Gately's football and decline — "Every coach past 6th grade told…"
Every coach past 6th grade told him he was a lock for a Division 1 college team if he bore down and kept his eye on the prize. Memories of half a dozen different neckless, buzz-cut, and pre-infarcted coaches all condense around a raspy emphasis on bearing down and predictions of a limitless future for Don G., Bimmy G., right up until he dropped out in high school’s junior year.
Context
With no father in the frame at all, the only adult men who ever invested in Gately were coaches, and the raw is precise about the terms of that investment: it was a bet on his yardage. Half a dozen interchangeable neckless men promised him a "limitless future" so long as he "bore down" and produced — a paternal-sounding faith that was really a scouting report, conditional on the head that could take a cowcatcher's worth of impact. The proof of the conditionality comes at the scene's end, when the drugs finally cost Gately his starting spot and the coach hands the identical "nearly limitless potential" line to a "big clear-eyed freshman" without a beat's hesitation. The ersatz patriarchs of the theme love the son exactly as long as he gains ground; the belief was never in the boy, only in the stats, and it transfers the instant the stats do.