Coach: Lessons on the Game of Life

by Lewis, Michael

  What was odd about this little speech—and, as the game began, became glaringly apparent—is that Stan Bleich’s son was, far and away, the team’s best player. At last count more than forty colleges were recruiting Jeremy Bleich to play baseball for them—and he was still only a junior. The question wasn’t whether he would be able to play Division I college ball; the question was: would he skip college to sign with the Yankees out of high school? He was a sixteen-year-old left-handed pitcher with a good fastball, great command, a big league changeup, and charm to burn. He had no obvious baseball social deformity, other than his love for his coach, but that fact alone alienated him from his teammates. The first baseman has recently pelted the Bleich home with eggs. The older kids on the team poked fun at Jeremy, but, in keeping with the spirit of their insurrection, never directly. “I’ve never had anyone say anything to my face,” Jeremy tells me later. “It’s all behind my back. Like, last year, they started calling me ‘J. Fitz.’ I’m fifteen years old and the seniors are making fun of me. I had no idea how to deal with it. They don’t like me because I work hard? Because I care about it? I’m like, I can’t change that.” He never knows exactly what the other players might be saying about him, but he knows what they say about Fitz: “They think his intensity is ridiculous.” And maybe they do. Of course, one fringe benefit of laughing at intensity is that it enables you to ignore the claims a new kind of seriousness makes upon you.

  An invisible line ran from the parents’ desire to minimize their children’s discomfort to the choices the children make in their lives. A week later, two days before the start of their regular season, eight players got caught drinking. All but one of them—two team captains, two members of the school’s honor committee—lied about it before confessing under duress. After he’d handed out the obligatory, school-sanctioned two-week suspensions to eight players, Fitz gathered the entire team for a sharp, little talk. Not two days ago he had the patience for a long sermon, about the dangers of getting a little too good at displacing responsibility. (“You’re gonna lose. You’re gonna have someone else to blame for it. But you’re gonna lose. Is that what you want?”) Now he had only the patience for a vivid threat: “I’m going to run you until you hate me.” The first phone call, a few hours later, came from the mother of the third baseman, who said her son had drank only “one sip of a margarita,” and so shouldn’t be made to run. She was followed by another father who wanted to know why his son, the second baseman, wasn’t starting at shortstop instead.

  THERE was always a question whether Fitz controlled his temper, or his temper controlled him, or even if it mattered. In any case, the summer of 1976 had been especially uncomfortable. Fitz had entered us in a better league, with bigger schools. Defeat followed listless defeat, until the night of this final Fitz story. We had just lost by some truly spectacular score. Twice at the end of the game he had shouted at our base runners to slide, and, perhaps not seeing the point, when down 15–2, in getting scraped, or even dirty, they’d gone in standing up. Afterward, at eleven o’clock or so, we piled off the bus and into the gym. Before we could undress, Fitz said, “We’re going out back.” Out back of the gym was a sorry excuse for a playing field. The dirt was packed as hard as asphalt and speckled with shell shards, glass, bottle caps, and god knows what else. Fitz lined us up behind first base and explained we were going to practice running to third. When we got there, we were to slide headfirst into the base. This, he said, would teach us to get down when he said to get down. Then he vanished into the darkness. A few moments later we heard his voice, from the general vicinity of third base. One by one, our players took off. In the beginning there was some grumbling, but before long the only sound was of Fitz, spotting a boy coming at him out of the darkness, shouting “Hit it!”

  Over and over again we circled the bases, finishing with a headfirst slide onto, in effect, concrete. We ran and slid on that evil field, until we bled and gasped for breath. The boy in front of me, a sophomore new to Fitz, began to cry. I remember thinking, absurdly, “you’re too young for this.” Finally, Fitz decided we’d had enough, and ordered us back inside. Back in the light we marveled at the evening’s most visible consequence: ripped, muddy, and bloody uniforms. We undressed and began to throw them into the laundry baskets—until Fitz stopped us. “We’re not washing them,” he said. “Not until we win.”

  Well, we were never going to win. We were out of our league. For the next few weeks—seven games—we wore increasingly foul and bloody and torn uniforms. We lost our ability to see our own filth; our appearance could be measured only by its effect on others. In that small community of people who cared about high school baseball, word spread of this team that never bathed. People came to the ballpark just to see us get off the bus. Opposing teams, at first amused, became alarmed, and then, I thought, just a tiny bit scared. You could see it in their eyes, the universal fear of the lunatic. Heh, heh, heh, those eyes said, nervously, this is just a game, right? The guys on the other teams came to the ballpark to play baseball—at which they just happened to be naturally superior. They played with one eye on the bar or the beach they were off to after the game. We alone were on this hellish quest for self-improvement.

  After each loss we rode the bus back to the gym in silence. When we arrived, Fitz gave another of his sermons. They were always a little different but they never strayed far from a general theme: What It Means To Be A Man. What it meant to be a man was that you struggled against your natural instinct to run away from adversity. You battled. “You go to war with me, and I’ll go to war with you,” he loved to say. “Jump on my back.” The effect of his words on the male adolescent mind was greatly enhanced by their delivery. It’s funny that after all these years I can recall only snippets of what Fitz said, but I can recall, in slow motion, everything he broke. There was the orange water cooler, cracked with a single swing of an aluminum baseball bat. There was a large white wall clock that had hung in the Newman locker room for decades—until he busted it with a single throw of a catcher’s mitt.

  The breaking of things was a symptom; the disease was the sheer effort the man put into the job of making us better. He was always the first to arrive, and always the last to leave, and if any kid wanted to stay late for extra work, Fitz stayed with him. Before one game he became seriously ill. He climbed on the bus in a cold sweat. It was an hour’s drive to the ballpark that day and he had the driver stop twice, on the highway, so he could get off and vomit. He remained sick right through the game, and all the way home. When we arrived at the gym, he paused to vomit, then delivered yet another impassioned speech. A few nights later, after a game, in the middle of what must be the grubbiest losing streak in baseball history, I caught him walking. I was driving home, through a bad neighborhood, when I spotted him. Here he was, in one of America’s murder capitals, inviting trouble. It was miles from the gym to his house, and he owned a car, yet he was hoofing it. What the hell is he doing? I thought, and then I realized: He’s walking home! Just the way they said he’d done in high school, every time his team lost! It was as if he was doing penance for our sins.

  And then something happened: we changed. We ceased to be embarrassed about our condition. We ceased, at least for a moment, to fear failure. We became, almost, a little proud. We were a bad baseball team united by a common conviction: those other guys might be better than us, but there is no chance they could endure Coach Fitz. The games became closer; the battles more fiercely fought. We were learning what it felt like to lay it all on the line. Those were no longer hollow words; they were a deep feeling. And finally, somehow, we won. No one who walked into our locker room as we danced around and hurled our uniforms into the washing machine, and listened to the speech Fitz gave about our fighting spirit, would have known they were looking at a team that now stood 1–12.

  We listened to the man because he had something to tell us, and us alone. Not how to play baseball, though he did that better than anyone. Not how to win, though winning was wonder
ful. Not even how to sacrifice. He was teaching us something far more important: how to cope with the two greatest enemies of a well-lived life, fear and failure. To make the lesson stick, he made sure we encountered enough of both. What he knew—and I’m not sure he’d ever consciously thought it, but he knew it all the same—was that we’d never conquer the weaknesses within ourselves. We’d never drive the worst of ourselves away for good. We’d never win. The only glory to be had would be in the quality of the struggle.

  I never could have explained at the time what he had done for me, but I felt it in my bones all the same. When I came home one day my senior year, and found the letter saying that, somewhat improbably, I had been admitted to Princeton University, I ran right back to school to tell Coach Fitz. Then I grew up.

  I’D gone back to New Orleans again. The Times-Picayune had just picked the Newman Greenies to win another state championship. The only hitch is that they no longer had nine eligible ballplayers. The drinking suspensions had made them less than a baseball team. It was a glorious Saturday afternoon and the team was meant to be playing a game, but the game had been forfeited. Fitz said nothing to the players about the canceled games but instead took them out onto the hard field out back. He began by hitting ground balls to the infielders and fly balls to the outfielders. His face had a waxen pallor, he was running a fever, and he was not, frankly, in the sweetest of moods. He was under the impression that he was now completely hamstrung—that if he did anything approaching what he’d like to do, “I’ll be in the headmaster’s office on Monday morning.”

  Nevertheless, a kind of tension built—what would he do this time? what could he do?—until finally he called the team in to home plate. On the hard field in front of him, only a few yards from the place where, years ago, another group of teenaged boys slid until they hurt, they formed their usual semicircle. Fitz has a tone perhaps best described as unnervingly pleasant: it’s pleasant because it’s calm; it’s unnerving because he’s not. In this special tone of his, he opened with one of Aesop’s fables. The fable was about a boy who hurled rocks into a pond, until a frog rises up and asks him to stop. “No,” says the boy. “It’s fun.” “And the frog says,” said Fitz, “‘what’s fun for you is death to me.’” Before anyone could wonder how that frog might apply to a baseball team, Fitz told them: “That’s how I feel about you right now. You are like that boy. You all are all about fun.” His tone remained even, but it was not the evenness of a still pond. It was the evenness of a pot of water just before the fire beneath it is turned up. Sure enough, a minute into the talk, his voice began to simmer:

  When are you consciously going to start dealing with the fact that this is a competitive situation? I mean, you are almost a recreational baseball team. The trouble is you don’t play in a recreational league. You play serious, competitive interscholastic baseball. That means the other guy isn’t out for recreation. He wants to strike you out. He wants to embarrass you…until your eyeballs roll over.

  The boys were paying attention now. The man was born to drill holes into thick skulls, and shout directly into the adolescent brain. I was as riveted by his performance as I’d been twenty-five years ago—which was good, as he was coming to his point.

  One of the goodies about athletics is you get to find out if you can stretch. If you can get better. But you got to push. And you guys don’t even push to get through the day. You put more effort into parties than you do into this team.

  Then he cited several examples of parties into which his baseball players had put great effort. For a man with such overt contempt for parties, he was distressingly well informed about their details—including the fact that, at some, the parents provided the booze.

  I know about parents. I know how much they love to say “I pay fourteen thousand dollars in tuition and so my little boy deserves to play.” No way. You earn the right to play. I had a mom and dad too, you know. I loved my mom and dad. My dad didn’t understand much about athletics, and so he didn’t always get it. You have to make that distinction at some point. At some point you have to stand up and be a man and say, “This is how I’m going to do it. This is how I’m going to approach it.” When is the last time any of you guys did that? No. For you, it’s all “fun.” Well, it’s not all fun. Some days it’s work.

  Then he wrapped it up, with a quote from Mark Twain about how the difference between animals and people—the ability to think—is diminished by people’s refusal to think. Aesop to Mark Twain, with a baseball digression and a lesson on self-weaning: the whole thing required five minutes.

  And then his mood shifted completely. The kids clambered to their feet, and followed their coach back to baseball practice. That coach faced the most deeply entrenched attitude problem in his players in thirty-one years. His wife, Peggy, had hinted to me that, for the first time, Fitz was thinking about giving up coaching altogether. He faced a climate of opinion—created by well-intentioned parents, abetted by a school more subservient than ever to its paying customers—that made it nearly impossible for him to change those attitudes. He faced, in short, a world trying to stop him from making his miracles. And on top of it all, he had the flu. It counted as the lowest moment in his career as a baseball coach. Unfairly, I took that moment to ask him: “Do you really think there’s any hope for this team?” The question startled him into a new freshness. He was alive, awake, almost well again. “Always,” he said. “You never give up on a team. Just like you never give up on a kid.” Then he pauses. “But it’s going to take some work.”

  And that’s how I left him. Largely unchanged. No longer, sadly, my baseball coach. Instead, the kind of person who might one day coach my children. And when I think of that, I become aware of a new fear: that my children might never meet up with their Fitz. Or that they will, and their father will fail to understand what he’s up to.

  The author, age sixteen, pitching for the Newman Greenies.

  PHOTO CREDITS

  Coach Fitz, © Tabitha Soren

  BE THE BEST YOU CAN BE, © Tabitha Soren

  Baseball field, © Deborah Raven / Photonica

  Teenage boys in dugout, © Nicolas Russell / The Image Bank / Getty Images

  A Ruislip Dodger, © George Hales, Hulton Archive / Getty Images

  Child and dog balance on pipe, © Matthew Septimus / Photonica

  Baseball coach talking with player, © Annie Griffiths Belt / CORBIS

  Firework display, © Bengt Geijerstam / Photonica

  Carving on tree trunk, © Bruno Ehrs / Photonica

  Formally dressed young couple, © Seth Goldfarb / Photonica

  Girl lying in snow, © Jakob Helbig Photography / Photonica

  Bicycle shadows, © Donovan Reese / Photodisc Blue / Getty Images

  Boy sitting on rock on the beach, © Bruno Ehrs / Photonica

  Girl and dog, © Michael Cardacino / Photonica

  Boy on swing, © Kate Connell / Photonica

  Honus Wagner, foreground, coaching second Grapefruit game against Browns, © Loomis Dean / Time Life Pictures / Getty Images

  Coach and boy, © Tabitha Soren

  Boys sitting on skateboards, © Bill Sykes Images / Photonica

  Girls playing in sprinkler, © Rieder Photography / Photonica

  Mortarboards, graduation, © Frank Whitney / Image Bank

  Students waving from bus, © Sean Justice / Photonica

  Amusement park and clear sky, © Stephen Mallon / Photonica

  Michael Lewis, from the author’s mother’s collection

 

 

 
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