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It’s an hour before Middlebury College’s homecoming football game against
Trinity. A short, thin, hunched-over man in a faded blue baseball cap
scuttles up and down the home team’s sideline, weaving his way between
helmeted college boys who step quickly out of his way. The old man carries an
armful of white towels piled up to his head. As he neatly folds each towel
over the aluminum bench and bends to retrieve stray jackets and mouthguards, a loud, clear voice interrupts his work.
“Pedro! Great to see you! Glad to see you got up for the game! Hey, your
feather’s looking a little ragged.” The player examines the feather, a small,
brown, withered thing sticking out of the old man’s Middlebury baseball cap.
Legend has it the feather has been there for 19 years.
“Well, thank you, it’s good to see you too.” Peter Kohn’s voice is low and
somewhat garbled, difficult to understand. Dropping his towels, he hugs the
laughing player. More guys nearby drift away from their stretching to form a
circle around Kohn.
“Hey Pete, what’s the line on today’s game?” one asks.
“What?” Kohn turns his body so that his good ear faces the boy.
“What’s the line on the game?”
“Well, now, I don’t bet.”
They all laugh. The boy keeps prodding. “Pete, I bet on Trinity, whaddaya think?”
“Well, not to take anything away from Trinity. I’m sure they’re a very, very
good team. But I’m afraid you’re going to lose [your bet].” Kohn cracks a big
smile. The players laugh loudly, clap him on the back and disperse. The small
man returns to his towels.
Homecoming has brought 72-year-old Kohn back to Middlebury, where he spent 20
years as equipment and field manager before “retiring” last spring. But Kohn
is also a local celebrity, like “Radio” in the recently released, fact-based
film about a challenged Guy Friday for a southern high school football team.
Middlebury’s lacrosse field is named after Kohn, who is himself the subject
of a documentary-in-process. Here, everybody knows his name.
But as the opening kickoff approaches, it seems as if Kohn would rather pick
up the gloves of fallen receivers than socialize with them. Middlebury’s
trainer comes over and grabs Kohn around the waist, saying loudly, “Peter!
You’re retired! You don’t have to do that!” Kohn mumbles something inaudible
and walks away from the trainer to the water cooler on the other end of the
bench. The trainer looks up at an amused fan and shrugs. “I tried,” he says.
Kohn has always loved sports, but he could never play them. He’s “different”
in ways that are apparent but difficult to categorize. There were times as a
youth when he didn’t grasp things as easily as his peers, Kohn says. But his
family had the means to keep him out of institutions, so no one ever
diagnosed him or assigned him a label.
Nor did his “disability” stop him from getting on the field. Kohn started
slinging towels for the basketball team at the prestigious Park School in Baltimore, where he was enrolled as a student. Baltimore was a center of American lacrosse in
the 1940s and ’50s and, after graduating from Park, Kohn, at 23, hooked up
with various teams in the surrounding area. He came to love the game, and for
the better part of the next three decades he worked as field manager for club
lacrosse teams and summer camps.
Over the years Kohn’s warmth earned him the friendship of some of the sport’s
great players and veteran coaches, including Jim Grube, who coached the lacrosse team at Middlebury College from 1979 to 1992. Grube befriended
Kohn and saw that he needed a change: In 1980, he offered then-50-year-old
Kohn a full-time post as an equipment manager in Middlebury’s athletic
department. There, Kohn says, “I was able to find myself at a late age. I was
able to harness the abilities I had.”
Peter Kohn has been the face of Middlebury sports for the past two decades,
working as an equipment and field manager for all the college’s teams, but
especially lacrosse and football, which Grube coached. In the spring Kohn
traveled with the lacrosse team, picking up spirits as readily as dirty
towels.
“He’s not an innocent bystander by any means,” says current coach Erin Quinn. “He knows his effect, and his sense
of timing — when the guys need a lift — is absolutely unbelievable… He’s so
positive. You’ll never get him to say anything bad about the other team, no
matter how hard you try.”
Perhaps that accounts for his good karma. In lacrosse practice Kohn’s main
role is retrieving balls; he does his job well and without fear, says Quinn:
“It’s amazing. He’s collecting balls that are whizzing by at sometimes 80, 90
miles an hour. If you just yell, ‘Peter, get out of the way,’ he’ll be sure
to stay there 10 more minutes, and you’ll have to physically remove him.”
Kohn’s luck contributes to his savant status. “I probably shouldn’t talk
about it,” says a superstitious Quinn. “One time I heard someone at a game at
Amherst talking about Pete’s force field, and
within a few seconds, I heard this big ‘aah!’ —
Peter got hit right in the chest. So we’re not supposed to jinx it, but
talking about it in the off-season might be okay.
“He’s got a force field,” Quinn elaborates. “I mean, it’s mythical, and you
have to use common sense in practice. There’s no other person who could spend
50 years walking around fields with balls whizzing around and survive without
a ding.”
The team also employs more practical measures to look out for Kohn. The
“Keeper of the Kohn” is an honor bestowed upon a couple of freshmen every
year; when the team travels, the Keepers make sure Kohn’s around, getting to
the right places and getting enough to eat — he has a huge appetite. “Not
that he needs [the help]; he’s entirely self-sufficient,” says Quinn. “When
we’re in Paris or London, he knows his way around better than
any of us. He knows the London train system like the back of his
hand. But because he knows how to get around, he’s got his own agenda, and
sometimes we have to urge him along.”
Kohn’s agenda includes stocking up on the postcards, newspapers and
disposable cameras that he carries around in his infamous overstuffed white
canvas bag. “He’s got a wealth of knowledge,” says Quinn, “and he works to
get it. He’s always taking pictures, memorizing faces, facts and names.” On
road trips Kohn is famous for providing historical facts about the towns the
team is passing through.
But sports trivia is his forte. One showdown pitted him against a guy at Collins College in Roanoke, Virginia, who correctly identified an obscure
pitcher from the 1920s. The Middlebury players groaned, thinking Kohn had
been defeated. “Yes, that’s right,” said Kohn, maintaining a poker face.
Then, after a brief pause, he came up with the pitcher’s middle name.
When Peter Kohn walks around campus, lots of people stop to say hello. He’s
gracious to everyone, even though most know him only slightly. “Pete may
spend only a week or two here in the fall these days,” says Quinn, “but
players from all sports who don’t really know him still feel a real
connection to him. There are very few of us who could have that sort of
impact.”
Kohn was officially recognized in 2000, when several alumni donated money to
build a new turf lacrosse field. When it came time to name it, there was no
doubt. Hundreds of alumni gathered to help dedicate Peter Kohn Field, along
with its new bleachers — a gift given by Kohn to the college. The most
emotional part of the evening came from Kohn himself; he dedicated the
bleachers to his mother, saying that she gave “everything in her life” to
make his better.
His personal journey is the subject of a full-length documentary by Dave
Gaynes. The New York filmmaker was hired by a group of Middlebury lacrosse
alumni to make the 20-minute commemoration, Finding Peter Kohn, which was
shown at Middlebury this past spring.
Gaynes has since decided to expand the short project into a full-length work
on his own. The new film focuses on Kohn’s mysterious “condition” and
society’s reaction to it. “Peter’s never been diagnosed,” says Gaynes. “He
feels no need to ‘know’ exactly how he’s different.”
But other people do. When they meet him, people inevitably ask, “What does he
have?”
“What if he does have something?” asks Gaynes, “Is
it worth labeling? If there is a problem, maybe it’s in those who seek to
label him. He’s perfectly happy and satisfied with his accomplishments,
which, by the way, are absolutely amazing by any standards.”
A couple of Middlebury graduates who went on to medical careers have told
Gaynes they think Kohn has some form of autism, which Gaynes says is
“probably not far-fetched.” But Kohn describes himself merely as someone who
had a lot of difficulties early on in life, was troublesome to his mother,
and did not find himself until he was in his fifties.
In 2002, Kohn was inducted into the New England Lacrosse Hall of Fame. “I’m
just thankful I’ve been able to live as long as I have,” he said with
characteristic self-effacement. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to see
so many wonderful things.” He then rattled off a list of people he considered
more deserving of the honor.
On Homecoming Day, there’s speculation that Kohn — who’s divided his time
between Middlebury and Cape May, New
Jersey, since his retirement — might come to the game. But no one
actually hears from him until the day before the game, when he shows up at
practice and begins handing out towels and water bottles.
Middlebury loses to Trinity, 16-0, and the home team trudges off the field
with their heads hanging. The coaches chat with alumni while fans socialize
on the field. But the “retired” equipment and field manager is still at work,
scouring the Middlebury bench for items the disheartened players have left
behind. As he straightens his frail body after retrieving a jacket, he spots
a trainer carting off the towel bag.
“Hold it!” Kohn snaps, peering into the canvas bag. “We have to separate
that! That one has blood on it!”
The trainer protests, but the old man has made up his mind. He plucks the
offending towel from the dirty laundry bag. Then, the last guy on the field,
he turns back to the bench, takes one final look around for lost items, and
begins the long trek back to the locker room.
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