All the Broken Pieces

Coach Robeson comes to practice to explain why he chose Chris as his replacement. Although Robeson doesn’t look sick, he “sounds like / he’s whistling through a straw” (168); yet while his voice has lost power, his words still “mean something” (169) important. He says that Chris—Coach Williams—was one of Coach Robeson’s students, known as “Whirlin’ Will” because he made “that baseball dance” (170). Coach Williams might have been good enough to make it to the major leagues, but instead he went to Vietnam. Coach Robeson tells the boys that “the war was worse / than this cancer I got,” because “it destroyed us from the inside” (171)—it prevented young men like Chris from achieving their dreams and led to anger, division, and prejudice.

Coach Robeson goes on to say he was going to make Chris his pitching coach even before he got sick, and he urges the boys to let Coach Williams be the great coach he can be—if the boys “give [him] a chance” (173). Most importantly, Coach Robeson encourages the boys to “give each other a chance” (173) as well, and not allow the legacy of the war to continue to “spread […] its poison” (171).