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What Did Coach Mike Leach Have That Bill Belichick Lacks?

by Daniel A. Hill

When The Athletic published its anonymous NFL players poll mid-season in 2023, one stunning result emerged. Did you see the poll results in response to the question, “Which current coach, aside from your own, would you want to play for?” Way out ahead was the Pittsburgh Steelers’ veteran coach Mike Tomlin at 26.4 percent. Second was the Miami Dolphins newbie coach Mike McDaniel at 14.6 percent. Left barely cracking the ranks of the top coaches being picked was the New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick. The Gray-Hoodie Grouch came in 12th place at 2.1 percent, quite the come-down for the guy hovering just behind Don Shula and George Halas in the race to be the all-time, winningest NFL coach.

Now, you might quibble with the results. If you’re a pure stats guy, you can say: well, a poll result based on input from only 72 players in a league with 1,696 players on the league’s active rosters covers only 4.2 percent of the waterfront. That’s a good point to make.

Nevertheless, stick to that rebuttal and you’ll be missing the boat here. For more than three seasons now Belichick has been drowning in the mediocrity that plagued his early days as a head coach for the Cleveland Browns, and I think I know the reason why. A contrasting example, the explanation, lies down in Key West, Florida, in a bar called Capt. Tony’s Saloon. There you’ll find that despite a history of famous guests ranging from Bob Dylan to Al Pacino and Dan Marino, only four stalwarts have been honored by having their bar stools hoisted on high. Between stools stamped with the names of Ernest “Papa” Hemingway and two U.S. presidents, John F. Kennedy and Harry Truman, you’ll find another stool bearing the name of a pirate who dressed up as a college football coach.

Meet the recently deceased Mike Leach.

Pegged as a “quirky, offensive mastermind,” the Dolphins newbie coach McDaniel has a profile that echoes the only pro or NCAA football coach I’ve ever known: the one-and-only Coach Leach. The Athletic quotes an NFL player saying of McDaniel, “He seems like a pretty fun coach to play for.” Could the same be said of Leach? There’s a lot of rah-rah, macho bullshit that goes on around teams — football foremost among the sports guilty of guys who would rather have an enema than admit to fear — so I can’t say for sure. What I can draw on is this when it comes to assessing Leach: a three-and-a-half-hour phone call with the guy as I drove from Salem, Oregon to Seattle; a nearly five-hour stint together in Capt. Tony’s; and three full days on site at Washington State’s stadium during the coach’s preseason camp.

The maverick I experienced on each of those occasions could be fairly described as borderline crazy, Sybil in cleats, somebody harboring a split personality. What kind of guy talks your head off while you’re navigating the #5 northward to Seattle and then, when you meet up at 10 p.m. at Capt. Tony’s, says barely a word until the clock strikes midnight? That’s Coach Leach for you in a nutshell.

Go into Capt. Tony’s now and the bar’s owner, Joey Faber, will tell you that Coach Leach told better stories than Hemingway and was way smarter than those Democrats that Leach, a die-hard conservative, never once spoke of to me. How to get Coach to talk, I pondered. The guy was nursing his favorite drink, grape vodka and water, barely making eye contact with me or Joey or anybody on the planet. I figured I had to join Coach Leach in outer space somewhere, so I finally broke the ice by asking him: “What’s your all-time favorite play, the one you ran that delighted you the most?”

Then I had my guy.

Leaning against the bar counter, Coach Leach pushed his finger along the top of it in a straight line. “Down the sideline,” he said, “flat out — bomb.” Only that wasn’t the play the Coach was proud of. “Down the sideline,” he said, “flat out — bomb.” No, I was only half drunk and hearing right. The Coach had run the same play for the second time in a row, and it still wasn’t the play he was so mighty proud of. “Down the sideline,” he said yet again, “flat out — touchdown.”

I looked into Coach Leach’s eyes looking for an answer that might only exist in the stratosphere. “I ran the play three times,” my drinking companion explained, “and each time with a different receiver. Fresh legs. I did it knowing the cornerback wouldn’t be subbed out. So, the guy was gassed, and we scored.”

If anyone else was still in the bar between 2 a.m. and when we parted ways an hour later besides Joey, who hovered, sometimes joining in, I didn’t notice. Once Coach Leach got going, you got comments like “If a pine cone war breaks out, you don’t really have any choice but to engage in it. I mean, there’s no neutral countries in pine cone wars.”

For those who knew Coach Leach well, that kind of comment wouldn’t be surprising at all. Leach will always be famous for having created an alternative universe peopled with favorites like the Apache chief Geronimo, the gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, and the abstract painter Jackson Pollack, who hailed from Coach Leach’s home state of Wyoming. What was the Coach saying when he talked? It beats me. Go ahead and parse comments such as this one following a lost game: “It’s a little like breakfast. You eat ham and eggs. As coaches and players, we’re like the ham. You see, the chicken’s involved, but the pig’s committed. We’re like the pig; [officials] are like the chicken. They’re involved, but everything we have rides on this.” Go ahead and parse that press conference remark and tell me whether the guy was taking an indirect swipe at the officiating or merely hungry for his next meal. Who was Coach Leach? A Pepperdine University trained lawyer who looked a little like Archie Bunker and could talk like Yogi Berra.

If you get the impression that Coach Leach was an extremely extroverted Introvert, you’re on to something I think. When the guy did talk, he didn’t talk; he yapped. By comparison, nobody’s ever said that of Coach Belichick. Look at him on the sideline on Sunday during a Patriots game and what you see is nearly all that you hear: a scowl.

Truth be told, Coach Belichick isn’t human; he’s the Pillsbury Dough Boy cooking up mischief, bereft of the Dough Boy’s big smile. Asked to explain his success, Coach Doom-and-Gloom, the Gray-Hoodie Grouch, explained his formula as consisting of only two basic ingredients: 1) coach the players you have, not the ones you wished you had; and 2) keep it simple so your players don’t “fuck it up.”

I alone, however, know the secret of Belichick’s success. He’s a thief. While Coach Leach’s mind was until he died last year at age 61 a bank waiting to be looted, Belichick was and will always be a thief who cracks the safe in the wee hours of the morning. Not for him the bad odds of going in as a “hands-up,” free-shooting bank robber operating in broad daylight.

How did I arrive at my theory that distinguishes villainous, pirate-loving Saint Leach from the Criminal Mastermind holed up in Foxboro, Massachusetts? By getting Coach Belichick’s foremost accomplice to squeal in a manner of speaking. Of course, I’m now talking about Deflategate. In mid-January of 2015, I’m in San Francisco. More specifically, I’m in the West Coast studio of Bloomberg TV about to go live based on my recent front-page coverage in The New York Times.

The media likes fresh angles. So, while the article explored my use of facial coding to help pro and NCAA Division 1 sports teams draft, trade, and coach players more smartly, my recent appearance on ABC’s “Good Morning, America” focused on what politicians’ expressions can tell you about their emotional make-up. Now the producers at Bloomberg TV plan on having me walk through the signature expressions of Wall Street titans like Jamie Diamon and thieves like the Bernie who Madoff (with yours and everybody else’s money).

Then, only just a few moments before I’m scheduled to hit the airwaves myself, Tom Brady holds a brief press conference. Looking on in the Bloomberg studio, I see a guy uncharacteristically nervous as hell. A guy who is normally a combination of dimly lit smiles and full-on, cocky smirking, is betraying fear. Again, again and again his mouth pulls slightly wide, a tell-tale sign of anxiety.

For instance, during the Deflategate press conference, a reporter asks: “When and how did you supposedly alter the ball?” Even as the question is being asked, Brady swallows hard and the right side of his mouth stretches laterally, back towards the ear. Then as he answers, here’s what happens: (mouth pulls wider) “I didn’t” (mouth widens slightly more) “you know” (both eyebrows shoot upwards) “have any, uh… ” (mouth both widens again and falls open). “I didn’t hold onto the balls in any way.”

With a voice quavering at times, Brady will go on to offer other, not exactly on-point denials. One example is when he says, “I didn’t alter the ball in any way,” which Allysia Finley recasts in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece as follows: “Of course, you didn’t. Your ball boys did. That’s what flunkies are for: Doing things you don’t want to get caught doing and then taking the fall.”

Similarly, note Brady’s careful words when asked if he had cheated: “I don’t believe so. I feel like I’ve always played within the rules.” On Bloomberg TV just a few minutes after the Deflategate press conference ends, what kind of appraisal do I give on the air? How culpable might Brady be? Seeking a point of reference, I cite an old Second City comedy skit. In it John Belushi is playing U.S. Senator Howard Baker during the Watergate hearings. “What I want to know,” Belushi drawls, “is what did the President know and when did he stop knowing it?”

In the TV studio, I can hear the camera crew struggling to muffle their laughter. What I don’t hear, of course, is Belichick chuckling because he never does.

 

Locate photos of Coach Leach on game days and you can see what I see. Success is greeted by smiles that tend to be tentative half-smiles, the sign of an introvert. Meanwhile, play calling gone awry leads to mostly mild dismay. The eyebrows will lower in concern, and the mouth tends to either fall slightly ajar in a sign of mild surprise or there’s a faint raising of the upper lip that expresses mild disgust and anger. In short, as the guy stands with his hands on both hips along the sideline, Leach resembles a fairly docile brown bear hoping to eat some more honey sooner than later.

In contrast, Coach Belichick ups the ante on anger — an emotion that at its finest, inspires overcoming injustices but that at its worst becomes a matter of seizing control of one’s circumstances and outcomes, however one must, in a supreme case of the ends justify the means. What does anger look like in Belichick’s case? The Patriots long-time head coach pinches his eyebrows together hard. His lower eyelids are taut and straightlaced. His lips will not generally press together gently like Leach’s did. Instead, they bulldoze each other — leading to a bulge that forms below the lower lip. Throw in the upside-down smile created when your chin presses upwards, and you’ve got the complete picture. With his arms characteristically folded across his chest, the Gray-Hoodie Grouch becomes Fortress Belichick, inaccessible to mere mortals like you and me.

With Belichick, there is no joy in Mudville — just a long rap sheet full of allegations that have mostly resulted in either fines, suspensions, or other penalties lodged against the Patriots as a team, rather than against a coach who’s never been a glorious role model. Take a hard look. When it comes to competitive misconduct, Coach Grouch qualifies as a repeat offender subjected by the League to ever smaller financial hand slaps that ended altogether as he accumulated more Super Bowl trophies:

The 2007 Spygate scandal, e.g., signal-stealing in a game against the New York Jets. A $500k fine.
The 2012 case of grabbing a ref’s arm at game’s end to protest a call. A $50k fine.
The 2014 Deflategate scandal when underinflated balls help Patriots receivers grip the ball in the wet weather and keep Payton Manning’s visiting Indianapolis Colts on defense. No fine.
In 2015, headset malfunctions the visiting Steelers consider intentional sabotage. No fine.
In 2019, the Cincinnati Bengals video scandal in which a Patriot’s staffer is more interested in filming the sidelines, looking for signal calling, than in recording the on-field action. No fine.

And amid all these allegations of infractions, I’m leaving out the trick plays Coach Belichick the Conniver has called, many of which subsequently led to changes in the NFL’s rule book.

What a clever bastard.

Is Coach Leach really a saint? It’s complicated. But the answer is NO if you endorse his suspension in 2009 by Texas Tech for the sin of apparently ordering one of his players, Adam James, to be locked up in an equipment closet after James had sustained a concussion in practice. What a fool, you might say. What was Leach thinking? Why keep a player “out of the light” when his dad is a former NFL player and an ESPN analyst ready to shed plenty of limelight on why he believes his son’s alleged “humiliation” got so out of hand?

 

Okay, so I’ve now dawdled long enough here, dirty dish water circling the drain. You want the goods. Why exactly is Belichick failing lately, and what is it that Leach had that the Grump lacks.

To go there, let’s first acknowledge that what Super Bowls galore, 300-plus-wins Coach Belichick is IS a defensive genius. He’s a thief whose lineups and schemes succeed by stealing from opponents the plays they most want to run by shutting them down, hard. How else is the guy a thief? He’s rightfully “stolen” ideas from football books, 400 of which he donated to the Naval Academy after his father (a long-time coach) finally died. He’s also less righteously stolen opponents’ play signals and the lives of players and assistant coaches by demanding even longer hours than other NFL teams commit to.

Most of all, though, the Gray-Hoodie Grouch has stolen and locked away happiness to a degree that Mike could never abide. There I did it. I slipped. I called Coach Leach Mike because you could.

Who would dare call Belichick Billy Boy? Not I or anybody who would want to be on his team for long. The guy’s been so omnipotent. So gruff and hard-nosed. Tough. More than ready to damn with the faintest of praise. “Do your job” has been the Patriots’ mantra. Should you question authority, well, forget it. Belichick has reigned as the deviser of game plans and offensive play calls, and as the de facto general manager handling every trade and whom to draft. Which is why penalizing the team instead of also continuing to fine Belichick himself makes no sense. After all, there’s, frankly, ZERO separation between the Patriots as a team and Belichick as the team’s God almighty.

Why has the Gray-Hoodie Grouch reigned for so long in Foxboro? Success breeds tolerance. When the Grouch’s assistant coaches have tried to implement his brand of stern discipline elsewhere, what’s happened? The answer is some pretty awful failures. It’s one thing to lose. It’s another thing to have your players pop champagne bottles or light up cigars in the locker room when you get fired, as reportedly happened to a pair of the Grouch’s former assistants turned head coaches in the NFL.

Again, was Coach Leach a saint? I can’t say yes. In Pullman, Washington, I watched the losers of drills be forced to wear pink, pull-over mesh jerseys. Pink = wuss. That was the logic, screwy and sexist as it was and for once I didn’t want to catch Mike’s glance for fear he would sense my dismay. Nor did the Coach intervene when I warned him that one of his offensive linemen wasn’t gelling with his teammates and looked downright, catatonically glum, a hint that turned into a suicide attempt a few weeks later.

That said, how can you not like a guy who adored pirates and for whom time meant next to nothing? Legend has it that Coach Leach once stayed on a call for 90 minutes with someone who had dialed a wrong number. In contrast, Coach Belichick’s Naval Academy family ties are reflected in the Patriots’ military-style order, rigorously imposed, a culture where no insubordination is allowed, the AFC’s western division Raiders’ eyepatch-and-cross-swords pirates logo be damned.

 

A shipshape, uptight defensive mindset can have its merits in football as elsewhere in life. But going on offense rewards also having other attributes you can call on. That’s where Coach Grouch is vulnerable. For the longest time, Tom Brady could paper over the divide. Not one of Belichick’s Super Bowl victories came before Brady arrived in Foxboro or after he left. Meanwhile, Brady obviously went on to win it all again with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers — oh, no: pirates again — in 2020, right after saying goodbye to the only NFL head coach the star quarterback had known.

In a New York Times Magazine profile of Coach Leach, the Moneyball author Michael Lewis happily described the Coach’s pass-happy, Air Raid offense as “a mood: optimism. It is designed to maximize the possibility of something good happening rather than minimize the possibility of something bad happening.” Not by chance did Leach’s quarterbacks at Texas Tech, Washington State and, finally, Mississippi State all thrive. In Don Coryell’s San Diego Chargers offense, led by quarterback Dan Fouts, the NFL had seen a similar vertical attack mode beginning in 1978. But never had college football seen such an explosion of passing yards, and the idea that fourth down might represent just another opportunity to spread four or five receivers along the line of scrimmage.

In Coach Leach’s scheme, quarterbacks were meant to hunt for treasure on the high seas. The guy taking the snap from center might select as much as 70 percent of the plays being run given Leach’s approach: “You’re out there on the field. You can see the way the defense is lined up better than I can.”

The Gray-Hoodie Grouch doesn’t see the situation like that. What more than anything else apparently caused Brady to leave for Tampa Bay? He wanted to be allowed some input regarding how the offensive schemes would unfold. Out the door went a long-term, successful relationship. In a way, the end of the Belichick-Brady bromance was not unlike how during the making of the Abbey Road album, John Lennon suggested to Paul McCartney that George Harrison’s strides as a singer-songwriter meant The Beatles should move to four songs apiece on future albums. McCartney ignored the idea, cementing the band’s dissolution.

Poor draft picks. Lousy trades. Paying too much for some players and not enough to land others on the roster. It can get ugly fast. At age 71, is it possible that more than Coach Belichick’s arteries are hardening? Lately, he’s been favoring assistant coaches he already knows too well, raising the specter of inbreeding. Might the goal of eclipsing Coach Don Shula’s record for all-time victories be in jeopardy now that Patriots owner Robert Kraft has grown tired of so much losing?

You could never fault Coach Leach for having an open mind, always exploring. Can you imagine Belichick stepping in for a television weatherman like Mike once did during his time in Lubbock, Texas? Who among the coaching ranks ever sought to discuss Moby Dick and the shape of cornflakes at almost the same time? Who else was ever quoted at a press conference as saying, “There’s nothing balanced about 50 percent run, 50 percent pass, because that’s 50 percent stupid”? And furthermore, did so after winning with a game plan that led to zero net yards gained from rushing the ball.

The truth is that Coach Belichick, Mr. Doom and Gloom, can never buy that kind of care-free attitude at any price and wouldn’t attempt to do so. The Gray-Hoodie Grouch is way too busy consigning players to his doghouse for minor infractions of team rules to bother. At Belichick’s inevitable Hall of Fame induction ceremony, coaching giants like his former colleagues Bill Parcells and Nick Saban may laud him. But there’s something small and pinched about the Foxboro Fortress that not even the sweetest words will relieve.

P.S. As nearly predicted in this essay written during the 2023-24 regular season, Bill Belichick ended his 24-year run in Foxboro and did so 15 victories shy of surpassing Don Shula’s all-time wins record. The big shock was that none of the eight NFL teams with a head coach slot open post-season hired Belichick. Maybe if Coach Grouch hadn’t wanted to retain his distinction as the only head coach in the league with complete control over his roster, he might have secured a new job. As it stands, however, Belichick’s failure to resign any player he drafted in the first three rounds since 2013 looms as a black eye, indicative of someone who’s better at diagramming x’s and o’s than deciphering the magic of what makes a player tick.

Daniel A. Hill is the author of 10 books including Emotionomics, which features a foreword by “The Simpsons” co-creator Sam Simon. He’s also served as an analyst of U.S. presidential candidates and debates for the past 20 years for major media outlets, including The New York Times, CNN, Fox, MSNBC, and Reuters as well as the programs ABC’s “Good Morning, America” and NBC’s “The Today Show.” For his work studying athletes for teams in professional and NCAA Division I sports, he received a front-page profile in The New York Times. Other media roles have ranged from frequently appearing as a guest on PBS’s critically acclaimed show “Mental Engineering” to hosting the podcast “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” on the New Books Network (NBN), the world’s largest book review platform. His previous essays have been noted with honor in three editions of The Best American Essays.

 

 

FUN, FUN, FUN!

A Review of Taro Gomi’s Run, Run, Run!

by Scott F. Parker

Taro Gomi was already a household favorite in my family, thanks to his classic Everyone Poops, which we have long quoted and laughed at and learned from. The art in Gomi’s latest book to be translated into English from the original Japanese, Run, Run, Run!, a board book, is reminiscent of his best-known work. Plain-colored backgrounds, in this case white, featuring simple figures in action, in this case mostly running, don’t just illustrate the story but play a crucial role in its telling.

The narrative announces itself from the start: “It’s time to race!” Five children approach the start line and await the starter’s signal. From the moment the gun fires, it’s only a page until the first child crosses the finish line, where she receives a flag numbered 1. But wait, the text tells us, “Running is fun!” Are we really at the finish line already? The book just started. As the second, third, and fourth runners accept their numbered flags, the last runner continues past the finish line. The next several pages see this runner take to city streets, neighborhoods, fields, and forests. If running is fun, Run, Run, Run! asks, why would anyone stop?

Eventually, though, if you run far enough you come back to where you began, as the child in the book does, approaching the finish line a second time. This time, however, a dog that has been following the child since the farm surges into the lead and claims fifth place in the race, bumping our hero back to sixth. This is how far behind our hero has fallen: finishing sixth in a five-kid race.

Meaningless childish silliness? I don’t think so. Or, rather, not just. Gomi’s runner is not merely eccentric. The child understands what the race is and what it’s for but chooses, despite this, to break out of the race’s constraints entirely. The reader’s expectations about the narrative are revealed as this child asserts the right to make new rules. Why can’t a race be run without racing? Why can’t a book start one story only to tell another? Run, Run, Run! is as liberatory to the adult reader as it is perfectly sensible to the child reader.

What could be more sensible, more logical, than to explore the world by foot, to proceed according to what’s fun, to run your own kind of race, to be your own kind of self? Does it sound childish. Great wisdom usually does.

Scott F. Parker is the author of Run for Your Life: A Manifesto and The Joy of Running qua Running, among other books. His writing has appeared in Runner’s World, Running Times, Tin House, Philosophy Now, the Believer, and other publications. He teaches at Montana State University and is the nonfiction editor for Kelson Books.

The Personal is Political as Memoir

A Review of Caster Semenya’s The Race to Be Myself

by Scott F. Parker

In another world, Caster Semenya’s memoir might have told the archetypal story of an athlete working hard with her considerable natural talent to overcome obstacles and achieve success. Needless to say, Semenya did just that in the course of setting numerous records and winning three world championships and two Olympic gold medals at 800 meters.

But in this world, Semenya’s memoir, like her career, gets totally subsumed by gender controversy. For all her accomplishments on the track, Semenya is far better known for her disputed status as a woman. “To put it simply” Semenya writes, “on the outside I am female, I have a vagina, but I do not have a uterus.” This fact was revealed by a gender test given in response to suspicions about Semenya’s race results. “I found out, along with the rest of the world, that I did not have a uterus or fallopian tubes. The newspaper reported I had undescended testicles that were the source of my higher-than-normal levels of testosterone.” The official diagnosis was a variant of DSD (difference in sex development) condition known as 46XY, which is to say Semenya has male chromosomes.

Despite this seemingly undeniable fact, Semenya devotes much of The Race to Be Myself to asserting her status as a woman. Take two typical passages: “I know I look like a man. I know I sound like a man and maybe even walk like a man and dress like one, too. But I’m not a man.” and “I want everyone to understand that despite my condition, even though I am built differently than other women, I am a woman.” The claim lands squarely on Semenya’s sense of identity. She was raised as a girl, accepted as a girl, and understood herself as a girl and then as a woman, and therefore takes herself to be a woman, regardless of what anyone else says: “To be honest, I didn’t care then, and I don’t care now what the medical findings are.”

Even the most sympathetic readers will notice that this emphasis on identification, no matter how understandable, avoids the central question, which is not how we define woman as such but how we define woman in track and field. The definition itself is relevant because women are protected from having to compete against men due to their relative physical disadvantages. A better analogy than to say LeBron James’s genes give him an unfair advantage over his competitors but we don’t ban him from the NBA would be to say that we have weight divisions in boxing to give more people a chance to compete. Following this analogy, Semenya simply has the misfortune of belonging to a class too small to field its own division within the sport. If this is unfair to Semenya — and it is — wouldn’t it be similarly unfair to the other athletes to let her race against women?

If you’d rather gain access to Semenya’s experiences of the extraordinary events of her life than engage such arguments, The Race to Be Myself feels mostly like a missed opportunity. As she writes, “it is hard to think of another athlete at the elite level who has endured as much scrutiny and psychological abuse from sports’ governing bodies, other competitors, and the media as I have.” Yet the book largely neglects the emotional toll that this experience placed on her in favor of defensive posturing. The greatest exception to this tendency comes in the book’s strongest chapter, “Nothing,” which depicts the low period in Semenya’s life after her private medical records were made public. “How do you explain what it feels like to have been recategorized as a human being? That one day you were a normal person living your life, and the next day you were seen as abnormal?” Yes, how do you explain that? I would love to find out.

Scott F. Parker is the author of Run for Your Life: A Manifesto and The Joy of Running qua Running, among other books. His writing has appeared in Runner’s World, Running Times, Tin House, Philosophy Now, the Believer, and other publications. He teaches at Montana State University and is the nonfiction editor for Kelson Books.

The Being and the Doing

A Review of Brendan Leonard’s I H♡TE RUNNING and You Can Too

by Scott F. Parker

Maybe I should consider it a sign. I was walking by a table of books at a church fundraiser when the word running caught my eye. Stopping, I read the full title, I H♡TE RUNNING and You Can Too: How to Get Started, Keep Going, and Make Sense of an Irrational Passion. It looked, from premise to design, a little cute for my tastes. But one term in the subtitle intrigued me: irrational passion. It is one of the motivating concerns of this column to make sense of precisely that. Plus, the book was $1, and it would go to the church.

It didn’t take me long to realize that, assumptions be damned, Brendan Leonard is my kind of running writer: “This is not a how-to book or a memoir of a very fast person who has stood on podiums at the finish lines of races. It will not tell you how to train for a race, how to eat during, before, or after running and/or racing, or what kind of shoes to buy or clothes to wear, or what kind of stretches to do before or after running.” Pausing briefly to remember that some fast people write great memoirs, what I really want to say here is Amen. When it comes to reading about running, give me the intangibles every time.

But Leonard is being slightly ironic in his disclaimer. I H♡TE RUNNING most definitely is a how-to book; it’s just not about how to run a certain way or toward a certain outcome. It’s more elemental than that — it’s actually about how to be a runner. To wit:

Isn’t it more complicated than that? Not really. As Leonard explains, “At some point, every person was running zero miles per week.” Like Lao Tzu before him, Leonard recognizes wisdom disguised as the perfectly obvious: the way to get from zero to more than zero is to start. It’s impossible to argue against such clear insights. But the point isn’t to nod your head, it’s to take to heart.

Leonard challenges our conceptions of what it means to run so that we will be liberated to run. Here he is quoting Bart Yasso, the former chief running officer of Runner’s World: “I often hear someone say, ‘I’m not a real runner.’ We are all runners; some just run faster than others. I have never met a fake runner.” If you’re inclined toward ordinary language philosophy, you’ll see right away what Yasso and Leonard are up to. So many of us are insecure about our status as runners. Are we real runners? But we don’t stop think to about the implied contrast of real in that question. Do we mean that we are slow runners? That we are occasional runners? That we haven’t ever run marathon? Maybe we are slow, maybe we don’t run every day, maybe we max out at three miles. But these are just three ways of modifying what we are: runners.

This might start out as semantic, but one of Leonard’s key psychological insights is that it quickly becomes ontological. Noticing what words mean and using them precisely can produce a change in our self-conception. And that change in self-conception can propagate quickly in behavior. If I am a runner… I run. Or here is one of Leonard’s helpful charts:

The question then becomes, Why be a runner? Why run?

To this, Leonard offers several answers. There is the undeniable: “Either you think doing hard things is worth it to some extent, or you don’t.” The inspirational, by way of Alex Lowe: “‘The best climber in the world is the one who’s having the most fun.’ I think that ethos can apply to anything we do, including running.” The realistic: “Yes, I hate it most of the time, but maybe once during every run, I have a few seconds, or a minute or two, where I find myself thinking, ‘You know, this isn’t so bad.’” Different runners will lean into different reasons. And perhaps reasons is the wrong concept to apply here. We run because running is in our nature. We can but don’t need to tell a story about how it got in our nature. It’s enough just to notice that it’s there. If you do, the rest follows:

 

Scott F. Parker is the author of Run for Your Life: A Manifesto and The Joy of Running qua Running, among other books. His writing has appeared in Runner’s World, Running Times, Tin House, Philosophy Now, the Believer, and other publications. He teaches at Montana State University and is the nonfiction editor for Kelson Books.

On Balance

A Review of Mylo Choy’s Middle Distance

by Scott F. Parker

At the same time, during high school, that Mylo Choy learned about running the most efficient line when cutting in from an outside lane during an 800m race, they “became interested in expressing more with less” in their drawings. This minimalist aesthetic maintains in Choy’s graphic memoir, Middle Distance, which is as sparse in its narrative as it is in its illustrations.

The book, then, is not unlike its subject — running. In the same way that the simplicity of running is the source of its depth, Middle Distance’s simple style creates the space for the rich experience of reading it. There is a whole felt world beneath the surface of this one runner’s outline of a story.

This is not to suggest that Choy’s work is vague or impersonal. To the contrary, the particular details of the style and story are crucial to its success. Choy chooses not to linger on their Buddhist upbringing or their nonbinary identity, but these aspects of the author’s life uniquely contextualize the role running plays in it and support Carl Rogers’s claim that “What is most personal is most general.”

Choy started running in sixth grade when their gym teacher sent the class out for a state-mandated timed mile. Choy’s response was immediate: “I felt free. A new way to be in my own world.” From this day on, running would be a source of meaning and stability in their life. “When I ran,” they write, “I could process my feelings without words, and without anyone else. It gave me the feeling of power in my own life.”

Of course, running doesn’t go only well for Choy. Training for the New York City Marathon, they get injured and are forced to give up running for what turns out to be years before working their way through a long, slow rehab that eventually culminates in their completing the NYC Marathon.

But this is not a story of mind over matter, or the conquering will of the heroic athlete. This is a subtler book than that. It’s about listening to what is and learning how to trust the world and expressing oneself through authentic acts. This period of struggle when they are not running is profound for Choy. They, like many runners, are not the same person when they are not running. And their return to running doesn’t return them to the person they used to be. Running the NYC Marathon leads Choy, instead, to a mature perspective and a mature sense of self that recalls the Buddhism of their childhood. “I never lost my love for running. That love taught me to look for a middle way.”

Choy’s running, finally, is quiet, balanced, receptive, and wise. As is their book.

Scott F. Parker is the author of Run for Your Life: A Manifesto and The Joy of Running qua Running, among other books. His writing has appeared in Runner’s World, Running Times, Tin House, Philosophy Now, the Believer, and other publications. He teaches at Montana State University and is the nonfiction editor for Kelson Books.

 Our “1970s Contest” Winners Featured in Latest Pub

Early in 2024, we announced SL’s “1970s Contest,” perhaps still marveling that it’s been been 50 years since the mid-1970s. We were lucky to bring two guest judges, both of them SL veterans and contest winners themselves, on board to judge the anonymous finalists. Jack Bedell and Sydney Lea also happen to be former state Poet Laureates.

In August, Bedell and Lea, picked their favorites… Robert Wallace for his essay, “Something to Do With Playing Ball,” and David J. Rothman for his poem, “A Sweet, Wild Passion.” Congrats to both of those winners, who each took home $500 prizes.

We appreciate all who entered the contest. For taking the chance, all writers and poets received back issues, as well as a two-issue subscription. We have no plans for a contest at the moment, but we are accepting work for our “30th Anniversary Issue,” which we anticipate coming out in late spring or summer.

Jack Bedell, our essay judge, served as Louisiana Poet Laureate from 2017 to 2019. A professor of English, Jack coordinates the Creative Writing program at Southeastern Louisiana University, where he also edits Louisiana Literature and directs the Louisiana Literature Press. His published work, in numerous journals, has been included in Best Microfiction and Best Spiritual Literature. His latest collection is Against the Woods’ Dark Trunks.

Sydney Lea, our poetry judge, served as Vermont’s Poet Laureate from 2011 to 2015. The author of 23 books, Syd was the 2021 recipient of his home state’s most prestigious artist’s distinction: the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. A former Pulitzer finalist and winner of the Poets’ Prize, he is the founding editor of New England Review.

Game: A Sport Literate Anthology

Years in the making (literally), Game: A Sport Literate Anthology, features 25 of our favorite essays from our first 25 years (1995-2020). Arranged alphabetically by sport, Jay Lesandrini leads off with his baseball short, “Waiting on Deck.” Mark Pearson’s wrestling piece, “The Short History of an Ear,” wraps up the collection. Coincidentally, both those essays were published in our “15th Anniversary Issue” in 2010.

In between our lead-off hitter and reflective wrestler, you’ll find the work of Anthony D’Aries, Justina Elias, Lucy Ferriss, Benedict Giamo, Linnie Greene, Jeffrey Hammond, Michael J. Hess, William Huhn, Mark Anthony Jarman, Michael Kula, William Loizeaux, Rachel Luria, Lance Mason, Michael McColly, Allessandra Nolan, Virginia Ottley Craighill, Liz Prato, Cinthia Ritchie, Bill Roorbach, Frank Soos, Robert Wallace, and Mark Wukas. It’s full of several of our “Best Americans,” along with their good humor, occassional heartbreak, and really wonderful writing.

To get some of the best of our best all within a 228 page collection, you can order the book for $24.95, plus $5 for shipping and handling. Pick it up through PayPal below.

Should that link not work, send us a message at billsportliterate@gmail.com and we’ll figure it out. Or go old school, sending a check, made payable to Sport Literate, to our Michigan home base: 1422 Meadow Street; Mount Pleasant, MI 48858. Or go new school and Venmo… @William-Meiners-3.

Five for Five

by Scott Palmieri

Somewhere near the middle of a row in the middle of my eighth-grade homeroom, not far from the end of middle school, I await morning announcements, which begin with the end of the Pledge of Allegiance. I hate every day here. But I can’t wait for this one to start, my last chance to emerge from the endless middle.

Part of me is still in yesterday, our last baseball game of the season, only our third win, when I have five hits, my last a bloop that drops well enough behind the second baseman, far enough from the right fielder. A cheap hit but a clean hit. No other middle schooler in the world is five for five.

We rumble back on the bus, change in the locker room, and I start my walk home, past the blacktop behind the school, between the track and the soccer field, dreaming of my imminent fame. I can already hear the next morning’s words muffling through the stiff tan weave of the speaker, fastened near the classroom clock, the voice of Mrs. Radinsky saying to the world of West Hollow Middle School, “Scott Palmieri had five hits.”

I need this more than ever. I am failing math. And in science, a kid in a Guns N’ Roses t-shirt pokes my back, wanting the answers to our daily quiz. I am only a little better at science than he is. English is better, but I make the dubious choice of writing a book report on Fred DeCordova, longtime producer of the Tonight Show. No other middle schooler in the world has done this. But this will not boost me up the social ladder, nor will the revelation from my elderly teacher, who wears a bright auburn wig, that she also loves Johnny Carson. Social Studies reminds me that my problems will not qualify for its syllabus.

I cross our vacant field to the space I played shortstop all spring. The big diamond, the real diamond, 60 feet and six inches from mound to home, 90 feet from base to base, the long throw from the middle of the infield, a burden I am just strong enough to bear. The song “Cycles” plays through my Walkman headphones because my father raised me not just on baseball but Frank Sinatra. No other middle schooler in the world hears:

Life is like the seasons
After winter comes the spring,
So I’ll keep this smile a while
And see what tomorrow brings.

I soar past the melancholy tenor because, as the song implies, even middle school days can be good, even here, tangled in hormones in the middle of Long Island, where strip malls bracket everything, even the first home of Walt Whitman, who spoke with affection about baseball in its earliest days, his farmhouse not far from my baseball field, which borders a cabbage farm that stretches like rows in a long homeroom. Up two long hilly streets, I turn into my driveway and submerge into my house.

I am neither the oldest nor the youngest of nine children. We are nine, but we are not all baseball. We are Irish-Italian but also a family of adoption. So we are South Korean, and we are Puerto Rican, in the middle of a grand transition. Unlike Whitman, I do not yet celebrate our shared atoms. I am 14 and selfish. I cower and cringe from the gaze of neighbors and the parishioners who gawk at our differences when we enter Mass, always a few minutes late, and shuffle down the middle aisle.

Maybe five hits can help me overcome the clarinet, the choice that doomed me to the cluster between flutes and trumpets, a good distance from the kid in the Megadeth t-shirt who plays electric guitar, his wild hair bouncing atop the bandstand beside the percussionists, who sport feint mustaches and joke about girls and getting to second base. Among the meek woodwinds, I gawk at the lone oboe, puckering my mouth around the splintering reed.

Maybe five hits can ease my black and white yearbook picture: a pale, braces-laden smile, drably parted dark hair, my eyes tired from staying up late to watch Johnny Carson, all squared alongside the rococo 1980s ambitions of hair spray. Or protect me from the likes of Rocco Scarpoli, who once volleyed my snarky comment with his large hand, shoving my head into a cafeteria table. I promptly rose and stared in his direction, and then promptly sat back down, when a friend from elementary school, who still cared enough, shook his head and winced as if to say, “He will kill you, man.”

On the baseball field, everyone can like me, even our chain-smoking pitcher, whose name I can’t remember and whose photo I don’t find in the yearbook, who laughs at my snarky comments because he hates middle school, too. He survives by doing the wrong things while I do the opposite. When our third baseman, Michael Gipp, yells out in disgust, “C’mon guys!” after I make an error, frustrated at our series of errors amidst a series of losses, the smoker tells Gipp to go fuck himself, flashing a smile at me.

But now it’s all up to Mr. Reiser, our hapless manager, who made up for his lack of coaching with a wealth of apathy. Though no matter how bad it got, no matter how limited the instruction, the special education teacher smiled and called out our names with each at-bat, sitting flat footed on the long, low bench behind the chain-link fence, his arms crossed in his short sleeve button-down and blue jeans. For us, his meager stipend was earned with one job: handing Mrs. Radinsky the highlights, when names and athletic feats, though we had few, soared through every room and hallway across three grades.

The announcements begin. The spring production of Grease will be this weekend. Sandy will be played by the angelic Jessica Pepe. The spring dance tickets are available, too. I will attend neither. I will rent Mel Brooks films from Mega Movies, near the Walt Whitman Shopping Mall, where on the walls, fronting J.C. Penny’s and Buster Brown Shoes, are imprinted lines from “Song of Myself.”

I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the begin-
ning and the end,
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end

Since my mother raised me on poetry, maybe my five hits can make me believe that “there will never be any more perfection than there is now.” Maybe I can salvage myself from the sinking shyness that stopped me from spinning the bottle, that dropped me from birthday party lists, that made me drift lonesome through the jangled locker spaces of the crowded halls.

Mrs. Radinsky’s sports recap begins. Don’t just say my name in a list among others. Tell them all I had five hits. Please, Mrs. Radinsky. Please, Mr. Reiser.

Then Mrs. Radinsky says it. She says it better than I ever could have hoped.

“Scott Palmieri went five for five.” She lands on each number. Five for Five. She gives me my own sentence, not a mere mention in the middle. Everyone knows that yesterday, I was extraordinary. In another room, Jessica Pepe must wonder who I am. Heads turn in my direction. Eyebrows rise, mouths open.

But Mrs. Radinsky must go on. The heads turn back. The announcements end as has middle school baseball. For the rest of the day, no one cares about five for five. Math class does not. The same for the Guns N’ Roses kid expecting the right answers and the one sporting Megadeth, who jams by himself in the band room, before class starts, creating, what must be for him, something beautiful, with no chance of Mrs. Radinsky telling the world.

I will get an A on the book report, walk home with Sinatra, and, by the next September, attend a high school where no one knows me, a new start, like Whitman, who left his Long Island hometown. Baseball will help send me to college, where I will study English, cycles of leaving home and returning to my family, whom I will rightly find extraordinary.

Tonight, my wife, a school nurse, tells me that today she found a girl sitting in a middle school hallway, back pressed against the wall, her face in her hands, sobbing.

“Why won’t anyone be nice to me? No matter how hard I try?”

I wish I could give the child my five hits and then 500 more, let her have my morning announcement, tell her that these words have been for her, though the truth is that this was already written and dedicated to my chain-smoking pitcher, whom I’d like to find again, finally thank for being kind.

Scott Palmieri is a professor of English at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island. His writing has been published in Sport Literate, Aethlon, Hobart, The Leaflet, The Alembic, and The Result Is What You See Today: Poems About Running. He played baseball at Providence College and continues his love of the sport through writing, coaching Little League, and playing, as long as his legs will allow, in a senior men’s league. He lives in Wakefield, Rhode Island, with his wife and three children, his biggest fans.

Concrete Charlie and The Golden Boy

by Hal Ackerman

The crash sounded like a train wreck. Cheers caught in the throats of 63,000 fans. Frank Gifford who had just caught a pass, lay flat on his back, motionless. Chuck Bednarik, the Eagles linebacker who had laid the hit on him, pulsed his closed fist skyward in triumph. Fans who were there and millions who saw the iconic photograph mistook the gesture for savage glee. Gifford would later defend it as a perfectly clean tackle, and Bednarik’s explanation of the gesture was not about the damage he’d inflicted but elation that his team had clinched the game and the division championship.

I had turned 18 on that November afternoon of 1960. My dad and I were seated in a VIP section among the players’ wives, courtesy of Joseph Sheehan, a sportswriter for the New York Times and a client of my dad’s. The New York Football Giants played their home games back then at Yankee Stadium. As diehard Brooklyn Dodger fans, even three years after their desertion to some city on the west coast, we had never set foot (or backside) in any other ballpark than Ebbets Field. Certainly not the home of the despised New York Yankees. So the Bronx was foreign territory.

Our drive from suburban Long Island took longer than we’d expected. All the parking lots close to the stadium were filled. We drove around the unfamiliar streets, circling further from the gates. My father was 46 and had already suffered two heart attacks: warning shots across the bow. He could not walk far. We pulled up to a lot that had a thick iron chain pulled across the entrance. The guy in charge was maybe 19, lean, Valvoline hair slicked back, wearing a blue work shirt with a pack of Camels in one pocket, a wad of bills rolled in the other. He waved his arms across his chest. “Sorry bub,” he said. “All filled.”

It was funny hearing my father called “bub.” He was not a “bub” kind of guy. A CPA. Mild mannered, prematurely grey. Pleated trousers and dress shirts even on weekends. He rolled down his window and leaned out to talk to the guy. I guessed he was going to slip the guy a five spot. Instead, in a real quiet voice so I wouldn’t hear, he said, “I have a weak heart.”

I heard the shame and apology in his voice but all I felt was angry. I hated his weakness. I didn’t want us to get in because of pity. The guy unlatched the chain and we left the car. I walked deliberately faster than he could on the way to the stadium, then pretended not to realize I’d gotten way ahead of him and made a big ceremony of slowing down for him. It was an unexpectedly warm day, in the low fifties. I don’t want to see his distress. I don’t want to inherit his faulty manufacture. It was not until I was nearly 60, when a urologist who had just read the results of my prostate biopsy, leaned across his desk and said to me, “Well. Mister Ackerman, you’ve got a good bit a of cancer there,” that I understood the terror my father woke up to every day, knowing that the rope suspending the ten ton safe that dangles over every one of us from the day we’re born had been snapped and the safe was plummeting.

Philly won the game 17-10. The sun had gone down, and the temperature had dropped by late afternoon. My father looked tired. I took the keys from him and told him to wait out of the wind while I went for the car. I felt like a World War II scout behind enemy lines. I felt my heartbeat skipping and feared that his malady had found me. I breathed easier when I found the lot. I had never driven his car except once when he was in the hospital and I’d snuck it out for a ride around our neighborhood. Traffic was brutal. The streets were unfamiliar. Trucks and taxis with grown up men driving them blasted their horns at me as I made my uncertain way back. What if I never found him? With relief I turned onto the street in the right direction. I stayed where I was and opened the passenger side door for him. “Get in, bub.” He gave me a look that said, “Don’t be a wise guy,” but he got in and let me drive.

My back found a space in the indentation worn by his back. I followed the signs in the gathering dusk and made it onto the Throgs Neck Bridge. The steady thrum over the mesh roadway was hypnotic. His eyes fluttered and he drifted to sleep, like I used to do in the back seat, to the familiar secure murmur of adults talking. I put the radio on softly to the classical station. I kept the car at a steady speed and changed lanes very slowly so not to wake him.

The third attack got him. He was dead two years later. Bednarik lived to age 90. “Concrete Charlie” was the last man to play full games both ways — offense and defense. Gifford sat out the rest of 1960 and all of ’61, then played five solid seasons, did Monday Night Football, married Kathy Lee, and died at 85. Their names would remain linked in folklore like Ralph Branca and Bobby Thompson, Ali and Frazier, Magic and Bird. Me? I lived to remember it all. The crash, the stadium falling into stunned silence, the ride home with the Alfred Deller Consort performing a Bach Cantata, and a perfect moment earlier in that game when 265-pound Jim Katcavage (huge for that time) smeared the Eagles quarterback for a loss, and his hundred pound wife leapt out of her seat and shouted at the top of her voice, KILL HIM, KAT!”

Hal Ackerman’s short fiction has appeared in New Millennium, The Pinch, Southeast Review, The Idaho Review, and elsewhere. “Sweet Day,” read by the late Robert Forster is available at Harper Collins. “The Dancer Horse” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and is available on Audible, read by Adrian Pasdar. “Bob Dylan and Me” appears in Visiting Bob, among 100 poets writing about Dylan. He has published two “Soft boiled” murder mysteries in a detective series about an aging counter-culture P.I His One-Man play, Testosterone: How Prostate Cancer Made a Man of Me (renamed Prick) won the William Saroyan Award for Drama and was named Best Play at the 2012 New York Solo Festival. The 15th anniversary edition of his book, Write Screenplays That Sell…The Ackerman Way is now available.

OF A MORAL LEGACY
A Review of Kara Goucher’s The Longest Race

by Scott F. Parker

By the time Kara Goucher’s memoir landed on my front porch, the big news had already broken. In The Longest Race, Goucher describes being sexually assaulted by her former coach Alberto Salazar and reveals that it was her accusations that eventually led to Salazar’s lifetime ban from professional coaching. (After his doping suspension is served, he will be eligible to coach high school and college athletes).

If you’ve been following this story for the past several years, this revelation does not come as a total surprise. Goucher and her husband, Adam, also a former member of Salazar’s Oregon Nike Project (NOP), worked with the FBI and the USATF for years at great personal cost to protect the integrity of track and field (such as it is) from Salazar’s amoral and possibly immoral approach to biological tinkering. Their success came when the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency banned Salazar for four years (upheld on appeal) for possession of testosterone, tampering with the doping control process, and for complicity in the administration of a prohibited method. In the course of that investigation, Goucher mentioned two sexual assaults that Salazar committed against her. This accusation sparked an investigation from SafeSport, which eventually implemented Salazar’s lifetime ban (also upheld on appeal).

The Longest Race represents Goucher’s most comprehensive statement on the sagas that have ensnarled her life since she first became involved with Salazar and is a riveting read on those merits alone. But aside from the details of the two monumental scandals, The Longest Race’s success stems equally from its depiction of the human being at the center of them. The self-portrait of Goucher at NOP is of a woman beset by self-doubt and dependence in the face of the powerful, charismatic, and domineering Salazar. One lowpoint is illustrative. Goucher, who as a young child lost her father to a car accident involving a drunk driver, is being driven through Portland’s notoriously twisty West Hills by a drunk Salazar and is too cowered by him and his role in her life to object, despite the profound inner torment her silence causes her. It is such emotional transparency that provides the book with so much feeling. And when Goucher does summon the courage to start speaking out against Salazar’s repeated transgressions, we know what a triumph it is for her.

Goucher finding her voice, despite the pressure and incentives not to, is the real story here. The book’s refrain consists of variations of “I was also fearful of speaking up”; “I worried about saying anything at all”; “Why didn’t I say anything?”; “I felt choked, deafened by my own silence”—a refrain that is ultimately replaced by “I realized, my power wasn’t in my legs. It was in my voice.” One way to understand this transformation is that Goucher was accustomed to subordinating herself to Salazar and might have gone on doing so indefinitely if it were a matter only of her own suffering but that she understood herself to have responsibilities to her sport and her community that compelled her to disrupt the status quo. Which is to say, claiming her voice was a byproduct of Goucher’s pursuit of the Good. Understood this way, Goucher’s heroism is as moral as it is personal—but either way it is heroism.

None of which even touches on the standard tribulations of life as an athlete in the strange world of professional running, all of which are present in Goucher’s story, including the capriciousness of career-sustaining sponsors, the unhealthy incentive structures that promote injury, the role of luck in a career, the prevalence of eating disorders, the joy-sucking pressure to succeed, the industry-standard hardships faced by mothers, and the egregious conduct of Nike, which violated USATF rules to unfairly advantage its athletes and then used its influence (it seems) to ensure that the cheating would not be penalized.

FIt’s a mess of a sport and one that not many elite athletes seem to get out of with their integrity intact. That Goucher has is testament to her judiciousness as well as her courage. She has been sober and circumspect, even kind, in her accusations when she might have been reckless and reactionary. Her example serves not only future runners but anyone who is reluctant to claim their own voice. Goucher may not have wanted to tell this story, but this is the story she has, this is the life she has lived. And it is this—Goucher’s complete self-acceptance, regrets and all—that most impresses me in The Longest Race. I come to this book a great admirer of Goucher and leave it the same. No one represents the sport better.

Scott F. Parker is the author of Run for Your Life: A Manifesto and The Joy of Running qua Running, among other books. His writing has appeared in Runner’s World, Running Times, Tin House, Philosophy Now, the Believer, and other publications. He teaches at Montana State University and is the nonfiction editor for Kelson Books.