THE FRESHMAN and THE COACH
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"Give me time, teach me the skills, provide me with encouragement and I will prove no wave would be too huge to ride!" ~RB, Author
Photo : Credit to the Author
The Freshman and the Coach - I Too Am The Mindanao State University!
(Based on an oration delivered during one of the literary contests of MSU Foundation Anniversay, while it was yet undergoing growth pains, that I rewrote into a short story that embodies the MSU spirit. The oration is embedded in the story.)
“I am sorry, sir. I cannot deliver this.”
“That’s it, my boy, firm and forceful,” murmured the coach as he watched from where he stood at the back of the lecture hall where the oratorical contest was being held. “Build it slow. Build it right and grab their hearts and minds as you grabbed mine,” he mused with a smile as the freshman cut the air with a polished sweep of his arm.
He is really good, he thought. A rare find in these days of mediocrity that he might have missed had the young boy been intimidated on that day he showed the first draft of the oration he wrote for the oratorical contest when, in a fit of exasperation, he railed at the way things were going on in the university. Other students would have been cowed then, but not this boy. This boy was different.
He did not think much of the boy during the elimination round to select who would represent the college though. To him, the lad was just a puny teen-ager barely out of high school who seemed to be just another freshman, naïve and callow. Even after he bested the other aspirants who were his seniors, he did not show any sign of a strong and determined will. To be sure, there was confidence in the way he delivered his oratorical piece for the elimination. But he was almost sheepish afterwards and could not even look him in the face when they talked.
He asked him why he chose the university over other universities in the country. The boy said he was lucky that he qualified for a full academic scholarship that granted free school fees, lodging, book allowance and stipend. Otherwise, his family could not afford to send him to college. Besides, he had an uncle who also studied at the university under scholarship before. His uncle told him stories of his days in the university. The “pioneering years” as his uncle fondly called those years. He was enamored with the university since then.
“Ah, another deluded sentimentalist duped by romantic images of the university that had been filtered, adorned and sentimentalized through the years in the minds of pioneering students,” the coach thought. For him those days of the university they knew were long gone and would never return. The sooner they stopped talking of “those days“with romantic underpinnings the better. That university had long ceased to exist. It had long gone down the way of most public institutions in the Philippines.
He felt some pity for the young boy before him that day. But he could not care less anymore. He was retiring at the end of the academic year. He would settle down somewhere quiet and cozy: the farther from the university, the better. He was done hoping that the university would ever veer back to its rightful course.
That was when the thought of what oration to write was formed in his mind: the last oration he would write – a caustic, bitter and cynical peroration against the university that had deprived him of the chance to show what he could do and had reduced him to a mere chalk and blackboard teacher; against the university that had betrayed its original vision. Perhaps, he thought further, he would be doing this lad a favor by showing him what the university had turned into so that he could go and seek his future elsewhere. If there were any potential in him at all, the better it was to drive him away from this university at this early stage while he was still a freshman brimming with bright hopes and ambition and not waste his potential like so many he knew.
He finished the draft overnight and showed it to the freshman the following day. But to his great surprise…
“I am sorry, sir. I cannot deliver this,” I told coach after reading the copy of the oration that he wrote.
“Why not child?” he asked.
“It is also caustic, bitter and cynical,” I added.
“I know,” he said. “But it is also honest and true. I understand you would not want to deliver that oration. You are just a freshman. You just came here. You know nothing of the university yet. You are full of high expectations. But just take my word and deliver that oration, ok?”
“What is wrong with the theme, sir? What is wrong with dreams,” I asked coach.
“Words, my child, mere words,” he snorted.
He went on to debunk the theme. His face slowly turned red as he lambasted it, deriding the committee that selected the theme for the university foundation, saying they had the gall to talk of facing the challenges of the new millennium with quality education and responsive extension services.
“What quality are they talking about? What extension services? Duh!”
He paced for a while, agitated. I kept silent, staring wide-eyed to the spectacle unfolding before me.
“They must have been drunk,” he said, referring to the committee that selected the theme for the university founding anniversary celebrations. “Or they must so inane to talk of braving the high seas of the East Asia Growth Area.”
I stood there unable still to say anything at all. Coach perhaps took my silence as a stubborn refusal to hear him out because he went on to continue with his tirade.
With characteristic sarcasm and frantic gestures he said, “Oh yes, it is true, we need much bravery, sailing the high seas with a makeshift raft and tattered sails: the bravery of the fool. I have different words for it: madness, delusion. Just because we can surf the Internet now, they think we can surf the real oceans. Ha!”
I felt a lump in my throat as I watched and listened to my coach. His hair was disheveled by then, his face lined with deep creases and his back stooped. Whatever the years had brought him must have taken its toll. He seemed to groan over some weight he carried on his shoulders.
“Why?” I asked myself. “What brought him to this?” Was I that naïve really to come here, duped by stories of the “pioneering years”? Did my enthusiasm and optimism to come here prevent me from hearing what coach had to say, prevent me from sympathizing with coach. Or, was I simply refusing to accept the bleak picture of the university that he painted - not after all those years that I have waited since I was a small kid to come to this great institution?.
I reminded coach that one of my uncles studied here before. He came from a poor family. His parents had no money to send him to college, but thanks to the university that granted him full scholarship, he was able to graduate and with honors! He was now right at the very nerve center of the country, involved in the affairs of the nation.
He told me of the beginnings of the university: the makeshift library and classrooms, the dirt roads that were knee deep in mud when it rained and sweltering with dust under the heat of the sun. He told me of his classmates, professors and the vibrant atmosphere, electrifying in the high hopes harbored within the hearts of everyone in the university.
His stories so enthralled me that through the years I kept dreaming of the day when I too would walk the hallowed ground of this university.
In the highly metaphorical language our debate turned into, I told coach that I have the world before me to conquer and that the East Asia Growth Area is not a bad place to start this conquest, that I came to this university not only because my father was poor and the university was the cheapest place to earn a college education but that I came convinced of its greatness, convinced that the university could prepare me for the world just as it had done with all those who came here ahead of me, and that it was disappointing at the very least to find myself in his office, faced with a daunted and dispirited middle-aged professor.
“No,” I told him, “I will not be daunted, sir.”
I told him that the theme of this year’s celebrations was not even new, that it was part of the original vision of the founding president of the university. The beloved visionary was convinced that the university could be a regional university, serving the needs of Southeast Asia. The theme was fitting and appropriate. It was a reiteration of the vision upon which the university was founded.
“If it was laudable then, why should it be madness now?” I asked.
I added that while listening to my uncle talk about the university when I was a kid, one of the images that were formed in my mind was precisely the image that my coach used in debunking the theme: that of a makeshift raft with tattered sails but steered and manned by stout hearts, not the cowed and the frustrated.
“I am sorry, coach, but you are the very picture of frustration,” I told him.
Stung by my remark, coach barked, “And what do you know about frustration, child? What do you know about this university other than the romantic images of your uncle’s past, our past? I’ll tell you what the university is now.”
And he railed at the university once more.
“Look around you. Open your eyes. Are you blind not to see those broken doors, broken windows with broken jalousies, darkly lit classrooms, comfort rooms that provide no comfort at all and, a library that is virtually a storehouse of obsolete books! Look at our college. Come, let me show you.”
Coach went out of the office, dragging me to the laboratory room, and with a pompous gesture of his hands, said,
“There. Look at the ghost of a laboratory! Go ahead, get inside and touch the rusted pipes. Go on; operate those broken sensors if you can. Where are the facilities that we, your teachers, could use to teach even the rudiments of your specialization? And we have the gall to talk about quality education! Do you know that most of what you use now at the Physics and Chemistry labs are leftovers from what we used before?”
He was red in the face all over again. He crossed the room, stood by the window, scanned the rolling hills overlooking the lush greenery outside and then looked towards the general direction of the administration building. Then with a spat of barb, he bewailed, “The University at its prime! Hah! I have never seen another so adolescent in its sudden reversals of passion, an incapacity for determined consistency, a talent for lapses of attention and outbursts of irritation at the slightest criticism.”
At some point he hollered, “Look at Dr. Estoista. Are you aware that her doctoral thesis garnered highest honors while she was in Europe? What is she doing now? Trying to prove she had a well rounded education by striving for highest honors coaching her college’s debating team? And, Dr. Alagao! Do you know that his paper was honored as the Best Paper for the Year 1994 by no less than the American Society of Mechanical Engineers? And do you know that he enrolled this semester in the College of Law to prove, perhaps, that he could also master the laws of the land and not only the laws of thermodynamics?”
He went over to his chair. Sat down and glanced once more at his copy of the draft oration on his hand. Then getting back to the theme, he spat the words, “Braving the high seas! What gall. Why oh why can we not choose simpler words, humbler aims: words that are much closer to reality?”
He turned to me and said, “You who claim that braving the high seas of the EAGA is not a bad place to start your conquest, what do you know about sailing the high seas? Have you ever stared at huge waves ready to topple down bigger boats than you have ever seen in your life?”
I told him I had. I told him that I used to ride on the fast boats of the Tausugs plying the southern seas and told him those were not really big boats. It would be easy to build one. I told him too that he was merely imagining the huge waves he was describing.
” Those waves do not come often and,” I added, “even if those waves do come, ready to topple us down, I will still take my chances for that is what adventures are all about: daring the odds.”
I told him that all I ask of my mentors is to give me time, teach me the skills, provide me with encouragement and I will prove no wave would be too huge to ride. For I too, as with all other freshmen, am the university and that, in my time, I will sail not only the EAGA. Like Dr. Alagao, I will sail the seas lying between the Philippines and Australia. Like Dr. Estoista, I will brave all the seas to Belgium. Like Dr. Asibal, I will cross the Pacific to the USA. If it needs be, I will dare the freezing cold of the frigid Arctic Ocean. I, the new University, shall face the challenges of the new millennium – undaunted.
Finally, I told him, “You asked me if I have eyes to see, sir. Yes, I have. But, sad to say, more than broken doors and broken windows, what I see is a broken spirit before me.”
I walked closer to my coach, handed out my copy of the draft oration back to him, and said as politely as I could, “Here, take your draft back, sir. I have no need for that! And stop calling me child, please, for this child could write a better piece than a litany of woes and lament, so devoid of optimism, so lacking in hope!”
Coach was silent. With menace in his blistering eyes, he glared at me. Then, to my surprise, he started to relax. His glare softened. He shook his head, drew near me, beamed, smiled and chuckled. Then he draped his arms on my shoulders and addressed me gently for the first time, “Well, young man, we have just rewritten your oration.”
I was speechless for a moment and realized, as I understood his words, that, indeed, we had.
And now, it was delivered."
The sound of applause erupted from the audience who stood up to give their ovation as the young man bowed his head towards the direction where the coach stood at the back of the hall. Friends of the young man started to shout his name. The emcee grabbed the phone to plead for silence but the applause continued, the shouting grew even louder. Some even rushed to the front to shake the hands of the young man.
The coach smiled and bowed his head too and then turned towards the door. He was still smiling as he stepped out of the hall and strolled down the golf course.
Source: FB/Romeo Balingcongan
September 1, 2021
