Don't Be Good – Be Great

best white team, Jesuit High also in New Orleans. And finally, our principal advice principle, we're able to negotiate this game. 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 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 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 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, 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

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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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

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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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,

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 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 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

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 know not to say look what I did, to say, look what you made it possible for me to do.

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

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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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. 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.

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 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 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. 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

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 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 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. 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

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, 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? 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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

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 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. 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 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 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

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, 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 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

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 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

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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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, 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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.