LockerRoom: A story. Sort of about sport, sort of about something else.

A few years ago, my life already being about as glamorous as a red-carpet walk with Dame Edna Everidge, I provided some small bit of help on a documentary which actually got made and shown on real screens and real TV channels. For a while afterwards we looked at houses up around the Monterey area of California, as I fancied Clint Eastwood as a neighbour. The offers never came flooding in, however. Stuck to the day job. Write to Clint at Christmas.

Coach was made by Liam McGrath, who lists among many other achievements the documentary Southpaw, a film about Francis Barrett, the boxer and traveller from Hillside in Galway who fought for Ireland in the 1996 Olympic Games.

The idea for Coach was simple. The documentary sampled a slice of the lives of two high-school coaches working in New York City. Coach Martin Jacobsen was in charge of the soccer programme at Martin Luther King High in Manhattan. Coach Larry Major looked after basketball in Paul Robeson High in Brooklyn.

Coach had scenes of a sporting nature without really being a sports movie. It was a film about people. The kids coached by Martin Jacobsen and Larry Major hadn't so much reached the last-chance saloon as been born into it. Sport was about the only way out.

Coach followed the two men through the latter stages of their seasons, and whether you like sport or not Liam's film was oddly compulsive, not least because Liam has a gentle, empathetic eye when it comes to human drama.

Martin Luther King High School occupies a prime piece of real estate up on the west side of Central Park and exists cheek to jowl with the arts school which was the model for Fame. Proximity is about all the two schools have in common.

Dubbed "Horror High" by the New York tabloids, MLK is a great liberal intention which has been disavowed. It was built so that the children of the wealthy midtown Manhattan folk could sit in classrooms with black faces who would be bused in from the boroughs. The white kids would emerge as well-rounded liberals. The black kids would see pathways opening up into the great white land.

All fine, except that the whites fled, leaving behind a school which has its troubles and which has its glories.

Of the latter, the greatest is Jacobsen's soccer programme, which has won the New York championship just about every year since the Dutch bought Manhattan off the Indians.

Jacobsen is a feisty New Yorker and a fascinating man - a former addict, a former drug dealer, a bankrupt and sufferer from hepatitis. His soccer programme is his life and his personal redemption.

It's no ordinary scheme. He takes immigrant kids in at one end of the programme, finds them homes and part-time jobs, and coaches them. At the end of their time in MLK High they invariably go on to soccer scholarships at third level. These are kids for whom America would otherwise offer no hope. They are saved by an amazing guy who saved himself.

Across in Brooklyn in Paul Robeson High, the problems are just as pronounced, and Coach Larry Major cut an equally sympathetic figure. The kids at Robeson play basketball, and in the documentary Coach Major is struggling to hold the programme together.

The cameras arrived into Robeson not long after the school had lost the city final. Coach Major had been promoted to athletic director and had decided he would like to return to basics. He had just opted to coach his school's junior team with a view to building for the future.

Dealing with the younger kids would pose a whole different set of problems for a coach who had more experience in the school than the kids had years on the planet.

One kid, a 14-year-old called Basil Grant, felt that his future lay in basketball. With the glitter of Madison Square Garden visible just over the river, Basil's dream was a common enough one.

Unfortunately, Basil and Coach Major were finding it difficult to see eye-to-eye. What do you do when you are 14 years old and in such a cul-de-sac? You come round. You could see in Larry Major's face how much he wanted the kid to come round, to get straight, to get, as the Americans say, with the programme.

After his promotion, Major hired ex-pupil Todd Myles to take over his coaching duties with the senior basketball team.

The film dipped in and out of the stories of a season. Basil and his internal struggle was one strand. Todd Myles, who enjoyed a short pro career in China, was another.

The school's best prospect was a senior called Malcolm Grant. His family had an air of desperation about them. Malcolm was their only hope of a ticket out of the horror that was their life.

In the end, though, as the film's title suggests, Coach was all about the vocational work of two extraordinary coaches.

This weekend the lives of Martin Jacobsen and Larry Major, which ran briefly parallel in different parts of New York City, achieved a kind of grim reverse symmetry.

Jacobsen, whose life was saved basically by the ability to teach and coach, battles on this autumn for yet another city championship. The city has been eyeing the choice real estate that his school is built on and want to move him out. Ill health nibbles at his body. He soldiers on. This is the good time.

For Larry Major it is all over. He was 45 years old and had a five-year-old son but was found dead in his car opposite a football field in a park in Queens on Saturday morning. He had a gunshot wound to the face. A shotgun and a suicide note were found in the car with him.

The details are sad and tragic. Back in 2002 (coincidentally, when Coach was being filmed), Larry Major began a sexual relationship with a 14-year-old student. The relationship continued until this April. A while ago, the girl involved told a friend who told her to tell the police. Larry Major was arrested last Wednesday. On Thursday he was charged with rape and child endangerment and released on bail of $25,000.

He had been a teacher for 21 years, or all his adult life.

So how do you balance the good a man does in his life with the damage he does or the mess he leaves behind? Is it all debits and credits, or can you tidy the account before you go? Martin Jacobsen redeemed himself with a remarkable career in coaching. Larry Major did all the good stuff before he did his crime.

For students past and present in Paul Robeson High School, Larry Major was a beloved figure and mentor. Several were quoted in the New York newspapers as saying Major was like a father to them.

And yet the abuse of trust involved in Larry Major's story is chilling, especially in a man so tuned to the needs of the kids he was surrounded with every day.

And the ending, lonely and ruined in a public park alone with a gun and a note, spreads the damage exponentially. The scars left for Larry's victim and his family got all the deeper on Saturday.

Maybe for all that we tell kids about sport being good for building their character, all sport can do is reveal character.

And character, in the end, will always be fate.