Coach: Lessons on the Game of Life

by Lewis, Michael

  I wasn’t a natural athlete—I had to work at it. I was the only starter whose scoring average was lower than his GPA. It was my junior year—the first year we won the state championship—and no one thought we’d be any good. We just finished in second place in the John Ehret tournament, and we had a long quiet bus ride home—because we all lived with some intimidation from Fitz. When we got back to the gym, he was pretty quiet in his demeanor and jingling the coins in his pocket, as he always would. He had our runner-up trophy in his hand. “You know what I think about second place?” he said. “Here’s what I think about second place.” And he slammed the trophy against the floor and we all flinched and covered our eyes, because these tiny shattered pieces were flying all over the place. The little man from the top of the trophy landed in the lap of the guy next to me. I loved that moment. We took the little man and put him up on top of the air conditioner. We touched the little man on our way out of the locker room, before every game. Second place: yeah, that wasn’t our goal, either…. I still think about Fitz. In moments when my own discipline is slipping, I will have flashbacks of him.

  The more I looked into it, the more mysterious this new twist in Fitz’s coaching career became. No parent ever confronted Fitz directly. They did their work behind his back. The closest to a direct complaint that I can tease from the parents I speak with comes from a father of a current player. “You know about what Fitz did to Peyton Manning, don’t you?” he said. Manning, now the quarterback of the Indianapolis Colts, and MVP of the NFL, played basketball and baseball at Newman for Fitz. Fitz, the story went, had benched Manning for skipping basketball practice, and Manning had challenged him. They’d had words, maybe even come to blows, and Manning had left the basketball team. And while he had continued to play baseball for Fitz, their relationship was widely taken as proof, by those who sought it, that Fitz was out of control. “You ought to read Peyton’s book,” the disgruntled father says. “It’s all in there.”

  And it is. Written with his father, Archie, Peyton Manning’s memoir is, understandably, mostly about football. But it isn’t his high school football coach that Manning dwells on in his memoir: it’s Fitz. He goes on for pages about his old baseball coach, and does indeed, in the end, reveal what Fitz did to him:

  One of the things I had to learn growing up was toughness, because it doesn’t seem to be something you can count on being born with. Dad says he may have told me, “Peyton, you have to stand up for this or that,” but the resolve that gets it done is something you probably have to appreciate first in others. Coach Fitz was a major source for mine, and I’m grateful.

  Of course you should never trust a memoir. And so I called Archie Manning, who laughed and said, “Fitz and Peyton had their issues. But I have a theory. The reason they locked horns is that they are exactly alike. Peyton’s just as intense as Fitz is. But you should call Peyton and hear what he has to say.” Peyton Manning might be the highest-paid player in pro football but, on the subject of Fitz, he has no sense of the value of his time. “As far as the respect and admiration I feel for the man,” Manning said, “I couldn’t put it into words. Just incredibly strong. For me, personally, he prepared me for so much of what I faced at the college and pro level. Unlike some coaches—for whom it’s all about winning and losing—Coach Fitz was trying to make men out of people. I think he prepares you for life. And, if you want my opinion, the people who are screwing up high school sports are the parents. The parents who want their son to be the next Michael Jordan. Or the parent who beats up the coach, or gets into a fight in the stands. Here’s a coach who is so intense. Yet he’s never laid a hand on anybody.”

  It was true. Fitz never laid a hand on anyone. He didn’t need to. He had other ways of getting our attention.

  IT had been nine months since I’d established, to my satisfaction, my heroic qualities. I was now pitching for the varsity, and we now had explicit training rules: no smoking, no drinking, no drugs, no staying out late. We signed a contract saying as much, but Fitz had too much of a talent for melodrama to leave our commitment to baseball so cut and dried. There were the written rules; and there were the rules. Over Easter vacation half of adolescent New Orleans decamped for the Florida beaches, where sex, along with a lot of other things, was unusually obtainable. Fitz forbade anyone who played for him from going to Florida and, to help them resist temptation, held early-morning practices every day. Once he discovered that two of our players had, in the dead of night, between morning practices, driven the eight hours to Florida and back. He herded us all into the locker room and said that while he couldn’t prove his case, he knew that some of us had strayed from the path, and that he hoped the culprits got sand in an awkward spot where it would hurt for the rest of their lives. (He put it a bit more colorfully than that, and somewhere in New Orleans there are two forty-three-year-old men who flinch whenever they see a beach.)

  Graduating from Babe Ruth to the varsity with only the slightest physical justification (I now resembled less a scoop of vanilla ice cream than a rounder Hobbit) meant coping with an out-of-control hormonal arms race. A few of our players had sprouted sideburns; but the enemy retaliated by growing terrifying little goatees and showing up at games with wives and, on one shocking occasion, children. I still had no muscles, and no facial hair, but I did have my own odor. I smelled, pretty much all the time, like Ben-Gay. I wore the stuff on my perpetually sore right shoulder and elbow. I wore it, also, on the bill of my cap, where Fitz had taught me to put it, to generate the grease for a spitball that might just compensate for my pathetic fastball. Everywhere I went that year, I emitted a vaguely medicinal vapor; and it is the smell of Ben-Gay I associate with what happened next.

  What happened next is that, during Mardi Gras break, I left New Orleans with my parents for a week of vacation. I had thought that if I was a baseball success, and I was becoming one, that was enough. But it wasn’t; success, to Fitz, was a process. Life as he led it, and expected us to lead it, had less to do with trophies than with sacrifice, in the name of some larger purpose: baseball. By missing a full week of practices over Mardi Gras, I had just violated some sacred, but unwritten, rule. Now I was back on the mound, a hunk of Ben-Gay drooping from the brim of my cap, struggling to relocate myself and my curveball. I didn’t have the nerve to throw the spitter. I’d walked the first two batters I’d faced, and was pitching nervously to the third.

  Ball two.

  As I pitched I had an uneasy sensation—on bad days I can still feel it, like a bum knee—of having strayed from The Fitz Way. But I had no evidence of Fitz’s displeasure; he hadn’t said anything about the missed practices. Then his voice boomed out of our dugout.

  “Where was Michael Lewis during Mardi Gras?”

  I did my best not to look over, but out of the corner of my eye I could see him. He was pacing the dugout. I threw another pitch.

  Ball three.

  “Everyone else was at practice. But where was Michael Lewis?”

  I was now pitching with one eye on the catcher’s mitt and the other on our dugout.

  Ball four.

  The bases were now loaded. Another guy in need of a shave came to the plate.

  “I’ll tell you where Michael Lewis was: skiing!”

  Skiing, in 1976, for a fifteen-year-old New Orleanian, counted as an exotic activity. Being exposed as a vacation skier on a New Orleans baseball field in 1976 was as alarming as being accused of wearing pink silk underpants in a maximum security prison. Then and there, on the crabgrass of Slidell, Louisiana, Coach Fitz packed into a single word what he usually required an entire speech to say: privilege corrupts. You were always doing what money could buy instead of what duty demanded. You were always skiing. As a skier, you developed a conviction, buttressed by your parents’ money, that life was meant to be easy. That, when difficulty arose, you could just hire someone to deal with it. That nothing mattered so much that you should suffer for it.

  But now, suddenly, something did matter so muc
h that I should suffer for it: baseball. Or, more exactly: Fitz! The man was pouring his heart and soul into me, and demanding in return only that I pour myself into the game. He’d earned the right to holler at me whatever he wanted to holler. I got set to throw another pitch, in the general direction of the strike zone.

  “Can someone please tell me why Michael Lewis thinks it’s okay to leave town and go…and go…and go…?”

  Please, don’t say skiing, I recall thinking, as the ball left my hand. Or, if you must say skiing, don’t shout it. Just then, the batter hit a sharp one-hopper back to the mound. I raised my glove to start the face-saving double play at the plate, but my ears were straining to catch Fitz’s every word. And then, abruptly, his shouting stopped.

  When I regained consciousness, I was on my back, blinking up at a hazy, not terribly remorseful Fitz. The baseball had broken my nose in five places. Oddly enough, I did not feel wronged. I felt, in an entirely new way, cared for. On the way to the hospital, to get my nose fixed, I told my mother that the next time the family went skiing—or anyplace else, for that matter—they’d be going without me. After the doctor pieced my nose back together, he told me that if I still wanted to play baseball I had to do it behind a mask. Grim as it all sounds, I don’t believe I had ever been happier in my adolescent life. The rest of that season, when I walked out to the pitcher’s mound, I resembled a rounder Hobbit with a bird-cage on his face; but I’d never been so filled with a sense of purpose. Immediately, I had a new taste for staying after baseball practice, for extra work. I became, in truth, something of a zealot, and it didn’t take long to figure out how much better my life could be if I applied this new zeal acquired on a baseball field to the rest of it. It was as if this baseball coach had reached inside me, found a rusty switch marked Turn On Before Attempting To Use, and flipped it.

  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. But I remember: when I first met him, he taught eighth-grade science and was working his way toward a PhD in biology. There were other clues that, as easily as he could be stereotyped as The Intense Coach, he had other dimensions. He was a devoted father. His wife, Peggy, was so pretty she made us all blush; and, more to the point, she didn’t seem to be the slightest bit intimidated by her husband. He had friends who didn’t bite, and he even made small talk. But I’d paid no attention to any of this. All I knew was that he cared about the way we played a game in a way we’d never seen anyone care about anything. All I had wanted from him back then was his intensity. Now I simply wanted something less relevant, the truth.

  “What really happened in your fight with Pete Maravich?” I asked him.

  And he laughed. He never beat up Pete Maravich. (The truly brave thing he had done was ask his Tulane coach for the job of guarding Maravich.) And though he did appear with Maravich on the cover of Sports Illustrated, he was guarding him, not throttling him. He never chased around after Rusty Staub either. Why would he be chasing Rusty Staub? he wondered. They’d gone to the same school. Fitz was an eighth grader when Staub was a senior. He never walked home after his high school team lost—they seldom lost—though he had, once, at Tulane. (“I got to the parish line and thought, hmm, is this really a good idea?”) So where did they come from, these stories we told each other? They came from the imaginations of fourteen-year-old boys, in search of something even well-to-do parents couldn’t provide.

  Then I noticed: on one of his bookshelves Fitz still kept an old black-and-white photograph of Sean Tuohy leaping into Fitz’s arms after their final, improbable state basketball championship. I asked him, “Do you remember the time that summer when you went out to the mound one too many times, all hell broke loose in the stands, and you had to pull Sean out of the game?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “That was a lifetime ago.”

  A moment that had prospered in my memory for thirty years was, for him, just one more forgettable piece of coaching history. I had been just another white rabbit he’d pulled out of a hat. But the wonder wasn’t that the trick meant more to the white rabbit than to the magician; the wonder was that the magician was no longer permitted to look for white rabbits inside empty hats. When I asked Fitz how he’d adapted to parents sitting on his shoulder as he tried to coach their children, there was a hint of bitterness in his reply. “I’ve had to learn that you can’t save everybody,” he said.

  “What do you mean ‘save’?”

  That gave him pause, and a new expression—of a man thinking about how what he said might sound if it was repeated. “I don’t mean I can save their lives or their careers, or anything like that,” he said. “I mean that some of them will never understand the responsibility they have to their teams and themselves.”

  I had a different recollection of the sort of salvation he was aiming at. I recalled a man trying to give boys a sense that their lives could be something other than ordinary.

  “I can’t talk like that anymore,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “Look,” he said. “All this is about a false sense of self-esteem. It’s now bestowed on kids at birth. It’s not earned. If I were to jump all over you today, you would be highly insulted and deeply offended. You would not get that I cared about you.”

  I never had any great sense of what Fitz made of the world outside his baseball program. Not much, I’d guess. He was running
an organization that, like the Franciscan order or the Marine Corps, depended on a more difficult system of values than that of the greater society. In the corner of his office lay, haphazardly, an old stack of inspirational signs, hung by Fitz in the boys’ locker room, and removed for the current renovation—the one that will leave the gym named for him. I picked up one and brushed away the dust: What is to give light must endure burning—Viktor Frankl.

  He laughed. “I don’t think we’ll be putting that one back up.”

  Later, at the ballpark, a few of the fathers who had complained about Fitz clustered behind home plate. On the other end of the otherwise empty bleachers from them sat another man. His name was Stan Bleich, and he was a cardiologist who had grown up in Brooklyn. Both details were significant. He wasn’t, like most of the dads, a lawyer. And he’d lived in New Orleans only twenty years, so by local standards he was an arriviste. An outsider. “I’ve had three kids go through Newman. I’ve thirty-nine school years of Newman parent life,” he says. “And I’ve never once called the headmaster.”

  That changed last summer. One of the fathers, upset about Fitz’s speech to his son, called Stan to encourage him to join the group, and file a formal complaint. Instead, Stan went to see the headmaster and make the case for the defense. “The story had gotten so exaggerated,” he says now. “One parent said, ‘Fitz called my kid fat.’ But all Fitz said to that kid was, ‘You promised me you’d lose fifteen pounds and you gained ten.’” Bleich said the headmaster told him that, because of Fitz, the kids left with a bad taste in their mouths. “I said, wait a minute, shouldn’t they leave with a bad taste in their mouths? They skipped practice. They didn’t try. The game when Fitz missed his grandson’s christening, three of the kids took off for Paris.” Stan said Fitz reminded him of a college professor he had—and was grateful that he had. “Ninety percent was not an A. One hundred percent was an A. Ninety percent was an F.” He motions to the group of fathers on the other end of the bleachers. “A couple of those guys won’t talk to me,” he says, “because I defended Fitz. But what can I do? My goal in life is not for my son to play college ball. Fitz has made my kid a better person, not just a better athlete. He’s taught him that if he works at it, anything he wants, it’s there for him.”