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
eighth 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
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 Rollie
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:



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
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 much 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
 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.”



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 wonderful. 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
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