I used to understand the phenomenon of people worshipping sports teams and coaches, as a general cultural disposition to enjoy the spectator experience. Lewis’ book let me understand, for people who practiced sports in coach Fitz’s way, such reverence for a coach is not a consumer admiring a purchased entertainment experience.
In this short book, Lewis interspersed his own personal experience being coached by Fitz, with observations on how Fitz affected students, parents and the school. Fitz made baseball a purpose for adolescents, and helped them to get out of young life crises. He separated the superfluous fun of “likes baseball, wants to win”, from applying your whole self like it’s life-and-death, from knowing that life is not a series of purchase decisions to bail out of whatever trouble you are in (for this group of adolescents in expensive school, bail using parents’ money). Fitz had an intensity that tolerated nothing less than devoting all to a purpose – team members who abandoned practices for parties were disciplined, and never wanted beach vacations for decades. Lewis himself was grilled by Fitz when he missed one week of committed practice when his parents took the family to vacation during Mardi Gras. Still feeling guilty for falling short of intense devotion, Lewis was accidentally hit by a ball which broke his nose upon returning to the field. Then — Lewis described that moment of being hit and losing consciousness as the happy moment of his life, and the first thing he said to his family at the doctor’s office, was he’ll never join vacations. He changed from a trouble-maker who frequented the headmaster’s office for confronting teachers, to a respectful one that the teachers genuinely love. Lewis put it the best– Fitz could reach in and pull a white rabbit out of an empty hat, and the whole experience means a lot more to the white rabbit than to the magician .
Before you think Fitz was some sadistic madness torturing high school students, the book sprinkles enough bits about Fitz to clarify that intensity is even stronger on himself. He’d walk home miles through bad neighborhoods in murder capital city, when his team lost. It was a habit from his day as a player, kept all the way to coaching, punishing himself in quietness, to redeem for noncommittal adolescents. He’d miss his own grandson’s christening to be there coaching for a game, and of course outraged when three boys chose to miss that game merely for a leisure trip to Paris.
But the trouble is time changes, and the magician is not allowed to reach into empty hats anymore. This is a larger point of the book: a general shift in attitude towards coaching, school and education since 1970s. Parents and former players from 70s revere Fitz for bringing senses into adolescent boys and making them better men – they appreciate him so much to raise funds to build a gym at school named Fitz. Parents today consider themselves as paying patrons demanding pampering, and badger the headmaster to fire coach Fitz, for calling out their kids’ lack of discipline, failed commitment, and lies. Most these parents are lawyers wanting too badly to help their kids to conventional success (of good school and good jobs), and resorting to pester the coach on giving their kids more playing time. The irony is, the only parent (a cardiologist) who refused invitations to join this lobbying and actually went to the headmaster to defend coach Fitz’s discipline – had the most hard-working, humble kid who turned out to be the best player on the team and courted by exactly the type of conventional successes that the lawyer dads tried to harassing the coach to get. The parents who are used to get their way through purchasing, lobbying, complaining and litigating, won’t appreciate the idea of intense devotion from coach Fitz.
This coach Fitz, a closet intellectual whose sermon to team quickly ran from Aesop to Mark Twain, who quotes “What is to give light must endure burning” to inspire team – is the intense idealism that money/lobbying consumers can’t purchase. As Lewis put, this kind of things “refused to be trivialized by time”. This book reminds me of teachers and parents, and worry whether I could do my job, caring the gift of intensity I received and passing it on, to the next generation.
Note: Lewis’s book is full of tension, I couldn’t do his superb writing justice in this book review, except to recommend please read it in full (Or better: listen to the audiobook read by him. His voice, though hoarse, is earnest).