Coach: Lessons on the Game of Life

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W
HEN
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.

W
HEN
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 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.