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

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