Coach

That Championship Season's moral center, Coach, is an older man who coached the other four characters to a high school state basketball championship twenty years earlier. He considers that championship the crowning achievement of his career, if not his life. The victory made him and the other characters local legends. He still receives special treatment in the town because of this long ago victory.

In many ways, Coach lives in the past. He proudly proclaims that he has not changed in sixty years. His living room is nearly a museum to past decades, and he dresses in a suit with a 1940s cut. Coach's values are also out of the 1950s. He is anti-Semitic and pro-Joseph McCarthy and Father Coughlin, a controversial conservative Catholic radio preacher. Victory is to be had at any cost for Coach.

Coach dislikes dissension, especially among his boys. He wants them to...