The New York Times
March 28, 2004
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Forgetting Fitz was impossible -- I'll come to why in a moment -- but
avoiding him should have been a breeze. And for 30 years I'd had next to
nothing to do with him or with the school where he coached me, the
Then came the second piece of news: after the summer baseball season, Fitz
gave a speech to his current Newman players. It had been a long, depressing
season: the kids, who during the school year won the
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 the 56-year-old 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 the players, who asked not to be named,
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
Since then McLeod 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. ''They think 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
J.V., 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 had never 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
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 everything.
That year he would lead our basketball team 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 Southeastern
Conference basketball title. He would set the S.E.C.'s 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 at the high school. My own experience of him
began the summer after my freshman year -- after he quit the
Out of one side of his mouth Fitz tore into the rule-book-carrying
high-school coach -- who scurried, ratlike, 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
pickup sticks jutting out from it) sent their side into spasms of delight. 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 top draft pick of the Oakland A's. But we
never discussed Fitz's accomplishments. We were far more interested in his
intensity. We heard that when he was in high school, when his team lost, Fitz
refused to board the bus; he walked, in his catcher's gear, from the ballpark
at one end of New Orleans to his home at the other. Back then he played against
another New Orleans superstar, Rusty Staub. While on second base, Staub made
the mistake of taunting Fitz's pitcher. Fitz raced out from behind home plate
and, in full catcher's gear, chased a 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 L.S.U. team, Fitz,
a tenacious defender, had naturally been assigned to guard Maravich. Pistol
Pete had rung him up for 66 points, but before he 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 L.S.U. basketball coach. When he
saw Fitz deck his son, he ran out and jumped on the pile. Fitz 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 anywhere 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 joy, Fitz glanced at the 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 effect. 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, 30 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 2 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. I flipped the ball to the third baseman, and it was in his glove before
the kid knew what happened. The kid just flopped around in the dirt as the
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 as if it were 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,'' which 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 good news. Fitz had just spoken to him about
me, he said. There might be hope 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 before --
and yet his intensity was more loathed than ever. Anyway, his unmodified
behavior is the reason his former players want to name the gym for him. The
school had given me a list of every player Fitz ever coached, most of whom I
didn't know. I called up about 20 of them to ask them how they felt now about
the experience. Their collective response could be fairly summarized in a
sentence: Fitz changed my life. They all had Fitz stories, and it's worth
hearing at least one of them, to get their general flavor. Here is Philip
Skelding, a 30-year-old student at Harvard Medical School, who played
basketball for Fitz:
''I wasn't a natural athlete -- I had to work at it. It was my junior year
-- the first year we won the state championship -- and no one thought we'd be
any good. We had just finished second in the John Ehret tournament. When we got
back to the gym, Fitz 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. The parents never confronted Fitz directly. They did
their work behind his back. The closest to a direct complaint that I could
tease from the parents I spoke with came from a father of one of the team's
better players. ''You know about what Fitz did to Peyton Manning, don't you?''
he said. Manning, now the quarterback of the Indianapolis Colts and most
valuable player of the N.F.L. last season, played basketball and baseball at
Newman for Fitz. Fitz, the story went, had benched Manning for skipping
basketball practice, and Manning challenged him. They'd had words, maybe even
come to blows, and Manning left the basketball team. And while he 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. Manning wrote his memoirs with his father, Archie, and
understandably, they are mostly about football. But it isn't his high-school
football coach that Manning dwells on: it's Fitz. He goes on for pages about
his old baseball coach, and while he says nothing critical, he does indeed
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 Peyton Manning,
to make sure of his feelings. He might be one of the highest-paid players 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. 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 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 driven the
eight hours to Florida and back, in the dead of night, between morning
practices. 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.
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 their players 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 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 faced and was pitching nervously to the third.
Ball 2.
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 3.
''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 4.
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 15-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 silk underpants in a
maximum-security prison. Then and there, on the crabgrass of Slidell, La.,
Coach Fitz packed into a word what he usually required an entire speech to say:
privilege corrupts. It enabled you to do 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 O.K. 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 with my ears 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 had the misfortune also 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 had happened? she asked. It was hard to explain.
I hadn't been to a Newman baseball game since I last played in one. On a sunny
winter day this February, Fitz had arranged for his defending state champions
to play a better team from a bigger school, 20 miles outside New Orleans. His
hair had gone gray and he was carrying a few more pounds, but he retained his
chief attribute: the room still felt pressurized simply because he was in it.
''I definitely have a penchant for crossing the line,'' he said in his prison
cell of an office before the game. ''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.''
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 offers 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 parents, he knew more than I ever imagined.
Alcoholism, troubled marriages, overbearing fathers -- he was 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 you to know of his
success. There were no trophies or plaques, though he'd 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 I was
barely aware of this other side of him. I remember: when I first met him, he
taught eighth-grade science and had a degree in biology. There were other clues
that, as easily as he could be typecast 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. Away from the game he had the ease and detachment of an aristocrat.
But as a boy, I paid no attention to how he was away from the game. 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 wanted from him was his intensity.
''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
did 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 high
school, though not at the same time; Staub was a senior when he was in the
eighth grade. 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 one another? They came from the imaginations of 14-year-old
boys, in search of something even well-to-do parents couldn't provide.
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 one up
and brushed the dust away: ''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
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 a lot of
the dads, a lawyer. And he'd lived in New Orleans only 20 years, so by local
standards he was an arriviste, an outsider. ''I've had three kids go through
Newman -- I have 39 school years of Newman parent life,'' he said. ''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 told me. ''One parent
said, 'Fitz called my kid fat.' But all Fitz said to that kid was, 'You
promised me you'd lose 15 pounds, and you gained 10.''' Bleich said the parents
told the headmaster 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 motioned to the group of fathers on the other end of the
bleachers. ''A couple of those guys won't talk to me,'' he said, ''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, it became
glaringly apparent -- was that Stan Bleich's son was far and away the team's
best player. At last count more than 40 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
16-year-old left-handed pitcher with a decent fastball, great command, a
big-league change-up and charm to burn. He had no obvious baseball social
deformity, other than his love for his coach, but that fact alone, it seemed,
alienated him from his teammates. Someone had 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 told me later. ''It's all behind my back. Like,
last year, they started calling me 'J. Fitz.' I'm 15 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 that 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 after my
trip to New Orleans, two days before the start of the 2004 regular season,
eight players were caught drinking. All but one of them -- two team captains,
two members of the school's honor committee -- lied about it before eventually
confessing. After he handed out the obligatory school-sanctioned two-week
suspensions to the eight players, Fitz gathered the entire team for a sharp
little talk. Not two days before, 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 the patience only 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 drunk only ''one sip of a daiquiri'' 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.
here
was always a question about whether Fitz controlled his temper, or his temper
controlled him, or even if it mattered. In any case, the summer of 1976 was
especially uncomfortable. Fitz had entered us in a new league, with the bigger,
Catholic schools. Defeat followed listless defeat until one night we lost by
some truly spectacular score. Twice at the end of the game Fitz shouted at our
baserunners to slide, and perhaps not seeing the point when down by 15-2 in
getting scraped or even dirty, they went in standing up. Afterward, at 11
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 surprisingly
low-budget version of 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 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. Finally, Fitz decided we'd had enough and ordered us 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 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 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 were 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 that 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. 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 during 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.
'd
gone back to New Orleans again. The Times-Picayune had just picked the Newman
Greenies to win another state championship. The only hitch was that after the
drinking suspensions, they didn't have nine eligible ballplayers. It was a
glorious Saturday afternoon and they were meant to be playing a nonleague game,
but the game had been canceled. Fitz said nothing to the players about the
cancellations but instead took them onto the field out back and began to hit
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, truth to tell, 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's he going to do? what can 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 teenage 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 began by telling them one of Aesop's fables. The fable was about a boy
who hurls rocks into a pond until a frog rises up and asks him to stop. '''No,'
says the boy, 'it's fun,''' Fitz said. ''And the frog says, 'What's fun for
some is death to others.''' Before anyone could wonder how that frog might
apply to a baseball team, Fitz said: ''That's how I feel about you right now.
You are like that boy. You all are all about fun.'' His tone was still even,
but 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 through them. I was as riveted by his performance as I'd
been 26 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've 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.''
He cited a few 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 $14,000 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 he attributed to 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 took five minutes.
And then his mood shifted completely. The kids climbed to their feet and
followed their coach back to practice. He faced the most deeply entrenched
attitude problem in his players in 31 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 sensitivity 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, easily, in his career as a baseball coach. Unfairly, I took the
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 paused. ''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.
Michael Lewis is a contributing writer for the
magazine. His most recent book, ''Moneyball,'' will be published in paperback
next month.