Coach: Lessons on the Game of Life by Michael Lewis

From Barnes & Noble

Billy Fitzgerald is a sports legend you've never heard of. The 57-year-old former minor league catcher coaches baseball and basketball at New Orleans' Isidore Newman School; not exactly a high-profile assignment. Ubiquitously called "Coach Fitz," this veteran mentor personifies a tough-as-nails coaching philosophy seldom seen in these days of player perks and recruiting wars. Not surprisingly, his old-school ways are under fire from parents at the expensive Louisiana prep school, but this gruff mentor does have hundreds of defenders among his former players (most notably NFL quarterback Peyton Manning), who insist that Coach Fitz changed their lives. Bestselling author Michael Lewis once labored under the verbal lashes of this unforgettable man; now he, too, pays tribute to a man who taught him some of life's most important lessons.

From the Publisher

"There are teachers with a rare ability to enter a child's mind; it's as if their ability to get there at all gives them the right to stay forever." There was a turning point in Michael Lewis's life, in a baseball game when he was fourteen years old. The irascible and often terrifying Coach Fitz put the ball in his hand with the game on the line and managed to convey such confident trust in Lewis's ability that the boy had no choice but to live up to it. "I didn't have words for it then, but I do now: I am about to show the world, and myself, what I can do." The coach's message was not simply about winning but about self-respect, sacrifice, courage, and endurance. In some ways, and now thirty years later, Lewis still finds himself trying to measure up to what Coach Fitz expected of him.

Publishers Weekly

Lewis (Liar's Poker; Moneyball) remembers his high school baseball coach, Coach Fitz, a man so intense a room felt "more pressurized simply because he was in it." At the New Orleans private school Lewis attended in the late 1970s, Coach Fitz taught kids to fight "the natural instinct to run away from adversity" and to battle their way through all the easy excuses life offers for giving up. He was strict, but he made such an impression on his students that now, 25 years later, alumni want to name a new gym after him. But the parents of today's students aren't as wowed by Coach Fitz's tough love. They call the headmaster with complaints, saying Coach Fitz is too mean to their children and insisting on sitting on his shoulder as he attempts to coach. A desire to set these new parents straight may be the underlying reason for Lewis's slight book, though he'd probably rather have readers believe he's just written it as a paean to a man who taught him some important life lessons. The book's corny subtitle, lack of heft and hackneyed images of kites flying and fireworks exploding may turn off some readers, but those who persevere will come away with a reminder that fear and failure are the "two greatest enemies of a well lived life." Agent, Andrew Wylie. (May) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Everything Lewis ever really needed to know he learned from prickly baseball coach Fitz. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

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