DALLAS — My first one-on-one with Mike Leach was over the phone, his preferred method of communication outside the bigger pulpit of press conferences. He liked the freedom, and, to his credit, he always called back. Almost to a fault. Like the time the Houston Chronicle’s Joseph Duarte waited all day on Leach before giving up and going to bed.
At 2 a.m., a ringing phone stirred Duarte from his slumber. Sure enough, it’s the Pirate, calling from a Lubbock drive-thru.
“Were you asleep?” he asked.
Leach didn’t just operate on a plane different from other coaches; he was on a level unoccupied by most humans in general. As is typical of such beings, he occasionally seemed unaware he’d trespassed any social norms. He followed where his inquisitive mind led him, no matter the consequences.
Halfway through that first call, for instance, he suddenly broke from a discussion about his Air Raid offense or Texas Tech’s opponent that week or something else keeping coaches awake all night to report a sandstorm boiling up outside his office window. You’d have thought Auntie Em’s farmhouse was pinned to the middle of it. He was so fascinated by the weather — and, interestingly enough, the over-analysis of it — that he once conned his way into doing Lubbock’s local weather report.
Most of his forecast went about how you’d expect for a guy who’d probably never seen a green screen in his life. But, in it, you learned just about everything you needed to know about the Pirate:
If they were playing a team that threw the ball half as much as the Red Raiders did, he liked the wind to whip at least 25 mph.
If you really want to know what it’s like out there, go see for yourself.
And appreciate what makes life different, even difficult.
“My favorite weather pattern,” he told viewers, “is when it rains mud.”
Most football coaches don’t do weather on the side. Most don’t believe the world is round. Or flat, for that matter. To most, it’s a prolate spheroid, and their lives revolve around it ceaselessly. Even remorselessly. In November 2016, Nick Saban, the king of coaches, announced that he didn’t even know a presidential election had just gone off until reporters brought it up. He didn’t seem embarrassed.
“We’re focused on other things here,” he said.
Leach focused on everything. Pirates, as the title of his book, “Swing Your Sword” suggests, but also gangsters, Native Americans, candy corn, honeymoons, politics, mascots, Shakespeare, tailgating, camping, anything that crossed his fertile mind. The eclectic reading material on his bedside table piled high. He considered himself a little bit of an expert on just about any topic. Which, of course, made him a little bit dangerous.
Over his 21 years as a head coach, Leach made us laugh a lot. Made us wince a little, too. He encroached upon the authority of athletic trainers at Tech by essentially mocking a diagnosed concussion of Adam James, leading to his unfortunate dismissal and a subsequent lawsuit against the university. The miracle was that after suing his former employer, he got hired at Washington State and Mississippi State anyway. His unvarnished candor — he started controversies in both Pullman, Wash., and Starkville, Miss., with inappropriate tweets — made him a risk too big for the likes of blueblood schools. A Tennessee athletic director once tried to hire him and got fired for his efforts.
The irony is that Josh Heupel, one of the quarterbacks Leach created out of thin air, led a revival in Knoxville this year.
Leach didn’t give his players and coaches an offense with the command to go out and change football at all three levels, even if that’s exactly what happened. As Sonny Dykes, a branch on Leach’s coaching tree, told ESPN the other day, the Pirate’s greatest gift to his charges was the courage to “be ourselves. ... That was the biggest lesson that I learned, that you can see the world differently and still be a successful college football coach.”
Dykes crashed the College Football Playoff in his first season at TCU. Lincoln Riley, another disciple, made it three times at Oklahoma and nearly pulled it off in his debut at USC. They’re Leach’s proud legacy, but they’re not knockoffs. No one could follow that act. Not if you wanted to be yourself or, more to the point, work at places where you could win big.
The Pirate never coached at a state’s flagship university. Never had the history or resources to go head-to-head, year-in, year-out.
On the other hand, he owns four of the 14 seasons in Washington State history in which it has won at least eight games. After an ugly start at Mississippi State, he improved to 7-6 and 8-4 this year.
And at Tech, he owns as many 8-win seasons as Matt Wells, Kliff Kingsbury, Tommy Tuberville, Spike Dykes, David McWilliams, Jerry Moore, Rex Dockery, Jim Carlen and Steve Sloan combined.
Frankly, I’m not sure he would have enjoyed working at a school where he would have had to mind his manners. Wasn’t in his constitution. He was, above all else, a character, and characters are messy.
They’re also in short supply in his field. The Pirate, gone too soon at 61, will be missed, particularly in pressboxes. His legacy goes on, lighting up scoreboards everywhere, though pressers will be dimmer. Late-night interviews won’t be the norm, either. He made up for waking Joseph Duarte with a fun interview. He knew our weakness for a good story. If he didn’t always exactly answer our questions, never were we so merrily led astray.
