COACH
ALSO BY MICHAEL LEWIS
Liar’s Poker
The Money Culture
Pacific Rift
Losers
The New New Thing
Next
Moneyball
COACH
LESSONS ON THE GAME OF LIFE
MICHAEL LEWIS
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
New York London
Copyright © 2005 by Michael Lewis
Copyright © 2005 by Tabitha Soren
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lewis, Michael (Michael M.)
Coach: lessons on the game of life / Michael Lewis.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-0-393-33113-4
1. Baseball coaches—Louisiana—New Orleans—Anecdotes. 2. Lewis,
Michael (Michael M.)—Childhood and youth. 3. Conduct of life. I. Title.
GV873.L49 2005
796.323'092—dc22
2004026048
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com
W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.
Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT
FOR QUINN AND DIXIE
COACH
CONTENTS
BEGIN READING
PHOTO CREDITS
WHEN I was twelve I thought that when the New Orleans Times-Picayune ran a headline about the “struggle for control of the West Bank” it meant the other side of the Mississippi River. I thought that my shiny gold velour pants actually looked good. I kept a giant sack of Nabisco Chocolate Chip cookies under my bed so that they might be available in an emergency—a flood, say, or a hurricane—that made it harder to get to the grocery store. From the safe distance of forty-three, “twelve” looks less an age than a disease, and, for the most part, I’ve been able to forget all about it—not the events and the people, but the feelings that gave them meaning. But there are exceptions. A few people, and a few experiences, simply refuse to be trivialized by time. There are teachers with a rare ability to enter a child’s mind; it’s as if their ability to get there at all gives them the right to stay forever. I’d once had such a teacher. His name was Billy Fitzgerald, but everybody just called him Coach Fitz.
Forgetting Fitz was impossible—I’ll come to why in a moment—but avoiding him should have been a breeze. And for nearly thirty years I’d had next to nothing to do with him, or with the school where he’d coached me, the Isidore Newman School. But in just the past year, I heard two pieces of news about him that, taken together, made him sound suspiciously like something I never imagined he could be: a mystery. The first came last spring, when one of his former players, a forty-four-year-old New Orleans financier named David Pointer, had the idea of redoing the old school’s gym, and naming it for Coach Fitz. Pointer started calling around and found that hundreds of former players and their parents shared his enthusiasm for his old coach, and the money poured in. “The most common response from the parents,” said Pointer, “is that Fitz did all the hard work.”
Then came the second piece of news: during the summer baseball season, Fitz had given a speech to his current Newman players. It had been a long, depressing season: the kids, who during the school year had won the Louisiana state baseball championship, had lost interest. Fitz had grown increasingly upset with them until, after their final game, he’d gone around the room and explained what was wrong with each and every one of them. One player had skipped practice and lied about why; another blamed everyone but himself for his failure; a third had wasted his talent to pursue a life of ease; a fourth had agreed before the summer to lose fifteen pounds and instead gained ten. The players went home and complained about Fitz to their parents. Fathers of eight of them—half the baseball team—had then complained to the headmaster. Several of them wanted Fitz fired.
The past was no longer on speaking terms with the present. As the cash poured in from former players, and parents of former players, who wanted to name the gym for Fitz, his current players, and their parents, were doing their best to persuade the headmaster to get rid of him. I called a couple of the players involved, now college freshmen. Their fathers had been among the complainers, but they spoke of the episode as a kind of natural disaster beyond their control. One of them called his teammates “a bunch of whiners,” and explained that the reason Fitz was in such trouble was that “a lot of the parents are big money donors.”
I grew curious enough to fly down to New Orleans to see the headmaster. The Isidore Newman School is the sort of small, wealthy private school that every midsized American city has at least two of—one of them called Country Day. Most of the seventy or so kids in my class came from families that were affluent by local standards. I’m not sure how many of us thought we’d hit a triple, but quite a few had been born on third base. The school’s most striking trait was that it was founded in 1903 as a manual training school for Jewish orphans. About half of my classmates were Jewish, but I didn’t know any orphans. In any case, the current headmaster’s name was Scott McLeod, and, he said, the school he’d taken charge of in 1993 was different from the school I’d graduated from in 1978. “The parents’ willingness to intercede on the kids’ behalf, to take the kids’ side, to protect the kid, in a not-healthy way—there’s much more of that each year,” he said. “It’s true in sports, it’s true in the classroom. And it’s only going to get worse.” Fitz sat at the very top of the list of hardships that parents protected their kids from; indeed, the first angry call McLeod received after he became headmaster came from a father who was upset that Fitz wasn’t giving his son more playing time.
Since then the beleaguered headmaster had been like a man in an earthquake straddling a fissure. On one side he had this coach about whom former players cared intensely; on the other side he had these newly organized and outraged parents of current players. When I asked him why he didn’t simply ignore the parents, he said, quickly, that he couldn’t do that: the parents were his customers. (“They pay a hefty tuition,” he said. “That entitles them to a say.”) But when I asked him if he’d ever thought about firing Coach Fitz, he had to think hard about it. “The parents want so much for their kids to have success as they define it,” he said. “They want them to get into the best schools, and go on to the best jobs. And so if they see their kid fail—if he’s only on the JV, or the coach is yelling at him—somehow the school is responsible for that.” And while he didn’t see how he could ever “fire a legend,” he did see how he could change him. Several times in his tenure he had done something his predecessors never had done: summon Fitz to his office and insist that he “modify” his behavior. “And to his credit,” the headmaster said, “he did that.”
Obviously, whatever Fitz had done to modify his behavior hadn’t satisfied his critics. But then, from where he started, he had a long way to go.
WHEN we first laid eyes on him, we had no idea who he was, except that he played in the Oakland A’s farm system, and was spending his off-season, for reasons we couldn’t fathom, coaching eighth-grade basketball. We were in the seventh grade, and so, theoretically, indifferent to his existence. But the outdoor court on which we seventh graders practiced was just an oak tree apart from the eighth grade’s court. And within days of this new coach’s arrival, we found ourselves riveted by his performance. Our coach was a pleasant, mild-mannered fellow, and our practices were always pleasant, mild-mannered affairs. The ei
ghth grade’s practices were something else: a 6'4", 220-pound minor league catcher with the face of a street fighter hollering at the top of his lungs for three straight hours. Often as not, the eighth graders had done something to offend their new coach’s sensibilities, and he’d have them running wind sprints until they doubled over. When finally they collapsed, unable to run another step, he’d pull from his back pocket the collected works of Bobby Knight and begin reading aloud.
This was new. We didn’t know what to make of it. Sean put it best. Sean was Sean Tuohy, our best player and, therefore, our authority on pretty much everything. That year he’d lead us to a 32–0 record; a few years later, he’d lead our high school to a pair of Louisiana state championships; and a few years after that he’d take Ole Miss to its first-ever SEC basketball title. He’d set the SEC record for career assists (he still holds it) and get himself drafted by the New Jersey Nets—not bad for a skinny six-foot white kid in a game yet to establish a three-point line. Sean Tuohy had fight enough in him for three. But one afternoon during seventh-grade basketball practice, Sean looked over at this bizarre parallel universe being created on the next court by this large, ferocious man and said, “Oh God, please don’t ever let me get to the eighth grade.”
AS it turned out, eighth grade was inevitable, though by the time we got to it Fitz had moved on to coach the high school. My own experience of him began the summer after my freshman year, after he quit the Oakland A’s farm system and became the Newman baseball and basketball coach. I was fourteen, could pass for twelve, and of no obvious athletic use. It was the last night of the season. We were tied for first place with our opponents. The stands were packed. Sean Tuohy was on the mound, it was the bottom of the last inning, and we were up 2–1. (These things you don’t forget.) There was only one out, and the other team put runners on first and third, but, from my comfortable seat on the bench, it was hard to get too worked up about it. The luna moths jitterbugged in the stadium lights; the small children frolicked on the other side of the chain-link fence, waiting for foul balls; and there was no reason to believe this night would turn out any different than any other. The first rule of New Orleans life was that, whatever game he happened to be playing, Sean Tuohy won it. Then Fitz made his second trip of the inning to the pitcher’s mound, and all hell broke loose in the stands. Their fans started hollering at the umps: it was illegal to visit the mound twice in one inning. The umpires, wary as ever of being caught listening to fans, were clearly inclined to overlook the whole matter. But before they could, a famous New Orleans high school baseball coach, who carried a rule book on his person, waddled out from the stands onto the field and stopped the game. Him, the umps had to listen to: Sean Tuohy had to be yanked.
Out of one side of his mouth Fitz tore into the high school coach with the rule book—who scurried, rat-like, back to the safety of his seat; out of the other he shouted at me to warm up. The ballpark was already in an uproar, but the sight of me (I resembled a scoop of vanilla ice cream, with four pick-up sticks jutting out from it) sent their side into spasms of delight. Even I was aware that there was something faintly incredible about me in that situation. I represented an extreme example of our team’s general inability to intimidate the opposition. The other team’s dugout needed a shave; ours needed, at most, a bath. (Some unwritten rule in male adolescence dictates that the lower your parents’ tax bracket, the sooner you acquire facial hair.) As I walked out to the mound, their hairy, well-muscled players danced jigs in their dugout, their coaches high-fived, their fans celebrated and shouted lighthearted insults. The game, as far as they were concerned, was over. I might have been unnerved if I’d paid them any attention; but I was, at that moment, fixated on the only deeply frightening thing in the entire ballpark: Coach Fitz.
By then I had heard (from the eighth graders, I believe) all the Fitz stories. Billy Fitzgerald had been one of the best high school basketball and baseball players ever seen in New Orleans, and he’d gone on to play both sports at Tulane University. He’d been a first-round draft choice of the Oakland A’s. He was, we assumed, destined for stardom in the big leagues. But we never discussed Fitz’s accomplishments. We were far more interested in his intensity. In high school, when his team lost, Fitz had refused to board the bus; he walked, in his catcher’s gear, from the ballpark on one end of New Orleans to his home on the other. Back then he’d played against another New Orleans superstar, Rusty Staub. Staub, on second base, made the mistake of taunting Fitz’s pitcher. Fitz raced out from behind home plate and, in full catcher’s gear, chased the terrified future All-Star around the field. I’d heard another, similar story about Fitz and Pete Maravich, the basketball legend. When Fitz’s Tulane team played Maravich’s LSU team, Fitz, a tenacious defender, had naturally been assigned to guard Maravich. Pistol Pete had rung him up for 66 points, but before he’d finished, he too had made the mistake of taunting Fitz. It was, as the eighth graders put it, a two-hit fight: Fitz hit Pistol Pete, and Pistol Pete hit the floor. But it got better: Maravich’s father, Press, happened to be the LSU basketball coach. When he saw Fitz deck his son, he’d run out and jumped on the pile. Fitz had made the cover of Sports Illustrated, with Pete in a headlock and Press on his back.
And now he was standing on the pitcher’s mound, erupting with a Vesuvian fury, waiting for me to arrive. When I did, he handed me the ball and said, in effect, Put it where the sun don’t shine. I looked at their players, hugging and mugging and dancing and jeering. No, they did not appear to suspect that I was going to put it anyplace unpleasant. Then Fitz leaned down, put his hand on my shoulder, and, thrusting his face right up to mine, became as calm as the eye of a storm. It was just him and me now; we were in this together. I have no idea where the man’s intention ended and his instincts took over, but the effect of his performance was to say: there’s no one I’d rather have out here in this life-or-death situation. And I believed him!
As the other team continued to erupt with glee, Fitz glanced at their runner on third base, a reedy fellow with an aspiring mustache, and said, “Pick him off.” Then he walked off and left me all alone.
If Zeus had landed on the pitcher’s mound and issued the command, it would have had no greater impact. The chances of picking a man off third base are never good, and even worse in a close game, when everyone’s paying attention. But this was Fitz talking; and I can still recall, thirty years later, the sensation he created in me. I didn’t have words for it then, but I do now: I am about to show the world, and myself, what I can do.
At the time, this was a wholly novel thought for me. I’d spent the previous school year racking up C-minuses, picking fights with teachers, and thinking up new ways to waste my time on earth. Worst of all, I had the most admirable, loving parents, on whom I could plausibly blame nothing. What was wrong with me? I didn’t know. To say I was “confused” would be to put it kindly; “inert” would be closer to the truth. In the three years before I met Coach Fitz, the only task for which I exhibited any enthusiasm was sneaking out of the house at two in the morning to rip hood ornaments off cars—you needed a hacksaw and two full nights to cut the winged medallion off a Bentley. Now this fantastically persuasive man was insisting, however improbably, that I might be some other kind of person. A hero.
The kid with the fuzz on his upper lip bounced crazily off third base, oblivious to the fact that he represented a new solution to an adolescent life crisis. The ball was in the third baseman’s glove before he knew what happened. He just flopped around in the dirt as our third baseman applied the tag. I struck out the next guy, and we won the game. Afterward, Coach Fitz called us together for a brief sermon. Hot with rage at the coach with the rule book—the ballpark still felt like it was about to explode—he told us all that there was a quality no one within five miles of this place even knew about, called “guts,” that we all embodied. He threw me the game ball, and said he’d never in all his life seen such courage on the pitcher’s mound. He’d caught Catfish Hunter and Rolli
e Fingers and a lot of other big league pitchers—but who were they?
A few weeks later, when school started again, I was told the headmaster wanted to see me in his office. I didn’t need directions. (My most recent trip, a few months earlier, had come after I turned on an English teacher and asked, “Are you always so pleasant, or is this just an especially good day for you?”) But this time the headmaster had surprising news. Fitz had just spoken to him, he said. There might be hope for me after all.
But there wasn’t, yet. I had thought the point of this whole episode was simple: winning is everything.
I CONFESS that the current headmaster didn’t clarify matters for me. Fitz had modified his behavior—he was, the headmaster agreed, mellower than ever—and yet his intensity was more loathed than ever. Anyway, his unmodified behavior is the reason his former players hoped to name the gym for him. The school had given me a list of people, most of whom I didn’t know, who had played for Fitz. I had called up about twenty of them, to ask them how they felt now about the experience. I knew there must be people who never reconciled themselves to Fitz—who still didn’t understand what he was trying to do for them—but they were hard to find. The collective response of Fitz’s former players could be fairly summarized in a sentence: Fitz changed my life. All of them had their own favorite Fitz stories, and it’s worth hearing at least one of them, to get their general flavor. Here is Philip Skelding, Rhodes scholar and twenty-nine-year-old student at the Harvard Medical School, who played basketball for Fitz:
Coach: Lessons on the Game of Life Page 1