For Rob Ford, football is not like other subjects. It’s more important, closer to the things he feels are more essential in life than politics, policy, or even policing.

That’s one reason he so often employs gridiron metaphors to describe those other things: pounding the ball down the field five yards at a time at council, scrambling to avoid a tackle in the city manager’s office, carrying the ball on transit. Football is a language he uses to translate so much of the rest of life’s business into something he can understand.

Ford believes the football field is a place where character is developed and demonstrated, where troubled men learn about self-discipline and responsibility; not just a sport, but a vocation that can change the course of a life.

That’s why the revelations of how he behaved as a football coach may tell us more about Ford, as even he understands himself, than any of the other scandals he’s endured. This is the real stuff. Being mayor is something he does; football is who he is.

Ford always pointed to his football coaching as a kind of social work he performed, taking poor kids who’d otherwise be, he said, “dead or in jail” and preparing them for university. That’s why, until he was banned from coaching in the Catholic high school system, he unapologetically skipped work in the mayor’s office for games and practices, got his office staff to volunteer for his team, even almost got kicked out of his job over his stubborn boosterism of his high school football foundation.

Whatever his other faults, and they are many, he and his brother would always insist we could just look at his coaching to see the essential truth about his character.

Well, here it is, according to the documents of the Catholic school board that finally forced him out, as reported by Daniel Dale in the Star yesterday: he called his players “----suckers” when they displayed an unsatisfactory effort, and had them roll around on the ground in goose feces as a punishment.

He showed up to coach a practice visibly intoxicated (to the point of being incoherent in a meeting immediately afterward). He promised to pay for new helmets and a road trip, then refused to do so when the bills came due.

He baldly refused to follow school rules about practice times and use of facilities. At one unauthorized practice, a player wound up with a broken collar bone.

Another time, Ford threatened a fellow coach — a teacher at Don Bosco — shouting in front of students, “I will kick your ass, F you, you’re a p---y.” He paraded his players in public for the media without permission from their parents, and used them as a human shield against it on another occasion. You get the idea.

And as we already knew, the final straw was his use of the team for PR, specifically, his habit of falsely portraying his players as orphaned feral gangsters only prevented from rampaging wild in the mean streets of Etobicoke through the careful care and discipline of their beloved Coach Ford.

But we know now, if we didn’t before, that he was the wild one. That the role model he provided his students was the same brand of threatening, bullying, belligerent disregard for both rules and consequences, and childish entitlement that we’ve come to know at city hall and in his personal life.

That’s how he approaches everything, of course, whether it’s relationships with councillors, city ethics rules, the policies he proposes to revise, or the laws he was elected to uphold and the police who enforce them. Should we be surprised that it’s also how he treated his job as a mentor to youth? Maybe not.

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But football, we were told, was supposed to be different. Redeeming. Evidence of selflessness, dedication, and discipline. But that’s not Rob Ford.

The school board finally concluded in May 2013 that he is unfit to lead. Turns out football isn’t so much different from other subjects after all.