Coach: Lessons on the Game of Life (2 page)

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:

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:

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.”