From across the practice field, John Cohen saw coach Mike Leach step away from drills to take a phone call.
That’s odd, thought Cohen, then the athletic director at Mississippi State. Whoever could be calling to make Leach walk away from practice? Was it an emergency? A family issue?
As it turns out, Leach, unlike many coaches, took plenty of calls while at practice. He even filmed Cameo video messages from the practice field that he eventually sent to fans. In fact, during special teams portions of practice, he was known to pop in his ear buds and listen to Duolingo Spanish classes.
But on this particular day, Leach took a most important phone call. After practice, Cohen asked about it.
FORDE: Mike Leach Was a One-of-a-Kind Football Coach
It was Donald Trump. “When the President calls, you feel compelled to answer,” Leach said.
In the fall of 2020, Trump and Leach communicated quite often—even in the middle of Mississippi State practices. Their relationship began when Leach visited the White House after the ’18 season, and it steadily blossomed into a friendship.
This is but one Mike Leach story. There are hundreds more about the late coach, who died Tuesday at age 61. Some of them are bizarre. Others are quite unbelievable. They are quirky, funny and wholly unique.
Matt Bush/USA TODAY Sports
They are stories that you find from no other person walking the Earth, let alone another major college football coach.
“There will never be another Mike Leach,” says Washington State athletic director Pat Chun. "He was the most interesting man alive."
On the day of his death, more than a dozen people in and around Leach’s final stop, Starkville, Miss., shared stories about the coach.
They paint a picture of a peculiar man who meandered through life on his own accord, a guy intrigued with life’s mysteries, fascinated to find answers and fearless of his surroundings.
“You’re going to be dead in a hundred years anyway,” Leach once said, “so live dangerously.”
Always a walker
For about 20 years, Dave Emerick worked with or for Mike Leach.
In that time, he saw the coach operate a vehicle once.
“I rode in a car, with him driving, in 1997 when we were at Kentucky and we played Vanderbilt,” recalls Emerick. “That was the last time I ever rode with him as the driver.”
If Leach went some place, he was driven there or he walked. He much preferred walking. At Washington State, he walked from his home to campus each day. During his early days at Mississippi State, he actually lived on campus, residing in a condo overlooking the school’s baseball stadium. The condo, owned by a donor, was primo seating for Bulldogs’ baseball games.
At some point, as the baseball season approached, school officials asked when he planned to move out of the 900-square-foot condo. Leach replied, “Never.” Eventually, under strong encouragement, he moved out and into a home a few miles from campus. No longer walkable, graduate assistants and other support staff members drove him to and from the office.
It made for a much less eventful route than those walks to the office in Pullman, Wash., where he often encountered wildlife. Deer, quail, rabbits and, most famously, raccoons. During one of his walks, Leach tracked a raccoon through the snow.
Strolling through a neighborhood, he saw the animal’s tracks and followed them for a half mile. Why would he ever do that?
Said Leach: “I was curious where the sucker lived.”
Late nights with Leach
Brad Peterson once went on a 12-night recruiting road trip through the state of Misisssippi with Mike Leach.
In an upset, Peterson lived to tell about it.
“We got back from that trip and I walked in the house and my wife said, ‘You look awful,’” he recalls. “I hadn’t been to bed before 1 a.m. in 12 days.”
A nightcrawler and a noon-riser, that was Mike Leach. Peterson served as Leach’s high school relations director during the coach’s first year in Starkville. A Mississippian himself, Peterson helped introduce the coach to the state—its high school coaches, its soul food, its many diverse regions.
Leach introduced Peterson to late-night drinking, long debates and karaoke. At one point on the trip, Leach quipped to Peterson, “I haven’t been to sleep before midnight since I was in sixth grade!”
It was quite normal for Leach to converse over strong spirits until 3 or 4 a.m. and not arrive into his office until after noon. At Washington State, Chun’s day often started at around 5 a.m., when he’d wake up to a text from Leach that was sent an hour earlier. “When he was going to bed, I was waking up,” Chun laughs.
It became fairly normal for Mississippi State’s primary athletic spokesman, Brandon Langlois, to field calls from the coach at 2 in the morning. These weren’t work calls. They were random musings from a man sipping bourbon on the other end of the phone.
“You didn’t know what it would be about it,” says Langlois, the school’s senior associate athletic director for communications. “He’d be like ‘Hey, I’m sitting here watching this documentary on Showtime about John McEnroe. Have you seen it?’ You look up and it’s 3:30.”
There were no quick calls with Mike Leach. And there was no possibility of saying “no” to the man. He routinely convinced hotel lobby bartenders to serve well past closing time. And he was unafraid to belly up to the local dive bar. In fact, he preferred it.
During one night of that 12-night road trip, Leach and Peterson arrived at their Hattiesburg, Miss., hotel at midnight after a long day of travel.
“So, where we going?” Leach asked.
“To bed,” answered Peterson.
About an hour later, Peterson found himself at a place called Shenanigans singing karaoke. Leach belted out favorites from Jethro Tull and ended the night by singing “Take It Easy” by the Eagles.
Given a portion of the song’s lyrics, it was a fitting farewell to Shenanigans for Peterson:
We may lose and we may win
though we will never be here again.
The island life
The story of how Mike Leach was hired at Mississippi State is very Mike Leach.
The tale features a Key West oyster bar, roosters in a Cuban restaurant, a poolside interview, a boat and a bike shop. But the most incredible factoid from the Bulldogs’ pursuit of Leach was that university officials flew to Key West completely unannounced.
In December 2019, no one—not even his agent—could reach Leach by phone (later, they’d learn why: He was on a boat).
Cohen, then the AD; Jared Benko, then the deputy AD; and Charlie Winfield, an attorney for the university’s fundraising arm; arrived on the island, set up a workstation at Half Shell Raw Bar and finally connected with Leach.
Michael C. Johnson/USA TODAY Sports
“Where are you?” Leach asked Cohen over the phone.
“Three blocks from your house,” he replied.
“Oh,” said a surprised Leach, “well then, go Bulldogs!”
They then met Leach at a local bike shop before walking to his Key West home, where he and wife, Sharon, spent much of the offseason. A two-hour interview unfolded on Leach’s pool deck before the trio left, flew back to the mainland to interview more candidates and then returned to the island for a one-night stay to finalize the deal.
Benko and Winfield hammered out Leach’s contract at a Cuban restaurant while chickens meandered about.
“Here I was on, Key West,” Benko says, “eating Cuban food and on an iPad with roosters all around us squawking trying to bang out negotiations to hire a football coach.”
Negotiations eventually got done. Leach scribbled his name on a memorandum of understanding from inside his Key West home. And then, in typical Leach fashion, he celebrated by sparking a bizarre conversation with Winfield.
“He walks over to me and says, ‘You ever been to Natchez?’” Winfield recalls.
“We got to talking about Natchez, which led to him talking about the Natchez Indians, then the Choctaw Indians, then the Trail of Tears, then Oklahoma, then the West and the Navajo Indians, and then he compared the Finnish language to the Navajo code talkers and how it wasn’t a great code because the Germans spoke too much Finnish, and then he talked about the Germans migrating to the U.S., and next thing I know, we are talking about Vicksburg and Natchez again.
“He seamlessly bounced from one thing to another and tied them all together. I thought, ‘Here he is having just signed the MOU to be our football coach, and we are talking about the Navajo Indians.”
One with the animals
If you timed it perfectly, you could catch Mike Leach wearing a full wetsuit, standing on a paddleboard and gliding across the water of the murky lake in the backyard of his Starkville home.
You couldn’t see but an inch below the swampy surface. Emerging from the water were random logs, cypress stumps and thick green algae. School administrators were concerned when they learned that their football coach was doing such. They soon found out that he not only paddle-boarded on top of the water but he swam in it as well.
“He was not afraid,” says Cohen. “When we were at his Key West house, he told me where he’d go swimming out in the ocean. I said, ‘Mike, this might be paranoia, but aren’t there sharks out there?’
“He said, ‘John, if you don’t mess with those guys, they don’t mess with you.’”
That goes for every other kind of wildlife that he came in close contact with: alligators, water moccasins and the like. At some point over the last two years, he had a nasty bout with fire ants. His entire left hand was covered in small red bites.
Somewhat recently, the overflow drainage pipe connected to his lake got clogged. So out went Leach to fix it. He reached his hand deep into the drain, fumbled with whatever blocked the water flow and then yanked it out.
It was a turtle!
“I asked him what he did with it,” says interim athletic director Bracky Brett.
Replied Leach: “What do you think? I threw it back in the water.”
Movie Mike
Each Friday night during the football season, Mike Leach and his team visited a nearby theater to watch a film.
This was tradition, an especially important tradition to Leach. He never missed a Friday-night movie. He seemed to slip back into his days as a kid. He’d load up on popcorn, Coke and an assortment of candy, hunker down in his seat and prepare for the screen to flicker to life.
“There was a hard-and-fast rule in the Leach household,” says Emerick. “No one got to touch any of their snacks until the actual movie started. So he would sit there throughout the previews and not touch a thing until the movie started.”
Mark J. Rebilas/USA TODAY Sports
After the movie ended, Leach remained in the theater to watch the final credits. With the entire team waiting in buses outside, the coach read the screen of credits down to the very last lines.
“I never sat with him during the movie, but once it ended I would go sit next to him and we would watch the credits,” says David Wilczewski, who oversees football operations. “He would critique the movie and ask where I thought things were filmed. Then we would watch the credits until it showed the different filming locations. Those were always fun because he was nearly 100% right on guessing filming locations.”
Leach was quite the movie buff. Chun recalls many conversations with him about film, some of them taking place at unusual times.
“It was always fun talking to him pregame. He’s so wired differently than your stereotypical head coaches,” Chun says. “I’d go shake his hand on the field before games. One time, he asked if I’d seen the movie Harriet. The team watched it the night before. He was walking toward me, so excited about the Harriet movie. He said he researched [Harriet Tubman], and she was one of his heroes.
“This was 30 minutes before kickoff.”
Food for thought
Mike Leach would never be described as a foodie. He ate plenty of junk food, despite Sharon steering him away from it.
In Mississippi, he found soul food delightful. Fried chicken. Hamburger steak. Smoked ribs. Pulled pork. If it had parents, Leach ate it.
Leach once spoke at an event in Alabama where boxed sandwiches were served. By the time Leach and Mississippi State officials arrived, the only options left were meant for vegetarians. Leach opened his sandwich box to see a slab of mushroom and a slice of tomato between two pieces of bread.
“He had this look of terror on this face,” Cohen recalls.
He turned to Cohen, “Any good barbecue joints around here?”
Dining with Leach was a true experience. He often enters the place knowing exactly what he plans to order, says Emerick, and yet he’s always the last one at the table to do so. He must first ask for the specials, then ask the waiter for recommendations before quizzing every member of his party on what they planned to order. He then would take up to 20 minutes to read the full menu.
“And then he orders exactly what he knew he was going to order in the first place,” Emerick says.
During Sunday staff meetings, Leach provided unintentional entertainment for his coaches, all gathered around a table as he sauntered into the room in his trademark cargo shorts.
And then out came the food.
“It was a highlight of every Sunday staff meeting to see how much stuff he would pull out of the pockets of his cargo shorts,” says Emerick.
Sharon packed the shorts with healthy snacks. Sliced apples, fruit packs, power bars, granola sticks. He’d even sometimes remove an entire sandwich.
“The entire staff would stare as he unloaded his pockets,” Emerick recalls.
Leach carried around food quite often, even if you didn’t see it. Eric George, Mississippi State’s deputy athletic director, was alongside Leach one day when he pulled from his pocket a burrito wrapped in foil.
Emerick, watching nearby, shouted, “Coach, isn’t that the burrito from yesterday?”
“Yep!” Leach said as he took a giant bite.
The end
Gardner Minshew, a Mississippian who played quarterback for Mike Leach at Washington State, once famously said that Leach puts more Copenhagen snuff in his lip than he’s ever seen from a single human being.
Those around Starkville say they’ve never met a person who consumed more brown liquor and could still eloquently carry on a conversation or debate. He’d often order two drinks at once. Leach drank coffee nearly every day, too.
And yet, despite shattering much of the faith’s beliefs, Leach was Mormon. At a dinner two years ago with a reporter, Leach revealed his background to the surprise of his dinner mate. Leach raised the two cocktails in front of him, smiled and said, “Hey, I never said I was perfect!”
Leach never missed a good party or social function. He sought out conversation and debate. He treated people the same no matter their status.
“Mike would keep a delivery man at his house [until] 2 in the morning talking about what he delivers and how he does it,” Winfield says.
And despite being close with so many celebrities, Leach never crowed about those relationships. Well, maybe once.
“I remember calling him and he was in Key West and it was really loud. There was an event going on,” Cohen says. “He’s like, ‘Hey man, Willie Nelson is walking toward me. Let me call you back.’”
No, there will almost certainly never be another Mike Leach. Not a chance.
“I remember my first night with him at Washington State,” says Eric Mele, an assistant coach under Leach at WSU and Mississippi State. “We were drawing up particular plays with tags and motions on the whiteboard. We’d draw a play and then we’d talk about the Germanic Vikings. We’d draw another play and then talk about the hierarchy of the New York mafia. We’d draw another play and then rank our best pizza joints.
“When we were finished, I asked for a ride home. He proceeded to tell me that he walked to work. Then he put some metal chains on his shoes and a miner’s light on his head and started to head out into the snow.
“That was Mike. Like Sinatra, he did everything his way.”
