Coach: Lessons on the Game of Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.

     

     
    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