Coach: Lessons on the Game of Life by Lewis Michael

Author:Lewis, Michael [Lewis, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2005-04-17T00:00:00+00:00

Not long after that, the English teacher who also had the misfortune to experience me as a freshman held me after class to say that, by some happy miracle, I was not recognizably the same human being I’d been a year earlier. “What has happened?” she asked. It was hard to explain.

I HADN’T been to a Newman baseball game since I last played in one. On this sunny late-winter day, Fitz had arranged for his defending state champions to play a better team from a bigger school, twenty miles outside New Orleans. Fitz’s hair had gone gray, and he was carrying a few more pounds, but he retained his chief attribute: the room still felt more pressurized simply because he was in it. He was a man who had become an idea, and he was able to seem as much like an idea as a man even when he was standing right in front of you. Which he was. Before an afternoon baseball game he tried to explain to me how he had become so routinely controversial. “I definitely have a penchant for crossing the line,” he said, “and some parents definitely think I’m out of control.” The biggest visible change in his coaching life was a thicker veneer of professionalism. His players now had fancy batting cages, better weight rooms, the latest training techniques, and scouting reports on opposing players. What they didn’t have, most of them, was a meaningful relationship with their coach. “I can’t get inside them anymore,” he said. “They don’t get it. But most kids don’t get it. The trouble is every time I try the parents get in the way.”

By “it” he did not mean the importance of winning or even, exactly, of trying hard. What he meant was neatly captured on a sheet of paper he held in his hand, which he intended to photocopy and hand out to his players, as the keynote for one of his sermons. The paper contained a quote from Lou Piniella, the legendary baseball manager: HE WILL NEVER BE A TOUGH COMPETITOR. HE DOESN’T KNOW HOW TO BE COMFORTABLE WITH BEING UNCOMFORTABLE. “It” was the importance of battling one’s way through all the easy excuses life offered for giving up. Fitz had a gift for addressing this psychological problem, but he was no longer permitted to use it. “The trouble is,” he said, “every time I try the parents get in the way.” About these parents, he knows more than I ever imagined. Alcoholism, troubled marriages, overbearing fathers—he is disturbingly alert to problems in his players’ home lives. (Did he know all this stuff about us?)

Fitz’s office wasn’t the office of a coach who wanted others to know of his many triumphs. There were no trophies or plaques, though he had won enough of them to fill five offices. Other than a few old newspaper clips about his four children, now grown, there were few mementos. What he did keep was books—lots of them. He was always something of a closet intellectual, though, as a boy, I was barely aware of this side of him.

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