May 12, 2020 • 44 mins
Michael revisits his high school days in New Orleans to tell the story of Billy Fitzgerald, the baseball coach who changed his life; and makes the case for the old-school, tough- love coaching that many parents find hard to take these days.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin early nineteen sixty five, Harold Silvester was a sixteen
year old basketball star in a segregated New Orleans school system.
He played for Saint Augustine High School. They were the
best high school basketball team in Louisiana, at least the
(00:37):
best in the league for black kids. They never faced
the white kids, so no one can actually say who
was the best. But the priests who ran Saint Ogg
were pushing for integration. They wanted to challenge the state's
best white team, Jesuit High also in New Orleans. And finally,
our principal advice principle, we're able to negotiate this game.
(00:59):
That's Harold talking about one of the most intense basketball
games ever played. You know, we played on a Friday.
Malcolm X was assassinated that Monday, you know, and we're
playing and what our skunsilers the first integrated athletic contest
in the history of the state of Louisia. Yeah, so
(01:19):
I had that kind of cloud, you know over it.
Some of the white parents protested, and two of the
Jesuit starters refused to play. The priests decided that they
needed to play the game in an empty gym nobody
was invited except parents and faculty, you know, So that
was a kind of sparse crowd. It was the sort
(01:42):
of game that they make movies about, and they did
much later. It was called passing Glory. So we'll scrolling
you people out there and fall fall, the fall, and
you gotta put it in you playing these guys. Then
how come you're playing I'm like they made out of porcela.
You scared to bump up against the Mics team. Let
(02:04):
me tell you something, they don't rob off. Harold Sylvester
was one of the biggest players on his team and
the best. He usually did the intimidating, but the white
guy who was guarding him was a different beast. Billy
Fitzgerald was his name. Harold knew him by reputation. I
certainly knew who he was, Yeah, because he was you know,
(02:25):
he had a couple of other cats, you know, were
the big guys. Man. It didn't matter that there was
no crowd. Billy Fitzgerald played like the whole world was watching,
with a fearlessness Harold had never seen. He was among
the toughest players I've ever played. Kids. You know, you
know that once his mind is on something, he's on
the lenny. When you say he was tough, like, what
(02:49):
do you mean? Like? Was he physical? What was it
like to be against him? Anyway you can think it tough?
Was Bill Fitzgerald? His demeanor, the look on his face
always felt like he was going to bite your head off. No, no,
no question. You know, if the competition with Billy, you
know you in for sight of your life. I don't
(03:11):
know how to better characterize the same. Two black priests
who set up the basketball game against the white kids
had a plan for Harold Sylvester to integrate big time
Southern college basketball. Tulane University had never had a black
basketball player. There was still a wall between black athletes
(03:31):
and white southern college sports. The priests wanted Harold to
help knock it down. But when he got to the
other side, he found something more intimidating than the color barrier.
He found Billy Fitzgerald, the intense white guy from the
Jesuit High school, had gone on to play for Tulane.
Now they were teammates, and being Billy Fitzgerald's teammate was
(03:53):
almost worse than playing against him, because now he was
wearing you out every day. There were two anything that
books to make sure that you were playing you're very best. Yeah.
He always assisted that you you're all you know. And
I think those of us to put alongside of him
(04:14):
as well as against him, you always respected that. If
Dylan was a wild he gave it everything you heared.
So he had the capacity to scare his teammates. You did.
I've got a special interest in Billy Fitzgerald, as you
might be guessing, But Harold Silvester is his own story too.
(04:36):
After Tulane, he left New Orleans and made a career
as an actor. You've seen him in something an officer
and a gentleman maybe or married with children. In nineteen
ninety nine, he wrote the script for Passing Glory, the
movie about that basketball game played without a crowd. The
movie took certain liberties, like just about every film set
in New Orleans, the actors all sound like they're from Mississippi,
(04:59):
and there seemed to him to be no way to
capture the intensity of the character based on Billy Fitzgerald.
So Harold and Ventnor for him a scary racist dad.
You get off that floss on someone for him to fight?
Are you coming? Or do I have to drag you off.
But I check go through life, you know, without talking
(05:22):
about the tough people that I've known, you know, and
he is amongst the toughest. And so so when I
leave that to plug into that tough reservoir, I go
to Bill Fitzgerald. You know, he's not a forgettable guy.
Not a forgettable guy. Harold assumed that Billy Fitzgerald would
go on to become a professional athlete. If I told
(05:45):
you he was going to end up being a high
school coach, would that have surprised you? It would have,
But you could imagine it. I can imagine, and I
can imagine if I knew how tough he was, then
I would have gone somewhere else, to school, that is,
to any school where Billy Fitzgerald was not the coach.
Harold knew enough to be scared. I did not. I'm
(06:12):
Michael Lewis, and this is against the Rules. A show
about various authority figures in American life. This season is
about the rise of coaches. This episode is about the
power of a coach to change a life, in this
case mine the winner of nineteen seventy three. Billy Fitzgerald
(07:08):
takes us by some prize we know nothing about him
except that he plays baseball for an Oakland A's minor
league team. Yes, baseball, but for some reason, he's spending
the offseason coaching eighth grade boys basketball at our school.
Our practices are easy, sort of like recess. The eighth
graders practices are not. Coach Fitzgerald is this six foot
(07:32):
four inch man with the face of a street fighter.
He hollers at the eighth graders for three straight hours,
then runs them till they drop. As they lay gasping
around his feet, he pulls a book from his back
pocket and reads them quotes from Bobby Knight, the scary
basketball coach of the Indiana Hoosiers. Let you hear, Let
(07:53):
you hear. Bobby Knight just threw his chair were across
a three throw line. There's a good chance Bobby Knights,
but a jackets this basketball game. Seventh graders all know
who Bobby Knight is, but this new coach seems bigger
and scarier. After a few days, one of my teammates says,
(08:13):
oh God, please don't ever let me get to the
eighth grade. But eighth grade is inevitable. So is Billy Fitzgerald.
He and his wife have a son and decide that
minor league baseball is no place to raise a child.
We don't know any of that. We don't know about
the wife, we don't know about the kid. All we
know is that this terrifying man is no longer the
eighth grade coach, but the head baseball and basketball coach
(08:37):
at our high school. The Isidore Newman School. Newman's one
of those small, wealthy private schools that every American city
has at least two of, one of them called Country Day.
Our school is not the most obvious place to create
a training camp for Spartan Warriors, but that's what this
new coach sets out to do. I'm not going to
(09:01):
tell you everything that happened over the next five years,
in part because I've already written a little book about
it called Coach. But I want to tell you two
stories incidents, really, just to give you a flavor. First incident.
It's two years later, and Billy Fitzgerald has just become
(09:21):
my coach. I'm now fourteen years old and a total mess.
To say that I'm troubled isn't quite right. Inert is
more like it. My teachers can't understand why I have
zero interests in what they're saying. My own mother one
day breaks down and more or less admits that I'm
ruining her life. And my mom's great. It's not her fault.
(09:43):
I just don't much care about anything except performing the
occasional acts of vandalism. The only human being on the
planet that I don't feel I can safely ignore is
my baseball coach. I'd quit playing baseball a few years earlier,
but Fitz found me at school one day and asked
me to come out for his summer team. I'm one
(10:04):
of the younger players, and he's new to me. He's
indeed tough, He's indeed scary when he wants to be.
He suspends kids who break the rules, no matter how
good they are. He never lays a hand on a player,
but he breaks all kinds of things, especially after games
that don't go well. No object in the locker room
is safe. He destroys an ancient wall clock with a
(10:25):
catcher's mitt and a big orange water jug with a
single swing of an aluminum bat. He takes us out
onto a hard field at ten o'clock at night after
a game. There we slide until our uniforms are red
and brown with dirt and blood. Then he declares that
they aren't to be washed until we meet his expectations.
Ten games later. Our uniforms are so filthy that people
(10:48):
will come to our games just to see them. We
look less like a team than a cult of insane
rich kids who refuse to bathe. But now, once, and
I really mean not once, do I have the feeling
that this was about anything but me and my teammates.
Coach Fitz never talks about himself. He never tells us
(11:11):
how close he got to playing in the big leagues
for the Oakland A's, for example, other people talk about it.
His young players spend lots of time swapping stories about him,
crazy stories which everyone repeats his gospel. Then, in high school,
Fits refused to ride the team bus after they lost
and instead walked many miles across the city of New
Orleans in his catcher's gear. That rusty stab who went
(11:34):
on to have a famous big league career, made the
mistake of taunting Fits, and Fitz ran out onto the
field and beat the crap out of him. Then there
was the most incredible story, the one we love the best,
that during a college basketball game, Fitz had not only
singlehandedly kicked Pete Marevich's ass, but also beating up Marevich's dad,
(11:56):
the LSU coach, in the same brawl. To this day,
Pete Marevich holds the college hoops scoring record. Getting into
a fight with him, well, it felt then like getting
into a with Lebron James would now. It made Fits
a legend in our minds. The incident that summer night
(12:17):
that I want to tell you about. It's made possible
by all these other stories. Our baseball teams actually very good,
but we're playing the only team in the league that
might be better. I'm the new young pitcher, and I
really don't belong in the game. Our older, better pitcher
has it all under control, but his fate would have it.
Fits is forced to pull our older pitcher in the
(12:39):
last inning with one out and us up two to one,
and them with runners on first and third and lots
of grown ups in the stands screaming and yelling and
going bat shit crazy. I'm not an imposing sight. I've
not so much hit puberty as delta a glancing blow.
(12:59):
I look like a scoop of vanilla ice cream, maybe
with pickup sticks jutting out of the sides. The other
team has facial hair and muscles. They're actually laughing and
dancing with glee. As I walk out to the mound,
Fitz just stands there, looking like he wants to punch someone.
The situation's terrifying, but strangely, I'm not terrified because Coach
(13:24):
Fits is on my side, and he's by far the
most terrifying thing in the entire city. And he looks
at me and says, there is no one I'd rather
have in this situation, which is total bullshit, but such
is the force of the man that I believe him
every word. Then he hands me the ball and says,
(13:46):
stick it up their ass. Before he leaves me out
there alone, he nods towards the kid with a little
mustache on third base and says, pick his ass off.
I didn't have the words for how I felt just then,
but I did later. I'm about to show the world
and myself what I can do. The strength of this
(14:08):
coach was inside me like a superpower. I picked the
kid's ass off third base, then stuck the ball up
the ass of some other kid, and we won. But
that's not the full magic of this moment. The magic
is what Billy Fitzgerald uses it to do. After the game,
he gives a little speech to the team about the
nature of courage and how if you want to know
(14:31):
what it looks like, you just need to watch me pitch.
I'm hearing myself being described in an entirely original way
and wanting to believe it that incident is more the
beginning of a longer story than the end, because what
that coach did in that moment is to hand me
the start of a new identity by giving me a
(14:53):
new narrative. I was no longer this pointless human being,
this nightmare of inertia. I was brave, a hero, almost,
and I ran with it. Four years later, when the
letter arrives saying that I'd gotten into Princeton, I run
to the school to find Coach Fitzgerald to let him
(15:15):
know not to say look what I did, to say,
look what you made it possible for me to do.
(15:38):
At any point in the decade after my high school graduation,
you could drop in to see Billy Fitzgerald at the
Newman School and feel that you were basically in the
same world that I grew up in. You know, if
we were in practice, you know he would he got
to a point where he didn't have to tell me
to go run a line, Gerald, I would just go
and run it myself, because I knew that was the
next thing out of his mouth. Philip Skelding played basketball
(15:59):
for coach Fitzgerald in nineteen ninety. Okay, I'll just go run,
you know, and beat him to it. Save his breath,
you know, which is kind of like that whole like
internalizing his voice thing. A few years later, Philip would
win a Rhodes scholarship then go on to become a doctor.
But he's talking about when he was sixteen years old,
just another kid trying to meet this coach's great expectations.
(16:21):
One night, his team lost in the championship game of
a tournament. It was a game they all knew they
should have won. So this bus ride was just a miserable,
quiet experience, I'm sure, with all of us just pouting
in listening to our walkman's and trying not to laugh
too loud if anybody said anything, because that would have
just sent him off the handle. But we got back
to locker room, and we would get into the locker
(16:43):
room like always and sit around and wait for a
while while he collected his thoughts. It was like sitting
at the base of Vesuvius watching the smoke, waiting, and
he came in and we had gotten a trophy for
winning a second place, which was a pretty big trophy. Anyhow,
maybe two feet tie off the table there and they're
(17:06):
just sitting on the table, and he came in and
paint around a little bit like he was typically going
to do when jingled the coins in his pocket, and
pause every now and again and just make eye contact
with one of us and then probably like you know,
do like a halfway side xho and keep the pacing going.
And he did that for a minute or two to
(17:27):
build a suspense, and then he just said, y'all know
what I think a second place and he picked up
the trophy. You felt the heat before you saw the fire.
Everyone in that room felt it. I bet everyone in
that room still feels it. I remember it like yesterday.
There was a humongous trophy. It was really nice. That's
(17:50):
Randy Livingston. He was on that team too. He'd go
on to become Gatorade National Player of the Year, the
best basketball player in the entire country. He'd played for
eleven years in the NBA, but Fitz never treated him differently.
He treated him as just another identity to be created.
He literally smashed that trophy into pieces and just said,
(18:14):
we're not playing for second place, and I will never
forget the head. You know, back in the day that
had the man on the top of the trophy and
he's in a shooting or he's in a standing position.
The head of that trophy miss one of the players
head by inches and it would have wiped him out.
That's how forceful he smashed that trophy. The little man
(18:35):
on top of the big trophy went flying through the air.
Different kids reacted differently to the eruption. That was a
memorable one because I think there were some kids who
maybe left a team over that. In fact, but I
thought it was great. I didn't want to be second
place either. Several kids actually told their parents about the
trophy that Fits had demolished. Something had changed. These moments
(18:58):
were no longer just things that happened between a coach
and his players. A third party had entered the conversation.
It must be some level of just just discomfort with
that much intensity, because it is really intense. I mean
he was a really intense guy then, but I know
there are some kids who left the team or whatever
had issues or the parents, you know, speaking for their kids.
(19:20):
So I'm not letting you play for that guy. He's
a maniac. But for me and many of others, I
think it more kind of stealed our resolve. I mean
to say, yeah, this is this is something we can do.
We can do better than this, we can do better
than this. That was how I had felt. But now
some kids didn't feel that way, and they must have
(19:40):
sensed that the coach was vulnerable. Because if you took
his most dramatic moments and you replayed them in your
family kitchen, they felt different than they had in the
locker room. Taking anything out of context can make it
different in terms of how people interpret it. And I
think we had essentially signed up for it, and we
had all, you know, voted with our feet and said like,
we're okay with this. We want to you know, work
(20:03):
together as a team and see what we can accomplish.
Would did you do? What did you do with the
pieces of the trophy? So yeah, the little man who
is at the top of any basketball trophy, that's just
sitting there with a ball getting ready to shoot, he
went flying intact, but he separated from the trophy and
went flying off and landed in the lap of the
guy next to me, and we stuck him up on
(20:25):
the ducting of the air conditioning that we could all
reach as tall guys, and we just tapped him on
the way out the door every time for the rest
of the season, a sort of a reminder, let's just
play our best game, touching the little man on the
way out the door. They played better and better. They
end up winning the Louisiana State championship, which shocked even them.
(20:46):
Then they do it again the next year and the
year after that. Their higher standard becomes second nature, but
only for the players who stayed and let the coach
work his magic. The players who left, well, they missed out,
but they gave you a hint where the world was heading.
(21:08):
More than a decade passes, it's now two thousand and three.
I get two phone calls about Billy Fitzgerald, one right
after the other, David Pointer calling from Michael David. The
first comes from a former Newman basketball player named David Pointer.
How are you? He set out to raise the money
(21:28):
to remodel the school Jim and name it for coach Fitzgerald.
Because it's fitz David finds the fundraising easy. You know,
fitz didn't sit down and put on a blackboard the
values that he thought he needed to impart upon us.
And maybe ten years later we finally figured out what
those values were. Former players said things to David. He
(21:51):
taught me life. Parents said things to David like he
did all the hard work all in. Couldn't agree with
you more. Can't believe the school is letting you do it,
Which brings me to the second phone call from a
former teammate of mine. He said he'd heard that the
Newman School was on the verge of firing Billy Fitzgerald.
(22:12):
Some parents had complained to the headmaster. The headmaster was sympathetic.
How did Newman get itself into the position where it
listened to those parents? Oh, fundraising. I don't think it's
Newman in particular to you. No, I think it's money
gets money. It was the money, but it was more
than the money. It was about what people think coaches
(22:36):
are for. I flew back to New Orleans to try
to make sense of the situation. Eight parents of current
players had formed a coalition. A few of them were
rich people who might give the school a lot of money.
They'd gone to the headmaster to complain, but not about
anything Coach Fits had done. That was one of the
(22:56):
strange things about the situation, because it turned out coach
Fits it sort of mellowed. His days of breaking trophies
were now over. His crime seemed to be that he
held kids accountable, suspended them when they violated training rules,
for example, or pointed out that they put on ten
pounds of fat when they promised to lose fifteen. The
(23:17):
other odd thing was that one of his teams had
just won the Louisiana State baseball championship. In sports, it's
almost a natural law. Winning teams are happy and losing
teams are not. After the fact, everyone says the team
won because of its great chemistry. But which usually happened
is that winning has just made everybody like each other more.
(23:38):
But here was a team that had just won it
all and it was falling apart. It was Marti Gras
time at the time. I remember her. You know, there
was drinking going on. There were young kids that were
doing things they shouldn't have been doing, just like anywhere.
Jeremy Blish was a junior on Newman's winning baseball team
(24:00):
that year. It was a Lord of the Flies situation
and he was Ralph Piggy and a few of the
other younger players were on his side, but scared to
say it because the older players, the seniors, were in revolt.
You know, as high schoolers, we signed training rules that
said we wouldn't drink like that's that's asinine to begin with, right,
(24:21):
So anyway, so we signed training rules to not drink
alcohol at sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen years old. You mean
it's asinine because you shouldn't have to sign a document exactly,
like who should be drinking like that in public? Who
should be drinking like that? Whatever? That's not you know, right,
it's not my kids or whatever. But my point is is,
like fits did held people accountable for for rules broken?
(24:46):
And yeah, was there some vulgarity involved? Of course? Was
there some talks where they were intense? Absolutely? So, yes,
this is New Orleans and coach Fitz asked his students
to forego their god given right to get shitfaced during
Marty Raw. But this kid, Jeremy Blish, he wasn't some
(25:09):
anti social leader of a child temperance movement. He just
wanted to commit to really work hard at something. His
dad was a five foot six inch cardiologist. No one
in his family had ever played sports, but Coach Fitz
was teaching him how to push himself as he had
never done before. And looking back, I had no idea
(25:30):
what my identity was, right, I mean, we're we still
look for these things every day. But it was a
perfect opportunity to put your foot down and say, no,
this is what I want to do. You know, I'm
Jeremy Blish and my identity is I want to go
play college baseball. You know, I want to put myself
in the best position to try and play college baseball.
So I took a chance. I took a chance on
(25:51):
an identity that at that point I had no tangible
feeling of what it was. Coach Fitz had something important
to say to his players, and Jeremy was internalizing it.
The message was always the same, and it was always consistent,
don't be good, be great at the end of the
phone call. Until years ago, until I was in pitching
in San Francisco for the ace, don't be good, be great.
(26:18):
Jeremy wound up not only going to Stanford on a
baseball scholarship, but being a first round draft pick of
the New York Yankees, he would one day pitch in
the big leagues. On his high school team, he was
by far the best player. In a normal environment, his
teammates would have been following his lead. But this was
no longer a normal environment. Now I want to tell
(27:00):
you my second story about Coach Fits, or second incident.
It's nineteen seventy six, nine months after I've established myself
as a hero in my own mind, I'm now a
high school sophomore pitching for the varsity baseball team. Early
in the season, during Mardi Gras break, I leave New
Orleans with my parents. We're going on a ski trip
(27:22):
and I'm going to miss a week of practice. There's
no written rule that says you can't do this. It's
school break, but I sense an unwritten one. Coach Fits
is not pleased. The day I return, he throws me
right into a game against a really good team. The
look on his face as he hands me the ball says,
I hope it goes well if you're out there, but
(27:43):
it really shouldn't. It doesn't go well. I can't find
the plate up to that moment. Fitz has not said
one word to me about my ski trip. But as
I throw ball three, I hear his voice. Where was
Michael Lewis during Marty Gras the voice booms from our dugout,
(28:06):
I try not to look at him, but out of
the corner of my eye, I can see him pacing,
jangling the keys in his pocket. I walk the first
batter and the second. Now he's really hollering. Everyone else
was at practice, but where was Michael Lewis? The other
team can hear him, The people in the stands can
(28:27):
hear him. More to the point I can hear him,
and all I can think is, please, don't say skiing, Please,
I'll tell you where Michael Lewis was skiing. He packs
into that single word an idea that usually requires an
entire speech for him to convey. Privilege corrupts. You're always
(28:52):
doing what money can buy instead of what duty demands.
You're always skiing. You're living your life as if nothing
matters so much that you should suffer for it. But
now something does matter to me so much that I
will suffer for it. Baseball, or more exactly, coach fits.
(29:14):
He's pouring himself into me. And even the fifteen year
old me, in rare moments of clarity, even I can
see the positive effects. But there in the dugout, my
coach is still on a roll. Can someone please tell
me why Michael Lewis thinks it's okay to leave town
(29:35):
and go and go. Please don't say skiing again. That's
my final thought before the one hopper back to the
mound hits me in the face and knocks me out.
When I come to, I'm looking up at Coach fits.
My nose is broken in five places. But I do
(29:58):
not feel wronged. I feel cared for in a new
way by this coach. I mean he cares enough to
save me from a lifetime. I was skiing on the
way to the hospital. I tell my mother that the
next time the family goes skiing or any place else,
they'll be going without me, and she just smiles because
(30:21):
I think she kind of gets it, all right. I
want to talk about what happened between the time I
left Newman School and the time I came back, what
had changed parents. In the middle of the crisis with
his state championship baseball team back in two thousand and three,
I found Billy Fitzgerald in his office alive. Surprisingly, parents,
(30:42):
parents and the culture. So how many games did your
mom and dad come to? Well, how many games did
in that period did the parents come to? Well, not
only did they come to the games and you sit
on the sidelines and on the fences, but they were
(31:03):
coming to practice, and they were wanting to know what
you were running and why you were running it, why
are you calling that pitch? If he sounds more relaxed
then you expected, it's in part because he truly had mellowed.
On the other hand, he'd always had the ability to
seem extremely calm, which was why it was so unsettling
(31:24):
when he wasn't all of a sudden. You have parents
doing things they weren't doing before. It's not only that,
it's the assumption that they know how to coach. So
they got more and more involved in their kids little
(31:45):
league and you know, bitty league basketball and whatever else,
and so they became these experts where they thought that
it was their right to say, well, you know, my
son ought to be hit, and third, I mean, you know,
he crushes the ball. It just got crazy. So what's
(32:10):
the price the kids pay for this? Oh my god? Well,
They're caught literally in the middle, and there is absolutely
no way out. The kid was trapped, you know. And
I tried to tell kids, Look, I love my dad,
but I knew my dad didn't know everything about everything,
(32:30):
and you have to decide, you know, for yourself, how
you're going to manage this, and they couldn't. Obviously I
had questions, and I'm sure you do too. What I
wanted to know was what happened each time he was
hauled into the headmaster's office. What happened in there at
(32:52):
the same time he's being memorialized on the school gym.
Walk me through what that looked like if I was
a fly on the wall just watching what happens in
those meetings. So I walk in and it's just the
two of us, and I intentionally walk in under the
(33:13):
guise of you are going to remain calm, you are
not going to raise your voice, you are going to
have a civil conversation, but you are going to set
the record straight as well. Then I basically am listening
to the headmasters say that several parents have come in
(33:37):
and one parent says you said his son was fat.
Another says, you belittled my son in the baseball meeting
that you had after the last game of the season,
and it goes on. It's a kind of a rap sheet.
(33:57):
It is. It is a rap sheet. I'd present the
other side of the story, but the other side never
left the shadows. No one who wanted to coach fired
ever confronted him in person or in writing. They're a
bunch of well to do people used to having their way,
and so they took their case straight to the higher
court where money could buy a decision. They never even
(34:19):
tried to grapple with the coach himself or what he
stood for. My job, as I perceived it was, Look,
I've got to educate you on how to swing, how
to throw, how to work a hitter, you know, But
I'm also teaching you that, hey, you know you're going
to strike out, You're gonna fail in life, and you've
(34:41):
got to find a way to deal with the failure
and use the failure to get better and to be successful.
So I didn't feel like I could let anybody off
the hook. Well, the minute you let them off the hook,
you lose the ability to teach them about the failure exactly.
That's the that's the big issue, and not letting them
(35:01):
off the hook makes them uncomfortable, right, and making them
uncomfortable is what nobody is comfortable is nobody wants see us.
The office in which i'd found Coach fits all those
years ago, Well, it looked more like a closet. The
gym was still under construction, and plaques with inspirational quotes
(35:23):
were stacked in a box by his desk. I pulled
one out, Victor Frankel's famous line, what is to give
light must endure burning? Coach Fitz laughed, but not a
happy laugh, and said we won't be putting that one
up again. Before I left him, I couldn't resist asking
(35:50):
about the stories about him we'd told his kids. Was
it true? Did he really walk home across New Orleans
every night in his catcher's gear after his team lost?
Had he really gone after Rusty Stab? And did he
really fight Pete Marovitch with Marevich's dad hanging from his back?
I got about halfway through trying to fact check my
(36:10):
middle school life, and then he started to laugh at me.
What fool would walk across New Orleans in his catcher's gear?
He asked, why would he get in a fight with
Rusty Stab? They went to the same school, and fitz
was in the eighth grade when Stab was a senior.
Billy Fitzgerald was scary enough in real life, but we'd
(36:31):
made him even scarier because we needed him to be
of one thing. I am totally certain if I'd never
met Coach Fitz, I'd have never become a writer. It
would have felt too risky, too hard. But I became
(36:55):
a writer, and eventually I wrote up the story of
Coach Fitz, first for the New York Times magazine and
then as a little book. Writing's hard to predict. You
work on something and then you throw it out there
at readers or listeners, and either they get what you
mean or they don't. A long time ago, Coach Fitz
sent me a poem that makes a connection between writing
(37:17):
and pitching. It's called The Pitcher by the American poet
Robert Francis. Here's how it ends. The others throw to
be comprehended. He throws to be a moment misunderstood yet
not too much, not errant, errant, wild, but every seeming aberration, willed,
(37:38):
not too yet still still to communicate, making the batter
understand too late. A picture, like a writer is delivering
a message. Both want the message understood, if in different ways.
(38:00):
That essay I published about Coach fitz made the batter
understand too late, and it generated this fantastic outrage not
towards the coach who pushed kids harder than they ever
been pushed, towards the people hoping to get the coach fired.
They got run out of town. More or less. The
(38:20):
headmaster left the school too, and the school created a
committee to find a new headmaster and put Billy Fitzgerald
in charge of it. This is where it all started,
right here for us eighth grade, nineteen seventy two. So
(38:40):
another decade passes. Twenty fourteen brings the retirement ceremony for
coach Billy Fitzgerald. Hundreds of people fly or drive to
the Newman School. So many people turn up that they
need to move it outdoors. The ceremony is held on
the same basketball court where I first watched him holler
and read from the collected works of Bobby Knight, just
(39:04):
around the corner from the gym now named for Billy Fitzgerald,
that you're going to coach, teacher, co worker, and athletic director.
The four of us are here tonight to tell you
that you've been a great father. People get up and
say what he meant to their lives. Thank you. Then
(39:24):
it's the coach's turn at the podium and he talks
about coaching. I happen to believe that coaching is teaching
in its most perfect and rewarding form, no matter the sport,
coaches give information, wait for a response, and then give
feedback that response. But as my career progressed, I came
(39:49):
to believe that coaching means finding ways to awaken our
students to new and different possibilities. You can see this
awakening in students eyes as they begin to reach those possibilities.
So I'm a firm believer in Gerda quote. Treat a
(40:10):
man as he is, and he remains as he is.
Treat a man as he can and should be, and
he will become as he can and should be. This
has been an incredible run and I can't thank you enough.
Thank you, coach. It's really not a job for just anyone.
(40:40):
Oh anyone can step into the role, of course and
call himself a coach. But it's like a tight rubber suit.
It takes on the shape whoever's in it. It hides nothing.
It expands and contracts with the character of the person
who wears it. In this case, the man makes the clothes.
(41:05):
This is a strange thing, man. The things that I
remember about Bill. One of the things that I remember happened,
what maybe five years ago. Harold Sylvester had gone back
to New Orleans for a funeral of her friend. He'd
walked into the church and found himself face to face
with the man who had seared himself into his imagination
back in nineteen sixty five in a basketball game played
(41:28):
in an empty gym, and Bill came up, and you know,
we chat up a little bit, and he said, yeah, hey, man,
I am a little sorry for the way things went down.
You know back in the day. What was he apologizing for.
He was apologizing for the times. But he said, you know,
I'm sorry for what you had to go through. And
(41:48):
when he said it, I was surprised. I don't remember
ever having a conversation about race. And I always thought
that Bill was fair. You know, I have no qualms,
you know about his toughness or his attitude or whatever
it was. I admired him. But bottom line is the
fact that he said it. Lady who could rise a March.
(42:14):
You know, in my opinion, he was a good guy.
He's a good guy to have as a friend. I'm
Michael Lewis. Thanks for listening to Against the Rules. Against
the Rules is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. The
(42:37):
show's produced by Audrey Dilling and Catherine Girodo, with research
assistance from Lydia Jeancott and Zooe Wynn. Our editor is
Julia Barton Mio o'bell is our executive producer. Our theme
was composed by Nick Brittell, with additional scoring by Stellwagon Sinphonette.
We got fact checked by Beth Johnson. Our show was
(42:57):
recorded by tofur Ruth and Trey Schultz at Northgate Studios
in Berkeley. Special thanks to the Isidore Newman School for
providing audio for this episode. As always thanks to Pushkins
founders Jacob Weisberg and Malcolm Gladwell. We're down there on
(43:24):
the baseline and all of a sudden, Billy were asked
back and punch Us Bogs in the head. You know,
he just knocks the shit out of him. Uh, you know,
and I'm saying I'm looking around, you know, I mean
they gonna Remi's pretty big, and and you know, my
four black friends were gone, you know, And and I'm
there sensitive by myself, and so so all I see
(43:48):
is Billy hitting peak and then the lsu Ben's rising
up and coming at us um. And that was it
what precipitated this, Like, why did Billy punch Pete Merrims,
I asked, Billy, you know why not? We we had
heard that story. We had heard a story where he
had gotten in a fight, start a fight with Pete
(44:10):
Marrivage and that there was you know, that he was
punching marriage and Press Marriviach was on his back and
it was just like and and I went and asked
him about it because I knew about it when I
was playing for him. It was like part of the
legend of Billy Fitzgerald. And he said, and he said
to me that never happened. Holy shit, So it did happen.
Pushkin early nineteen sixty five, Harold Silvester was a sixteen
year old basketball star in a segregated New Orleans school system.
He played for Saint Augustine High School. They were the
best high school basketball team in Louisiana, at least the
(00:37):
best in the league for black kids. They never faced
the white kids, so no one can actually say who
was the best. But the priests who ran Saint Ogg
were pushing for integration. They wanted to challenge the state's
best white team, Jesuit High also in New Orleans. And finally,
our principal advice principle, we're able to negotiate this game.
(00:59):
That's Harold talking about one of the most intense basketball
games ever played. You know, we played on a Friday.
Malcolm X was assassinated that Monday, you know, and we're
playing and what our skunsilers the first integrated athletic contest
in the history of the state of Louisia. Yeah, so
(01:19):
I had that kind of cloud, you know over it.
Some of the white parents protested, and two of the
Jesuit starters refused to play. The priests decided that they
needed to play the game in an empty gym nobody
was invited except parents and faculty, you know, So that
was a kind of sparse crowd. It was the sort
(01:42):
of game that they make movies about, and they did
much later. It was called passing Glory. So we'll scrolling
you people out there and fall fall, the fall, and
you gotta put it in you playing these guys. Then
how come you're playing I'm like they made out of porcela.
You scared to bump up against the Mics team. Let
(02:04):
me tell you something, they don't rob off. Harold Sylvester
was one of the biggest players on his team and
the best. He usually did the intimidating, but the white
guy who was guarding him was a different beast. Billy
Fitzgerald was his name. Harold knew him by reputation. I
certainly knew who he was, Yeah, because he was you know,
(02:25):
he had a couple of other cats, you know, were
the big guys. Man. It didn't matter that there was
no crowd. Billy Fitzgerald played like the whole world was watching,
with a fearlessness Harold had never seen. He was among
the toughest players I've ever played. Kids. You know, you
know that once his mind is on something, he's on
the lenny. When you say he was tough, like, what
(02:49):
do you mean? Like? Was he physical? What was it
like to be against him? Anyway you can think it tough?
Was Bill Fitzgerald? His demeanor, the look on his face
always felt like he was going to bite your head off. No, no,
no question. You know, if the competition with Billy, you
know you in for sight of your life. I don't
(03:11):
know how to better characterize the same. Two black priests
who set up the basketball game against the white kids
had a plan for Harold Sylvester to integrate big time
Southern college basketball. Tulane University had never had a black
basketball player. There was still a wall between black athletes
(03:31):
and white southern college sports. The priests wanted Harold to
help knock it down. But when he got to the
other side, he found something more intimidating than the color barrier.
He found Billy Fitzgerald, the intense white guy from the
Jesuit High school, had gone on to play for Tulane.
Now they were teammates, and being Billy Fitzgerald's teammate was
(03:53):
almost worse than playing against him, because now he was
wearing you out every day. There were two anything that
books to make sure that you were playing you're very best. Yeah.
He always assisted that you you're all you know. And
I think those of us to put alongside of him
(04:14):
as well as against him, you always respected that. If
Dylan was a wild he gave it everything you heared.
So he had the capacity to scare his teammates. You did.
I've got a special interest in Billy Fitzgerald, as you
might be guessing, But Harold Silvester is his own story too.
(04:36):
After Tulane, he left New Orleans and made a career
as an actor. You've seen him in something an officer
and a gentleman maybe or married with children. In nineteen
ninety nine, he wrote the script for Passing Glory, the
movie about that basketball game played without a crowd. The
movie took certain liberties, like just about every film set
in New Orleans, the actors all sound like they're from Mississippi,
(04:59):
and there seemed to him to be no way to
capture the intensity of the character based on Billy Fitzgerald.
So Harold and Ventnor for him a scary racist dad.
You get off that floss on someone for him to fight?
Are you coming? Or do I have to drag you off.
But I check go through life, you know, without talking
(05:22):
about the tough people that I've known, you know, and
he is amongst the toughest. And so so when I
leave that to plug into that tough reservoir, I go
to Bill Fitzgerald. You know, he's not a forgettable guy.
Not a forgettable guy. Harold assumed that Billy Fitzgerald would
go on to become a professional athlete. If I told
(05:45):
you he was going to end up being a high
school coach, would that have surprised you? It would have,
But you could imagine it. I can imagine, and I
can imagine if I knew how tough he was, then
I would have gone somewhere else, to school, that is,
to any school where Billy Fitzgerald was not the coach.
Harold knew enough to be scared. I did not. I'm
(06:12):
Michael Lewis, and this is against the Rules. A show
about various authority figures in American life. This season is
about the rise of coaches. This episode is about the
power of a coach to change a life, in this
case mine the winner of nineteen seventy three. Billy Fitzgerald
(07:08):
takes us by some prize we know nothing about him
except that he plays baseball for an Oakland A's minor
league team. Yes, baseball, but for some reason, he's spending
the offseason coaching eighth grade boys basketball at our school.
Our practices are easy, sort of like recess. The eighth
graders practices are not. Coach Fitzgerald is this six foot
(07:32):
four inch man with the face of a street fighter.
He hollers at the eighth graders for three straight hours,
then runs them till they drop. As they lay gasping
around his feet, he pulls a book from his back
pocket and reads them quotes from Bobby Knight, the scary
basketball coach of the Indiana Hoosiers. Let you hear, Let
(07:53):
you hear. Bobby Knight just threw his chair were across
a three throw line. There's a good chance Bobby Knights,
but a jackets this basketball game. Seventh graders all know
who Bobby Knight is, but this new coach seems bigger
and scarier. After a few days, one of my teammates says,
(08:13):
oh God, please don't ever let me get to the
eighth grade. But eighth grade is inevitable. So is Billy Fitzgerald.
He and his wife have a son and decide that
minor league baseball is no place to raise a child.
We don't know any of that. We don't know about
the wife, we don't know about the kid. All we
know is that this terrifying man is no longer the
eighth grade coach, but the head baseball and basketball coach
(08:37):
at our high school. The Isidore Newman School. Newman's one
of those small, wealthy private schools that every American city
has at least two of, one of them called Country Day.
Our school is not the most obvious place to create
a training camp for Spartan Warriors, but that's what this
new coach sets out to do. I'm not going to
(09:01):
tell you everything that happened over the next five years,
in part because I've already written a little book about
it called Coach. But I want to tell you two
stories incidents, really, just to give you a flavor. First incident.
It's two years later, and Billy Fitzgerald has just become
(09:21):
my coach. I'm now fourteen years old and a total mess.
To say that I'm troubled isn't quite right. Inert is
more like it. My teachers can't understand why I have
zero interests in what they're saying. My own mother one
day breaks down and more or less admits that I'm
ruining her life. And my mom's great. It's not her fault.
(09:43):
I just don't much care about anything except performing the
occasional acts of vandalism. The only human being on the
planet that I don't feel I can safely ignore is
my baseball coach. I'd quit playing baseball a few years earlier,
but Fitz found me at school one day and asked
me to come out for his summer team. I'm one
(10:04):
of the younger players, and he's new to me. He's
indeed tough, He's indeed scary when he wants to be.
He suspends kids who break the rules, no matter how
good they are. He never lays a hand on a player,
but he breaks all kinds of things, especially after games
that don't go well. No object in the locker room
is safe. He destroys an ancient wall clock with a
(10:25):
catcher's mitt and a big orange water jug with a
single swing of an aluminum bat. He takes us out
onto a hard field at ten o'clock at night after
a game. There we slide until our uniforms are red
and brown with dirt and blood. Then he declares that
they aren't to be washed until we meet his expectations.
Ten games later. Our uniforms are so filthy that people
(10:48):
will come to our games just to see them. We
look less like a team than a cult of insane
rich kids who refuse to bathe. But now, once, and
I really mean not once, do I have the feeling
that this was about anything but me and my teammates.
Coach Fitz never talks about himself. He never tells us
(11:11):
how close he got to playing in the big leagues
for the Oakland A's, for example, other people talk about it.
His young players spend lots of time swapping stories about him,
crazy stories which everyone repeats his gospel. Then, in high school,
Fits refused to ride the team bus after they lost
and instead walked many miles across the city of New
Orleans in his catcher's gear. That rusty stab who went
(11:34):
on to have a famous big league career, made the
mistake of taunting Fits, and Fitz ran out onto the
field and beat the crap out of him. Then there
was the most incredible story, the one we love the best,
that during a college basketball game, Fitz had not only
singlehandedly kicked Pete Marevich's ass, but also beating up Marevich's dad,
(11:56):
the LSU coach, in the same brawl. To this day,
Pete Marevich holds the college hoops scoring record. Getting into
a fight with him, well, it felt then like getting
into a with Lebron James would now. It made Fits
a legend in our minds. The incident that summer night
(12:17):
that I want to tell you about. It's made possible
by all these other stories. Our baseball teams actually very good,
but we're playing the only team in the league that
might be better. I'm the new young pitcher, and I
really don't belong in the game. Our older, better pitcher
has it all under control, but his fate would have it.
Fits is forced to pull our older pitcher in the
(12:39):
last inning with one out and us up two to one,
and them with runners on first and third and lots
of grown ups in the stands screaming and yelling and
going bat shit crazy. I'm not an imposing sight. I've
not so much hit puberty as delta a glancing blow.
(12:59):
I look like a scoop of vanilla ice cream, maybe
with pickup sticks jutting out of the sides. The other
team has facial hair and muscles. They're actually laughing and
dancing with glee. As I walk out to the mound,
Fitz just stands there, looking like he wants to punch someone.
The situation's terrifying, but strangely, I'm not terrified because Coach
(13:24):
Fits is on my side, and he's by far the
most terrifying thing in the entire city. And he looks
at me and says, there is no one I'd rather
have in this situation, which is total bullshit, but such
is the force of the man that I believe him
every word. Then he hands me the ball and says,
(13:46):
stick it up their ass. Before he leaves me out
there alone, he nods towards the kid with a little
mustache on third base and says, pick his ass off.
I didn't have the words for how I felt just then,
but I did later. I'm about to show the world
and myself what I can do. The strength of this
(14:08):
coach was inside me like a superpower. I picked the
kid's ass off third base, then stuck the ball up
the ass of some other kid, and we won. But
that's not the full magic of this moment. The magic
is what Billy Fitzgerald uses it to do. After the game,
he gives a little speech to the team about the
nature of courage and how if you want to know
(14:31):
what it looks like, you just need to watch me pitch.
I'm hearing myself being described in an entirely original way
and wanting to believe it that incident is more the
beginning of a longer story than the end, because what
that coach did in that moment is to hand me
the start of a new identity by giving me a
(14:53):
new narrative. I was no longer this pointless human being,
this nightmare of inertia. I was brave, a hero, almost,
and I ran with it. Four years later, when the
letter arrives saying that I'd gotten into Princeton, I run
to the school to find Coach Fitzgerald to let him
(15:15):
know not to say look what I did, to say,
look what you made it possible for me to do.
(15:38):
At any point in the decade after my high school graduation,
you could drop in to see Billy Fitzgerald at the
Newman School and feel that you were basically in the
same world that I grew up in. You know, if
we were in practice, you know he would he got
to a point where he didn't have to tell me
to go run a line, Gerald, I would just go
and run it myself, because I knew that was the
next thing out of his mouth. Philip Skelding played basketball
(15:59):
for coach Fitzgerald in nineteen ninety. Okay, I'll just go run,
you know, and beat him to it. Save his breath,
you know, which is kind of like that whole like
internalizing his voice thing. A few years later, Philip would
win a Rhodes scholarship then go on to become a doctor.
But he's talking about when he was sixteen years old,
just another kid trying to meet this coach's great expectations.
(16:21):
One night, his team lost in the championship game of
a tournament. It was a game they all knew they
should have won. So this bus ride was just a miserable,
quiet experience, I'm sure, with all of us just pouting
in listening to our walkman's and trying not to laugh
too loud if anybody said anything, because that would have
just sent him off the handle. But we got back
to locker room, and we would get into the locker
(16:43):
room like always and sit around and wait for a
while while he collected his thoughts. It was like sitting
at the base of Vesuvius watching the smoke, waiting, and
he came in and we had gotten a trophy for
winning a second place, which was a pretty big trophy. Anyhow,
maybe two feet tie off the table there and they're
(17:06):
just sitting on the table, and he came in and
paint around a little bit like he was typically going
to do when jingled the coins in his pocket, and
pause every now and again and just make eye contact
with one of us and then probably like you know,
do like a halfway side xho and keep the pacing going.
And he did that for a minute or two to
(17:27):
build a suspense, and then he just said, y'all know
what I think a second place and he picked up
the trophy. You felt the heat before you saw the fire.
Everyone in that room felt it. I bet everyone in
that room still feels it. I remember it like yesterday.
There was a humongous trophy. It was really nice. That's
(17:50):
Randy Livingston. He was on that team too. He'd go
on to become Gatorade National Player of the Year, the
best basketball player in the entire country. He'd played for
eleven years in the NBA, but Fitz never treated him differently.
He treated him as just another identity to be created.
He literally smashed that trophy into pieces and just said,
(18:14):
we're not playing for second place, and I will never
forget the head. You know, back in the day that
had the man on the top of the trophy and
he's in a shooting or he's in a standing position.
The head of that trophy miss one of the players
head by inches and it would have wiped him out.
That's how forceful he smashed that trophy. The little man
(18:35):
on top of the big trophy went flying through the air.
Different kids reacted differently to the eruption. That was a
memorable one because I think there were some kids who
maybe left a team over that. In fact, but I
thought it was great. I didn't want to be second
place either. Several kids actually told their parents about the
trophy that Fits had demolished. Something had changed. These moments
(18:58):
were no longer just things that happened between a coach
and his players. A third party had entered the conversation.
It must be some level of just just discomfort with
that much intensity, because it is really intense. I mean
he was a really intense guy then, but I know
there are some kids who left the team or whatever
had issues or the parents, you know, speaking for their kids.
(19:20):
So I'm not letting you play for that guy. He's
a maniac. But for me and many of others, I
think it more kind of stealed our resolve. I mean
to say, yeah, this is this is something we can do.
We can do better than this, we can do better
than this. That was how I had felt. But now
some kids didn't feel that way, and they must have
(19:40):
sensed that the coach was vulnerable. Because if you took
his most dramatic moments and you replayed them in your
family kitchen, they felt different than they had in the
locker room. Taking anything out of context can make it
different in terms of how people interpret it. And I
think we had essentially signed up for it, and we
had all, you know, voted with our feet and said like,
we're okay with this. We want to you know, work
(20:03):
together as a team and see what we can accomplish.
Would did you do? What did you do with the
pieces of the trophy? So yeah, the little man who
is at the top of any basketball trophy, that's just
sitting there with a ball getting ready to shoot, he
went flying intact, but he separated from the trophy and
went flying off and landed in the lap of the
guy next to me, and we stuck him up on
(20:25):
the ducting of the air conditioning that we could all
reach as tall guys, and we just tapped him on
the way out the door every time for the rest
of the season, a sort of a reminder, let's just
play our best game, touching the little man on the
way out the door. They played better and better. They
end up winning the Louisiana State championship, which shocked even them.
(20:46):
Then they do it again the next year and the
year after that. Their higher standard becomes second nature, but
only for the players who stayed and let the coach
work his magic. The players who left, well, they missed out,
but they gave you a hint where the world was heading.
(21:08):
More than a decade passes, it's now two thousand and three.
I get two phone calls about Billy Fitzgerald, one right
after the other, David Pointer calling from Michael David. The
first comes from a former Newman basketball player named David Pointer.
How are you? He set out to raise the money
(21:28):
to remodel the school Jim and name it for coach Fitzgerald.
Because it's fitz David finds the fundraising easy. You know,
fitz didn't sit down and put on a blackboard the
values that he thought he needed to impart upon us.
And maybe ten years later we finally figured out what
those values were. Former players said things to David. He
(21:51):
taught me life. Parents said things to David like he
did all the hard work all in. Couldn't agree with
you more. Can't believe the school is letting you do it,
Which brings me to the second phone call from a
former teammate of mine. He said he'd heard that the
Newman School was on the verge of firing Billy Fitzgerald.
(22:12):
Some parents had complained to the headmaster. The headmaster was sympathetic.
How did Newman get itself into the position where it
listened to those parents? Oh, fundraising. I don't think it's
Newman in particular to you. No, I think it's money
gets money. It was the money, but it was more
than the money. It was about what people think coaches
(22:36):
are for. I flew back to New Orleans to try
to make sense of the situation. Eight parents of current
players had formed a coalition. A few of them were
rich people who might give the school a lot of money.
They'd gone to the headmaster to complain, but not about
anything Coach Fits had done. That was one of the
(22:56):
strange things about the situation, because it turned out coach
Fits it sort of mellowed. His days of breaking trophies
were now over. His crime seemed to be that he
held kids accountable, suspended them when they violated training rules,
for example, or pointed out that they put on ten
pounds of fat when they promised to lose fifteen. The
(23:17):
other odd thing was that one of his teams had
just won the Louisiana State baseball championship. In sports, it's
almost a natural law. Winning teams are happy and losing
teams are not. After the fact, everyone says the team
won because of its great chemistry. But which usually happened
is that winning has just made everybody like each other more.
(23:38):
But here was a team that had just won it
all and it was falling apart. It was Marti Gras
time at the time. I remember her. You know, there
was drinking going on. There were young kids that were
doing things they shouldn't have been doing, just like anywhere.
Jeremy Blish was a junior on Newman's winning baseball team
(24:00):
that year. It was a Lord of the Flies situation
and he was Ralph Piggy and a few of the
other younger players were on his side, but scared to
say it because the older players, the seniors, were in revolt.
You know, as high schoolers, we signed training rules that
said we wouldn't drink like that's that's asinine to begin with, right,
(24:21):
So anyway, so we signed training rules to not drink
alcohol at sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen years old. You mean
it's asinine because you shouldn't have to sign a document exactly,
like who should be drinking like that in public? Who
should be drinking like that? Whatever? That's not you know, right,
it's not my kids or whatever. But my point is is,
like fits did held people accountable for for rules broken?
(24:46):
And yeah, was there some vulgarity involved? Of course? Was
there some talks where they were intense? Absolutely? So, yes,
this is New Orleans and coach Fitz asked his students
to forego their god given right to get shitfaced during
Marty Raw. But this kid, Jeremy Blish, he wasn't some
(25:09):
anti social leader of a child temperance movement. He just
wanted to commit to really work hard at something. His
dad was a five foot six inch cardiologist. No one
in his family had ever played sports, but Coach Fitz
was teaching him how to push himself as he had
never done before. And looking back, I had no idea
(25:30):
what my identity was, right, I mean, we're we still
look for these things every day. But it was a
perfect opportunity to put your foot down and say, no,
this is what I want to do. You know, I'm
Jeremy Blish and my identity is I want to go
play college baseball. You know, I want to put myself
in the best position to try and play college baseball.
So I took a chance. I took a chance on
(25:51):
an identity that at that point I had no tangible
feeling of what it was. Coach Fitz had something important
to say to his players, and Jeremy was internalizing it.
The message was always the same, and it was always consistent,
don't be good, be great at the end of the
phone call. Until years ago, until I was in pitching
in San Francisco for the ace, don't be good, be great.
(26:18):
Jeremy wound up not only going to Stanford on a
baseball scholarship, but being a first round draft pick of
the New York Yankees, he would one day pitch in
the big leagues. On his high school team, he was
by far the best player. In a normal environment, his
teammates would have been following his lead. But this was
no longer a normal environment. Now I want to tell
(27:00):
you my second story about Coach Fits, or second incident.
It's nineteen seventy six, nine months after I've established myself
as a hero in my own mind, I'm now a
high school sophomore pitching for the varsity baseball team. Early
in the season, during Mardi Gras break, I leave New
Orleans with my parents. We're going on a ski trip
(27:22):
and I'm going to miss a week of practice. There's
no written rule that says you can't do this. It's
school break, but I sense an unwritten one. Coach Fits
is not pleased. The day I return, he throws me
right into a game against a really good team. The
look on his face as he hands me the ball says,
I hope it goes well if you're out there, but
(27:43):
it really shouldn't. It doesn't go well. I can't find
the plate up to that moment. Fitz has not said
one word to me about my ski trip. But as
I throw ball three, I hear his voice. Where was
Michael Lewis during Marty Gras the voice booms from our dugout,
(28:06):
I try not to look at him, but out of
the corner of my eye, I can see him pacing,
jangling the keys in his pocket. I walk the first
batter and the second. Now he's really hollering. Everyone else
was at practice, but where was Michael Lewis? The other
team can hear him, The people in the stands can
(28:27):
hear him. More to the point I can hear him,
and all I can think is, please, don't say skiing, Please,
I'll tell you where Michael Lewis was skiing. He packs
into that single word an idea that usually requires an
entire speech for him to convey. Privilege corrupts. You're always
(28:52):
doing what money can buy instead of what duty demands.
You're always skiing. You're living your life as if nothing
matters so much that you should suffer for it. But
now something does matter to me so much that I
will suffer for it. Baseball, or more exactly, coach fits.
(29:14):
He's pouring himself into me. And even the fifteen year
old me, in rare moments of clarity, even I can
see the positive effects. But there in the dugout, my
coach is still on a roll. Can someone please tell
me why Michael Lewis thinks it's okay to leave town
(29:35):
and go and go. Please don't say skiing again. That's
my final thought before the one hopper back to the
mound hits me in the face and knocks me out.
When I come to, I'm looking up at Coach fits.
My nose is broken in five places. But I do
(29:58):
not feel wronged. I feel cared for in a new
way by this coach. I mean he cares enough to
save me from a lifetime. I was skiing on the
way to the hospital. I tell my mother that the
next time the family goes skiing or any place else,
they'll be going without me, and she just smiles because
(30:21):
I think she kind of gets it, all right. I
want to talk about what happened between the time I
left Newman School and the time I came back, what
had changed parents. In the middle of the crisis with
his state championship baseball team back in two thousand and three,
I found Billy Fitzgerald in his office alive. Surprisingly, parents,
(30:42):
parents and the culture. So how many games did your
mom and dad come to? Well, how many games did
in that period did the parents come to? Well, not
only did they come to the games and you sit
on the sidelines and on the fences, but they were
(31:03):
coming to practice, and they were wanting to know what
you were running and why you were running it, why
are you calling that pitch? If he sounds more relaxed
then you expected, it's in part because he truly had mellowed.
On the other hand, he'd always had the ability to
seem extremely calm, which was why it was so unsettling
(31:24):
when he wasn't all of a sudden. You have parents
doing things they weren't doing before. It's not only that,
it's the assumption that they know how to coach. So
they got more and more involved in their kids little
(31:45):
league and you know, bitty league basketball and whatever else,
and so they became these experts where they thought that
it was their right to say, well, you know, my
son ought to be hit, and third, I mean, you know,
he crushes the ball. It just got crazy. So what's
(32:10):
the price the kids pay for this? Oh my god? Well,
They're caught literally in the middle, and there is absolutely
no way out. The kid was trapped, you know. And
I tried to tell kids, Look, I love my dad,
but I knew my dad didn't know everything about everything,
(32:30):
and you have to decide, you know, for yourself, how
you're going to manage this, and they couldn't. Obviously I
had questions, and I'm sure you do too. What I
wanted to know was what happened each time he was
hauled into the headmaster's office. What happened in there at
(32:52):
the same time he's being memorialized on the school gym.
Walk me through what that looked like if I was
a fly on the wall just watching what happens in
those meetings. So I walk in and it's just the
two of us, and I intentionally walk in under the
(33:13):
guise of you are going to remain calm, you are
not going to raise your voice, you are going to
have a civil conversation, but you are going to set
the record straight as well. Then I basically am listening
to the headmasters say that several parents have come in
(33:37):
and one parent says you said his son was fat.
Another says, you belittled my son in the baseball meeting
that you had after the last game of the season,
and it goes on. It's a kind of a rap sheet.
(33:57):
It is. It is a rap sheet. I'd present the
other side of the story, but the other side never
left the shadows. No one who wanted to coach fired
ever confronted him in person or in writing. They're a
bunch of well to do people used to having their way,
and so they took their case straight to the higher
court where money could buy a decision. They never even
(34:19):
tried to grapple with the coach himself or what he
stood for. My job, as I perceived it was, Look,
I've got to educate you on how to swing, how
to throw, how to work a hitter, you know, But
I'm also teaching you that, hey, you know you're going
to strike out, You're gonna fail in life, and you've
(34:41):
got to find a way to deal with the failure
and use the failure to get better and to be successful.
So I didn't feel like I could let anybody off
the hook. Well, the minute you let them off the hook,
you lose the ability to teach them about the failure exactly.
That's the that's the big issue, and not letting them
(35:01):
off the hook makes them uncomfortable, right, and making them
uncomfortable is what nobody is comfortable is nobody wants see us.
The office in which i'd found Coach fits all those
years ago, Well, it looked more like a closet. The
gym was still under construction, and plaques with inspirational quotes
(35:23):
were stacked in a box by his desk. I pulled
one out, Victor Frankel's famous line, what is to give
light must endure burning? Coach Fitz laughed, but not a
happy laugh, and said we won't be putting that one
up again. Before I left him, I couldn't resist asking
(35:50):
about the stories about him we'd told his kids. Was
it true? Did he really walk home across New Orleans
every night in his catcher's gear after his team lost?
Had he really gone after Rusty Stab? And did he
really fight Pete Marovitch with Marevich's dad hanging from his back?
I got about halfway through trying to fact check my
(36:10):
middle school life, and then he started to laugh at me.
What fool would walk across New Orleans in his catcher's gear?
He asked, why would he get in a fight with
Rusty Stab? They went to the same school, and fitz
was in the eighth grade when Stab was a senior.
Billy Fitzgerald was scary enough in real life, but we'd
(36:31):
made him even scarier because we needed him to be
of one thing. I am totally certain if I'd never
met Coach Fitz, I'd have never become a writer. It
would have felt too risky, too hard. But I became
(36:55):
a writer, and eventually I wrote up the story of
Coach Fitz, first for the New York Times magazine and
then as a little book. Writing's hard to predict. You
work on something and then you throw it out there
at readers or listeners, and either they get what you
mean or they don't. A long time ago, Coach Fitz
sent me a poem that makes a connection between writing
(37:17):
and pitching. It's called The Pitcher by the American poet
Robert Francis. Here's how it ends. The others throw to
be comprehended. He throws to be a moment misunderstood yet
not too much, not errant, errant, wild, but every seeming aberration, willed,
(37:38):
not too yet still still to communicate, making the batter
understand too late. A picture, like a writer is delivering
a message. Both want the message understood, if in different ways.
(38:00):
That essay I published about Coach fitz made the batter
understand too late, and it generated this fantastic outrage not
towards the coach who pushed kids harder than they ever
been pushed, towards the people hoping to get the coach fired.
They got run out of town. More or less. The
(38:20):
headmaster left the school too, and the school created a
committee to find a new headmaster and put Billy Fitzgerald
in charge of it. This is where it all started,
right here for us eighth grade, nineteen seventy two. So
(38:40):
another decade passes. Twenty fourteen brings the retirement ceremony for
coach Billy Fitzgerald. Hundreds of people fly or drive to
the Newman School. So many people turn up that they
need to move it outdoors. The ceremony is held on
the same basketball court where I first watched him holler
and read from the collected works of Bobby Knight, just
(39:04):
around the corner from the gym now named for Billy Fitzgerald,
that you're going to coach, teacher, co worker, and athletic director.
The four of us are here tonight to tell you
that you've been a great father. People get up and
say what he meant to their lives. Thank you. Then
(39:24):
it's the coach's turn at the podium and he talks
about coaching. I happen to believe that coaching is teaching
in its most perfect and rewarding form, no matter the sport,
coaches give information, wait for a response, and then give
feedback that response. But as my career progressed, I came
(39:49):
to believe that coaching means finding ways to awaken our
students to new and different possibilities. You can see this
awakening in students eyes as they begin to reach those possibilities.
So I'm a firm believer in Gerda quote. Treat a
(40:10):
man as he is, and he remains as he is.
Treat a man as he can and should be, and
he will become as he can and should be. This
has been an incredible run and I can't thank you enough.
Thank you, coach. It's really not a job for just anyone.
(40:40):
Oh anyone can step into the role, of course and
call himself a coach. But it's like a tight rubber suit.
It takes on the shape whoever's in it. It hides nothing.
It expands and contracts with the character of the person
who wears it. In this case, the man makes the clothes.
(41:05):
This is a strange thing, man. The things that I
remember about Bill. One of the things that I remember happened,
what maybe five years ago. Harold Sylvester had gone back
to New Orleans for a funeral of her friend. He'd
walked into the church and found himself face to face
with the man who had seared himself into his imagination
back in nineteen sixty five in a basketball game played
(41:28):
in an empty gym, and Bill came up, and you know,
we chat up a little bit, and he said, yeah, hey, man,
I am a little sorry for the way things went down.
You know back in the day. What was he apologizing for.
He was apologizing for the times. But he said, you know,
I'm sorry for what you had to go through. And
(41:48):
when he said it, I was surprised. I don't remember
ever having a conversation about race. And I always thought
that Bill was fair. You know, I have no qualms,
you know about his toughness or his attitude or whatever
it was. I admired him. But bottom line is the
fact that he said it. Lady who could rise a March.
(42:14):
You know, in my opinion, he was a good guy.
He's a good guy to have as a friend. I'm
Michael Lewis. Thanks for listening to Against the Rules. Against
the Rules is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. The
(42:37):
show's produced by Audrey Dilling and Catherine Girodo, with research
assistance from Lydia Jeancott and Zooe Wynn. Our editor is
Julia Barton Mio o'bell is our executive producer. Our theme
was composed by Nick Brittell, with additional scoring by Stellwagon Sinphonette.
We got fact checked by Beth Johnson. Our show was
(42:57):
recorded by tofur Ruth and Trey Schultz at Northgate Studios
in Berkeley. Special thanks to the Isidore Newman School for
providing audio for this episode. As always thanks to Pushkins
founders Jacob Weisberg and Malcolm Gladwell. We're down there on
(43:24):
the baseline and all of a sudden, Billy were asked
back and punch Us Bogs in the head. You know,
he just knocks the shit out of him. Uh, you know,
and I'm saying I'm looking around, you know, I mean
they gonna Remi's pretty big, and and you know, my
four black friends were gone, you know, And and I'm
there sensitive by myself, and so so all I see
(43:48):
is Billy hitting peak and then the lsu Ben's rising
up and coming at us um. And that was it
what precipitated this, Like, why did Billy punch Pete Merrims,
I asked, Billy, you know why not? We we had
heard that story. We had heard a story where he
had gotten in a fight, start a fight with Pete
(44:10):
Marrivage and that there was you know, that he was
punching marriage and Press Marriviach was on his back and
it was just like and and I went and asked
him about it because I knew about it when I
was playing for him. It was like part of the
legend of Billy Fitzgerald. And he said, and he said
to me that never happened. Holy shit, So it did happen.
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