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

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:

     

     
    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 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.
    One of the goodies about athletics is you get to find out if you can stretch. If you can get better . But you 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.
    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.
    I know about parents. I know how much they love to say “I pay fourteen thousand dollars 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 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 ,”