a senior, I knew the difficulty of any child being admitted to Harvard—never mind one with Sam's B-aver-age transcript—but I wanted to make sure there was absolutely no chance before Sam committed anywhere else. My conversation with the Harvard coach was brief, blunt, and painful. We never even got to the issues of SATs and academic index. Sam had participated in several camps and tournaments at the Harvard baseball field and the coach was brutally honest with me.
Senior Year Page 6
