Who is Hack? — A Guest Post from D.J. Gelner
Hi everyone, I’m D.J. Stuart’s been kind enough to let me guest post today. If you’re interested in reading more, I’m giving away one of my books right now on Kindle: Hack: Innings 1-3. The main character of that book, Hack O’Callahan, is a crotchety old baseball manager with profane sensibilities. He’s also the topic of today’s guest blog. Enjoy!
If the American high school experience is as universal as a movie like Dazed and Confused makes it out to be, then we all had at least one old school, hard-assed gym teacher or coach in our pasts.
You know the type: they berated you to scurry up the rope climb a bit faster, or forced you to keep running well through dusk as the streetlights calmly flickered to life. Or they screamed at you for an errant pass or wrong technique in a sport in which you had absolutely zero interest.
I played baseball and football all through high school, so I had my share of these types of coaches. But as I got older and worked my way into leadership positions on those teams, I found that often the crusty, abrasive exterior often hid a genuine love for the sport that ran far deeper than any of their flaws.
Most of these men (at least they were men in my experience) certainly were flawed; you’d hear the odd rumor of a problem with booze, or they’d give in to politics at some point and play one of their buddy’s sons instead of a more deserving, yet less well-connected, player.
Yet perhaps it’s those very deficiencies that make for such interesting characters. In my experience covering pro sports, the higher up a coach gets, the greater the sacrifices he must make. Long nights away from family and friends, a relentless and obnoxious press (sorry about that…), and larger paychecks drive expectations ever-higher. These coaches operate under some of the most intense working conditions of anyone. It’s enough to break a man.
Of course, a coach who enjoys a lot of success can also fall victim to the pitfalls of ego and arrogance, more deficiencies to add to the pile until you have the potential for a character rotten to his core.
When we meet Hack O’Callahan, that’s exactly what he is. He’s set in his ways. He’s profane. He’s arrogant. He’s xenophobic.
And yet, there’s something endearing about him. He has a soft side that no one gets to see that’s similar to a lot of those coaches I had back in the day. He’ll fight for his players to the death, and even then he’ll plunge into the fires of hell to save them.
There’s something about that loyalty, that utter devotion to the idea of “the team,” even when a man’s personal life is in absolute shambles, that was the germ of the idea for Hack.
Not only that, but a couple of the anecdotes are based on real life events, namely when Hack berates the team and says, “Yer’ nothin’ but a bunch’a girls!” and expects the players to be horrified. That happened my freshman year on JV baseball. We were losing by ten runs in the third inning, and our coach (a real character) said that in the dugout.
You know what? We won the game by seven.
Another habit Hack shares with a different coach of mine is carrying his bat around and using it as a cane. Again, I took some liberties with the story; my coach never would use it the same way Hack did. But I thought it was a cool little detail that added a bit of authenticity to the story.
I love using those little extra bits of experience or research to really paint a vivid picture in the reader’s mind and create a connection that wouldn’t otherwise exist.
If I can also help folks have a laugh or cry along the way? Well, that’s just gravy.
D.J. Gelner is a fiction and freelance writer from St. Louis, Missouri. His novel, Jesus Was a Time Traveler, is available on Amazon , Nook, Kobo, iBooks and in Paperback . The first two installments of his second series, the Hack trilogy, are now available for Kindle (here’s the sequel). Follow him on twitter (@djgelner) or facebook (here). E-mail him at djgelbooks@gmail.com
