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Lessons on the Game of Life
I’m not sure what you’re going to make of the following excerpt (I’m not sure what I make of it myself), but it’s taken from a book called Coach by best-selling author Michael Lewis. Michael Lewis basically attributes his sucess in life to his baseball coach, as described in the following passage. Before you read it, I’ll just mention that this coach is now being undermined by many of his athletes’ parents for being too hard on the kids. Here’s what Coach Fitz has to say about this trend: “All this is about a false sense of self-esteem. It’s now bestowed on kids at birth. It’s not earned. If I were to jump all over you today, you would be highly insulted and deeply offended. You would not get that I cared about you.”
The summer of 1976 had been especially uncomfortable. Fitz had entered us in a better league, with bigger schools. Defeat followed listless defeat, until the night of this final Fitz story. We had just lost by some truly spectacular score. Twice at the end of the game he had shouted at our base runners to slide, and, perhaps not seeing the point, when down 15-2, in getting scraped, or even dirty, they’d gone in standing up. Afterward, at eleven o’clock or so, we piled off the bus and into the gym. Before we could undress, Fitz said, ‘We’re going out back.’ Out back of the gym was a sorry excuse for a playing field. The dirt was packed as hard as asphalt and speckled with shell shards, glass, bottle caps, and god knows what else. Fitz lined us up behind first base and explained we were going to practice running to third. When we got there, we were to slide headfirst into the base. This, he said, would teach us to get down when he said to get down. Then he vanished into the darkness. A few moments later we heard his voice, from the general vicinity of third base. One by one, our players took off. In the beginning there was some grumbling, but before long the only sound was of Fitz, spotting a boy coming at him out of the darkness, shouting ‘Hit it!’.
Over and over again we circled the bases, finishing with a headfirst slide onto, in effect, concrete. We ran and slid on that evil field, until we bled and gasped for breath. The boy in front of me, a sophomore new to Fitz, began to cry. I remember thinking, absurdly, ‘you’re too young for this’. Finally, Fitz decided we’d had enough, and ordered us back inside. Back in the light we marveled at the evening’s most visible consequence: ripped, muddy, and bloody uniforms. We undressed and began to throw them into the laundy baskets - untill Fitz stopped us. ‘We’re not washing them’ he said. ‘Not until we win’.
And they didn’t. I’m skipping quite a bit here about the continuing torture of these boys, and here’s the conclusion of this episode.
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.