Coach: Lessons on the Game of Life (4 page)

“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.

T
HERE
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.