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Friday, March 20, 2020

Basketball: "Coach"


Michael Lewis brings characters alive. In Coach he profiles Billy Fitzgerald, hard-nosed, unforgiving winner.

 "Fitz changed my life," was typical sentiment. The contemporary parents at Newman, an elite private school in New Orleans, felt something less inspiring. "The past was no longer on speaking terms with the present." While alumni found funds to renew and rename the gym, the parents raised Cain for torches and pitchforks seeking to send Fitz packing.  

 Fitz oozed toughness. He expected it in return. "Being exposed as a vacation skier on a New Orleans baseball field in 1976 was as alarming as being accused of wearing pink silk underpants in a maximum security prison."

Lewis had a metamorphosis. "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." Michael Lewis became Michael Lewis. 

 "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." We know how we want the game played. Fitz enforced it in ways a different time allowed, like sliding practice on the equivalent of asphalt. 

 He told an Aesop's fable about "a boy who throws 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 for me." The point? His players were all about fun. 

 "What it meant to be a man meant that you struggled against your natural instinct to run away from adversity. You battled." 

 Lewis lets the reader know that today's helicopter or "snowplow" parents can't coexist with the Coach Fitzgeralds of the world. And that dinosaurs like Fitz won't be around much longer to coach his children. 

 Lagniappe: Your best demands you run.
Lagniappe 2: "The last act..."
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