- April 15, 2024
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A star high school quarterback’s cockiness is turning into laziness, so his father leads him down the cellar steps to toughen him up, give him some humility. They’ve had boxing lessons in the past, pounding the heavy bag, but this time, the father crouches, with fists up, facing his son. The father is no longer a balding bartender — he’s a mad dog.
The father quickly lands a punch, which is almost as infuriating to the teen as his father’s lectures. The teen tries to counterattack, but the father is too elusive, and several minutes later, drenched in sweat, the teen knows he’s beaten.
“I was the heavy bag now,” the son says, reflecting back on the moment years later. In the climax to the scene, the father’s fist is flying toward his son’s face. “But he stopped, held it, barely touched my skin.” The father, with “tired, frightened, loving eyes,” embraces the son and repeats, “Don’t get cocky.”
This scene, in the first quarter of “The Blood We Truly Bleed,” a new novel by Caesar Campana, may not be central to the plot of the story as described on the book's cover, but it’s indicative of Campana’s technique of mining personal experience for character development. As a third-grader, Campana was beaten up by two fifth-graders, and his own bartender father taught him to box, for self defense.
Campana, who is a retired teacher and football coach from Flagler Palm Coast High School, now splits his time between Palm Coast and North Carolina. He met with me on March 25 at Starbucks to talk about his writing.
Tanned and trim, wearing a gray Nike ball cap, with Ray Bans perched on the brim, a gray polo with the buttons undone, gray shorts and black Nike running shoes, he looked like he could be ready to jog onto the field for another football practice. But that was all in the past, and he is now in full novelist mode.
He was a jock in high school, he tells me, before a 10th-grade English teacher in New Jersey, Joe Lang, inspired him to become a teacher, too.
Campana majored in English and was the third-string quarterback at North Carolina State, for the legendary coach Lou Holtz. He has kept in touch with Holtz over the years. “He treated me as if I was the most valuable person on the team,” Campana said. At a dinner in Orlando two years ago, Holtz stood up and recognized Campana in front of the crowd. “I played for him 40 years ago,” Campana said, implying that a third-string quarterback would be forgettable for most coaches. But Holtz was genuine in his praise. “That’s the kind of guy he is,” Campana said. Holtz also sent Campana a condolence letter when Campana’s father died.
Campana’s wife, Monica, is a retired Flagler Schools media specialist who has written letters to the editor about school issues recently, in the Palm Coast Observer. They have four children — Caesar IV, Carl, Catrina, Caitlyn — all of whom are both jocks and scholars, he said. Some might remember Caitlyn for being a swimmer at Matanzas High School; she’s 25 now and is starting a doctorate at Syracuse University.
Campana coached football for 20 years at schools in Orlando before teaching English at FPC from 2003 to 2016. He was FPC’s head football coach from 2010 to 2014; one of his players was Robert Paxia, who is now the Bulldogs’ head coach. Campana also helped coach one year as an assistant for Travis Roland.
Campana was ready to be done, though. “It’s so hot out there,” he said, now enjoying the breeze in the shade outside Starbucks. Roland, about half Campana’s age, once noticed Campana looking exhausted during practice and felt compelled to ask, “You OK?”
Campana laughs about it now — he’s living the dream of retirement-novelist life. He gets up before dawn, reads the news with breakfast, then works on a writing project for two hours. He edits and revises using his phone, stealing moments here and there on errands around town, for example. He does on-location research from his computer, taking walking tours using Google Earth.
Why does he do it? He knows it won’t make him famous.
“I wrote my first short story after my father passed in 1989,” he said, “a story about him and me, and I gave it to my mother as a Christmas present. I thought, ‘This is kind of therapeutic, to search who you are, where you’re heading.’” The ultimate artist, he believes, creates his art and destroys it, not feeling any need to show it to others.
He’s written five novels and has ideas for more. His sixth will be poetry, though, “so it really doesn’t count as a book,” he said.
He has never sent any of his work to agents or publishers, only to family; he self-published his work via Amazon. (He mailed me a copy, too.) He gets mixed reviews from his family. One of his adult children told him chapter five of a recent book was his worst.
“Within an hour, my oldest son contacted me and said, ‘Dad, chapter five is the best thing you ever wrote,’” Campana recalled.
He is in writing groups in North Carolina and learned from a workshop with Valerie Neiman (author of "To the Bones") that it’s OK to “excite” the reader. “They don’t want to read about their normal lives,” he learned.
In 2009, Campana taught at a dropout prevention program at Princess Place Preserve, for Matanzas High School. He was recommended for it by then-Superintendent Bill Delbrugge and hired by then-FPC Principal Jacob Oliva. Alongside teachers Mat Saunders and Hola Laquadera, they taught a variety of “credit recovery” classes and service learning projects.
Years later, he visited Princess Place and came up with the idea for a novel connected with the Russian history of the place. “The Blood We Truly Bleed” is about a Faberge Egg at Princess Place, with leaps in time and many “spinning plates,” metaphorically, that come together for what he hopes is an “exciting” ending.
Campana’s family remains his principle audience, and his children are adept at finding the autobiographical details in their literary football coach’s stories.
“My grandfather was a professional boxer,” Campana said. “My father also boxed at West Palm High School. I was taught to box."
The teen in his novel is “kind of an alter ego with me,” he said, adding that his father also exposed him to great books, inspiring a respect for writing from an early age and teaching him a lesson that remained with him through his years as an English teacher and as a football coach:
“Sometimes you’ve got to know how to box,” he said, “sometimes you’ve got to know how to read a poem.”
To buy the book, visit https://www.amazon.com/Blood-We-Truly-Bleed-Princess/dp/B09L4SCB6K.
Email [email protected].
