Gately's football and decline

Gately's one quasi-father was his mother's live-in ex-M.P., and the grimmest thing the scene says about that fatherhood is that its single mercy to Gately was directional: the man beat the mother, not the boy. Gately even theorizes that this is why he never became a bully — that not being knocked around himself left him with "no interest in brutalizing the weak," a moral formation delivered entirely by omission. It's the absent-father pole at its bleakest: no father at all, only a violent man passing through who eventually "decamped in his sticker- covered Ford" for a Newburyport divorcée, and whose chief gift to his surrogate son was the beatings he chose to aim elsewhere. The theme keeps finding new floors, and this is one of them — a boy grateful, in retrospect, for the abuse that missed him.