Killer Kane Audio Memoir; Chapter 2: Before Kane

Chapter Two: Before Kane

Jim “Killer” Kane did not create toughness in Sam Fischer from nothing.

Long before Sam arrived at Mount Michael, life on his family’s ranch in the Nebraska Sandhills had already taught him the basic rules: finish the job, keep your word and do not stop simply because you are tired or uncomfortable. His parents—especially his father—poured the foundation. Kane would later reinforce it until those lessons became inseparable from the man Sam became.

In Chapter Two of Killer Kane, Sam leaves the ranch for Mount Michael Benedictine High School, a Catholic boarding school 310 miles from home. It is a world of monks, schedules, homesickness, hidden televisions and small rebellions—an institution that demands young boys adjust, endure and finish.

Then there is Kane: physically imposing, emotionally inaccessible and unquestionably in command. He controls the practices, calls the plays, decides who belongs and reveals almost nothing about the man behind the coach.

Before Sam can earn a place on Kane’s football field, he must first learn how to survive Kane’s world.

Transcript

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Welcome to Cowboys Not Eggheads. This is Killer Kane, a special 12-part audio memoir about my 1985 senior football season at Mount Michael, and the coach whose influence stayed with me for the next 40 years. Thanks for listening. Chapter 2 Before Kane. Jim Kane did not create toughness in me from nothing. Long before I'd met him, my parents, especially my father, had already established a basic code by which I understood work. You finished what you started, you did the job in front of you. You did not stop simply because you were tired, uncomfortable, or no longer interested. I grew up in Ninzel, Nebraska, in the sand hills, where work was not an extraordinary activity or a character building exercise designed by adults. It was part of daily life. Things had to be done because they had to be done. Animals did not care about whether you were tired, whether to not wait until you were ready. A job left unfinished remained there for you the next morning, usually harder than it had been the day before. There was little romance in it while I was living it. Years later, people sometimes talk about ranch life as though every sunrise carried a lesson and every day produced wisdom. I do not remember thinking it that way. I was a kid doing the work that was expected of me. But the expectations mattered. My father taught me that being dependable was not something you announced about yourself. Other people determined whether you were dependable by watching what you did when the work became difficult. Did you finish? Did you keep your word? Could people count on you? The foundation existed before Mount Michael. Cain did not pour the concrete. My parents did. What Cain eventually did was reinforce it so forcefully that the last lesson almost became impossible to separate from the rest of my identity. He locked it in and threw away the key. Mount Michael Benedict in High School was approximately 310 miles from the ranch that I grew up on. At that age, 310 miles was not simply a long drive, it was another world. The school sat outside Omaha in Elkhorn, Nebraska. It was a Catholic boarding school run by Benedictine monks, and it operated with an order and discipline unlike anything I had known. The campus itself contained contradictions. The chapel was round, pristine, and beautiful. It seemed designated to elevate your attention, to make you aware that you were entering a place set far apart from ordinary life. Other parts of the school were less inspiring. The dormitories could feel dank. The football locker room was disgusting. The campus had two football fields, and the entire place carried the sense that generations of boys had lived, studied, prayed, fought, sweat, and tried to grow up within the same confined world. There was no television available to us. That did not mean no television existed. My friend Jeff Malone and I hid one. The fact that we were willing to violate one of the school's central restrictions probably says something about both teenage ingenuity and the limits of institutional discipline. Mount Michael controlled nearly every part of our day, but did not entirely eliminate our ability to find small rebellions. Still, the school's authority was real. You lived where you were told to live. You ate meals when meals were served. You attended class, study periods, mass, and whatever else the schedule demanded. Your freedom narrowed. The normal separation between school and home disappeared because home because school was home. For many students, homesickness was part of the experience. You did not leave at the end of the day and return to your family. You remained on campus with the same classmates, teachers, monks, rules and expectations. Problems did not end when the final bell rang, neither did friendships. That produced a kind of fraternity among the boys who remained long enough to graduate. We had not all lived the same experience. We do not all remember it the same way. But we understood that Mount Michael had demanded something from us. The school was difficult academically, socially, and emotionally. You had to adjust to life away from your home while you were still young enough to need one. Anyone who graduated from Mount Michael earned something. Years later, I began to think of that achievement as a kind of trident. The term was mine, we did not use it when we were students. No coach handed us a badge and no school ceremony declared we had survived some formal ordeal, but the idea made sense to me. A trident was a symbol carried by people who had completed something difficult and belonged to a group that understood what the symbol meant. I did not equate attending Mount Michael with military service, and I would never diminish what actual military operators endured. The comparison was personal and symbolic. You had stayed, you had endured, you had finished. No one could take that away from you. Playing three years of football under Jim Kane created a more specific version of that trident. There were players who came out for the team and left. There were players who decided the demands were not worth it. There were boys who discovered they did not want football badly enough to live under Kane's authority. I remained. That did not make me a star, it did not make me one of Cain's chosen eleven. It did not mean I enjoyed every practice or accepted every decision. It meant I finished. The distinction matters because my senior year eventually became or my senior season eventually became defined in my mind by the moment I emotionally quit. But I never physically left the team. I continued showing up, I continued practicing, I completed the season. Both facts were true. I gave up internally, I stayed externally. The contradiction would follow me for years. Mount Michael football was not merely an activity added to an already demanding school. Under Cain it became another institution within the institution. He had been coaching there long before I had arrived. His presence seemed inseparable from the program. The trophy cases, championship teams, and stories passed from one generation to all to another, all reinforced the idea that Mount Michael football belonged to him. Cain was approximately six foot one with a large build, Irish coloring, and a voice that carried the authority of a military command. He commonly wore khaki pants, black football cleats, and in bad weather a rain, a red rain jacket. I do not remember him wearing a hat. He did not need one to be recognizable. You knew where he was. More importantly, you knew when he was watching. Players addressed him as sir. We do not talk when he talked. We do not openly question his instructions. I never saw a player challenge him or talk back. The idea would have been unthinkable. Cain did not need to deliver a speech explaining that he was in charge. The entire environment communicated it. He controlled the practices, he controlled the plays, he made the adjustments, he decided who played. Assistant coaches had supporting roles, but Kane was the authority around which everything else revolved. He was also physically formidable. When he demonstrated a block, he did not casually walk through the movement. He delivered force. The player receiving the demonstration had to brace himself and could still be driven backward or knocked off balance. Kane did not merely describe the physical standard. He embodied it. That mattered to teenage boys. There are coaches who demand things they clearly cannot do themselves. Their authority depends entirely on title, age, or position. Kane's authority was different. He was older than we were, but he remained stronger than nearly every player on the team. He could show you exactly what he expected and make the demonstration feel unpleasant enough that you remembered it. His football philosophy was not complicated. He believed in discipline, repetition, preparation, and execution. The playbook was limited enough that we could drill the same concepts repeatedly. Traps, the veer, the veer option, power, crossbucks, bootlegs, a down out and down to the split end. The language of the offense became part of the rhythm of practice. If formation came first, then the play. Split right, flanker left, 33 crossbuck. Even number holes were to the right, odd number holes were to the left. On a 33 cross buck, the right guard pulled left through the three hole. The details mattered because Kane believed games were won by executing known assignments better than the opponent executed theirs. He might call the same play several times in succession. If the blocking was wrong, he stopped practice. If a player's technique failed to meet the standard, Kane demonstrated it or corrected it. Then we ran the play again and again. There was no value in variety for its own sake. The objective was not to impress players with the coach's imagination. The objective was to make the team difficult to defeat. Former players later said they entered games expecting to win because Kane had prepared them. Opponents understood that even if they beat Mount Michael, they would have to earn it. Kane was difficult on everyone, his players, opposing players, coaches, officials, and even fans. But if he was going to be difficult, I was glad he was on our side. As a young player, I did not analyze his leadership style. I did not wonder whether his methods were emotionally healthy or whether another coach might have developed more players. I was trying to survive, practice, and earn a place. Kane had several ways of identifying players he considered soft, fearful, lazy, or undisciplined. A player might be dismissed as a lump lump or a panty waste. I do remember his sarcasm. A slow player might become lightning. He might tell someone to get the lead out of their ass. The rest of us might smirk internally, but open laughter was controlled. Caine permitted humor only for as long as he permitted it. Then practice continued. He once told us that he knew we all thought he had been dropped out of a tree. It was one of the few lines I remember that suggested Cain understood the mystery surrounding him. The players may have chuckled briefly. Then as always, he moved on. We knew almost nothing about his private life. He did not talk about a wife, children, family, hometown, or personal history. He lived and ate at the monastery with the priests. I sometimes saw him walking with Father Robert, a quiet monk and a librarian a librarian, who I barely remember hearing speak. Loudest man at the school walking beside the quietest. Even then the contrast struck me. Caine existed in our lives almost entirely as Coach Caine. He seemed to have no need to be known beyond that role. That unknowability would eventually become part of his power over my memory. I could study his methods, remember his language, and trace his influence, but I could never fully understand the man making the decisions. At the time, none of that was my concern. My concern was simpler. I wanted to prove that I belonged on the football field, and in Jim Kane's program, belonging had to be earned. Thanks for listening. Follow Cowboys Not Eggheads on Instagram and visit cowboysnot eggheads.com to join the conversation. If you played for Coach Kane, I'm sure you have your own stories, and you may think I've gotten some of this wrong. Weigh in. I'm all ears.