Coach: Lessons on the Game of Life (5 page)

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:

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.

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.

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.