Just Tell Me I Can't by Jamie Moyer Page A

in the way that men of that generation tended to be. Like Jim Moyer, he wasn’t given to public displays of affection. Also like Jim Moyer, his love was to be inferred from his teachings—and from the fact that he was always teaching. Every time he dropped a pearl of wisdom on his impressionable son, it was as if he’d thrown his arms around him. “Know what you’re doing and you’ll be a confident boy,” he told his son. “Know how to deal with what happens to you and you’ll be a confident man.” The son later came to tell his charges, “Believe it and you will become it.”
    When Harvey went off to college at Brockport State in Rochester, he soon called home with stunning news that was worrisome to his mother. He was going to defy medical advice and play goalie for the school’s soccer team. “You’ve got more guts than brains,” his father told him, barely masking his pride. Harvey’s adolescent path from spectator to participant was complete. In goal, he’d inhale epinephrine surreptitiously when the ball went down to the field’s other end. In 1955, Brockport State would share the national title with Penn State. Later, Dorfman would be inducted into the school’s hall of fame.
    Harvey would eventually write about this period as the time in which he once and for all rejected comfort and security and started learning how to be mentally tough. “I determined to confront my difficulties—or any adverse situation—with a relentless attitude,” he wrote. “I now know that once a will becomes truly strong, it becomes insistent. That being mentally tough requires us to develop the will to bear discomfort.”
    He’d go on to become a beloved English teacher at Burr and Burton Academy, a well-regarded prep school in Vermont. There he’d coach girls’ basketball and perfect the approach to athletes he’d use for the rest of his life: the tough love, the wisecracking (“Ladies,” he once said, poking his head into a locker room of barely clad players with his eyes closed after a big win, “all I can say is, you’ve got a lot of balls!”), the inspirational quotes from great literary works.
    He was ahead of his time, going so far as to turn a big, uncoordinated girl named Becky into a type of on-court enforcer. When an opposing player got overly aggressive, he’d approach hulking Becky on the bench: “You see that?”
    She’d nod. “Take care of it,” Coach Dorfman would say. Becky would enter the game and come out minutes later, after a succession of hard fouls that were sure to leave bruises.
    The true teaching moments came during losses, though. Once, the Bulldogs were getting blown out and Dorfman called a timeout late in the game; his girls couldn’t wait to get off the court. “This is why we’re here,” he said. “To toughen up. To handle adversity with poise and determination. If you don’t cave in—if you don’t quit —under these conditions, no one in the state of Vermont will be able to handle you.”
    The next year, the girls won the state title, with Harvey quoting Aldous Huxley to them whenever they’d hit a rough patch: “Experience isn’t what happens to you; it’s what you do with what happens to you.” Mac Dorfman—and, for that matter, Jim Moyer—couldn’t have said it better themselves.

June 1992
Chapter Four
    When we fail to learn, we’ve learned to fail.
    â€”Harvey Dorfman
    B ehind the wheel of his eggshell-white Lexus, Jamie Moyer fiddled with his car radio. Every song he settled upon seemed to offer an ominous commentary on his once again in-limbo future. On one station, Elton John and George Michael sang “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me.” On another, some new R&B group named Boyz II Men crooned “End of the Road.”
    â€œThere’s gotta be some