A Kiss For the Coach - Jim Jordan on the Mat

We had a coach at the Catholic high school I attended - dead now, who treated the boys he coached and to whom he taught gym as if they were there for his pleasure. Hands everywhere - fingers in students' mouths and down pants. He would talk and say goofy things as he allowed his hands to do what he wanted them to do to the obedient and submissive, and in his mind, clueless boys. He was big - brutish - an ignorant swagger.

On a retreat, 40 boys copped to the fact that this was going on. Returning to the school with this reality now exposed the monsignor in charge of the school gathered us all in a classroom and let us know that no one in the years past ever complained about this. He made it clear this man's life would be ruined. He said you will have to sit on a witness stand and have to tell what you say he did. He suggested we all misinterpreted or imagined intent and touch.

One of the basketball players he coached quoted him saying to him often, after the team won a game - "A kiss for the coach?"

Jim Jordan, although a former coach, did not request a kiss from anyone, but silence. He had the role of the monsignor. Whatever he knew or was told, he decided, it seems, to file it away as harmless even though he knew, if anyone believed it, everyone goes down. He could have told himself the boys really thought nothing of it. "Toughen up. Don't get too sensitive for Chrissake. The guy is harmless - really."

But he, like the monsignor, like his behavior now, has one overriding principle: Protect the franchise at all costs. In the minds of people like Jordan, boys are dispensable - an opportunity for dominance, or indifference. He accepts the Darwinian model and male hierarchy.

Whenever I have had the misfortune to watch him enter the ring of discourse, he speaks like a machine gun - "must win this point - must pin you." Thoughtless rattling of bluster. His energy and ethos reminds me of former Representative Grimm saying to a young male reporter who asked the "wrong" question, "I'll break you in half, like a boy."

These "men" should not be in government. They don't respect or feel a need to protect children. This revelation, if proven, is consistent with everything he is apart of now. The doc fondles wrestlers - well - what are my options? Protect the boys or the franchise? Who pays my salary? Question answered. Priorities set. Then, and now.

We can extrapolate this to all the cast of dishonorable characters around the hollow vortex of the current embodiment of the franchise. As coach, Jordan used silence to protect the franchise. As cohort, sidekick and aspirant, he uses word Stroganoff. A kind of rat-tat-tat-tatouille. The priority remains the same - his character and the boys are necessary sacrifices. His character is his business. The boys and children are ours.