When Mike Leach approached me about writing his autobiography 15 years ago, I was flattered but hesitant. The timing of undertaking another book project wasn’t ideal. But ultimately, I agreed to help because I thought it would give me a great window into the Air Raid world, not just the curious cutting-edge offensive wizard driving it but also the crew of coaches in his orbit that were going to make an enormous impact on football.

Advertisement

What I never imagined was how writing that book, “Swing Your Sword,” would change my career and my life, throwing both into chaos. Mike, who died Monday night at age 61, had an uncanny way of always making a big splash — and a tendency to make the process of trying to defend him exhausting.

I had been at ESPN for about a dozen years. It was my dream job. Most of my closest friends worked with me. I never thought of leaving it for anywhere else in sports. Mike and I worked on the book for a year. I spent weeks in Lubbock and in Key West. Then late in 2009, I got word from someone else at Texas Tech that things had really gone sideways with Leach and his bosses in Lubbock. I was told that the root of the conflict was Mike’s treatment of a player who happened to be the son of former SMU star Craig James, who at the time was a prominent voice at ESPN and had the ear of my bosses there. Years earlier, I had worked closely with Craig, and he had tried to hire me to work for his start-up company in 1996. It was the one time I’d ever really thought of leaving ESPN.

Long story short, Leach was forced out of Lubbock and I ended up caught in the middle of Mike and ESPN. And then things got really bizarre. Before the book was published, we had to buy the rights of the book back from the publisher. Leach’s career at the time was in limbo. Was he un-hirable? No one was sure given the allegations that were out there from the Tech/Craig James camp.

Buying the book back and deciding to publish it ourselves had its own risks, but Leach’s story had only become more compelling. Leach and I would talk for two or three hours every other night about the book and his situation. He was on East Coast time and I was in Los Angeles, and I kept thinking, It’s like 4 a.m. his time and yet I can’t get this friggin’ guy off the phone. As the book came together, I convinced him that we needed to run all the emails Leach had obtained in discovery during the legal proceedings against Texas Tech and James in the book, to show he wasn’t just throwing stuff out there. Leach was brilliant; I have no doubt he would’ve been a fantastic lawyer if he’d opted to go that route after graduating from Pepperdine Law. I learned he probably could’ve been a good editor, too, because he copy edited the book.

Advertisement

I tried to convey Mike’s voice the best I could in the format I chose. Sometimes Mike didn’t love how he sounded, but I appreciated how meticulous he was in his editing process. I can’t imagine another football coach who could do that like he did.

When the book came out in July 2011, Leach’s feud with ESPN exploded. Not long after that, I was in a feud with ESPN of my own. I ended up a Trending Topic during the most surreal week of my life. Leach’s star got brighter. He still didn’t have a program to run because no one would hire him back then, but he was seen as a counter-culture maverick who stuck up his middle finger at the establishment, an image I know he relished. And if Leach thought you were being wronged, he’d rally for you. I knew he had my back, but after my own situation blew up, I was hesitant to tell Mike too much. At the time, he had a national radio show, and Leach with a hot mic could be a daunting proposition — as everyone later found out after the rise of Twitter.

Leach was already known as The Pirate by then because bestselling author Michael Lewis had picked up on one of his many off-field fascinations and made it a central topic of a 2005 New York Times Magazine feature. But Leach was fascinated by so many things that he offered infinite rich material for a writer to delve into with him. He was like a divining rod for people, destined to lead you down a rabbit hole of your own curiosity.

He was a fantastic play caller because he had an innate feel for people and timing, and he was an even better storyteller for the same reason. There was the childhood story that we opened the book with, about the neighborhood golden lab, Pepe, that tormented him until the day young Mike came up with a plan for revenge and ended up peeing all over the dog. “I’m not sure if this says more about animal behavior or my own,” he told me. It was probably the latter, Mike.

Random Leach-y things surfaced everywhere as we worked together. The year after Texas Tech had knocked off Texas for the first time in six years, thanks to that famous Graham Harrell-to-Michael Crabtree touchdown, I was in Lubbock for the week leading up to the rematch in Austin. In the middle of the week, Leach received a package, containing a script for an episode of the series “Friday Night Lights.” As it turned out, Leach was going to tape a scene for the show the night before the Texas game. What college coach would go off and film a TV show the night before a big game? Most coaches wouldn’t film anything the day before they’re playing an FCS team, much less the biggest game of their season.

Advertisement

I asked Mike if he was nervous about knowing his lines. “I’ve acted before,” he said. What? Back when he was in law school, Leach had an agent, Joe Kolkowitz, and played small roles in “Grunt! The Wrestling Movie” and a TV miniseries about J. Edgar Hoover.

I got Kolkowitz on the phone. He didn’t remember Leach, but when he asked why I was writing something about the guy, I told him Leach had become a big deal as a football coach. Kolkowitz was shocked: Wait, I represented that Mike Leach?

My favorite Leach story from the book has nothing to do with football. It’s about him explaining his mindset upon entering college.

When I left home for BYU I wanted to reinvent myself. In high school, people tend to get rutted into little cliques. I did. Maybe it’s instinctive that people fall into the same patterns over time. Everybody gets a little bit rutted by their routine, by what’s comfortable. Problem is, if you’re doing the same old thing that everybody else is doing, that’s who you become-everybody else. What’s more, you start to become the person you think everybody expects you to be, good or bad. Those expectations seem to weigh especially heavily on kids. They may never fully blossom, and years later, they cringe when they think back on what could have been, and end up resenting the people around them.

When you’re young, your instincts tell you to conform to surroundings or to roll with the expectations. It’s the path of least resistance. Even if you don’t like who you are-or who others have perceived you to be-that’s how you manage to find acceptance. It’s easy for you to exist that way, rather than to shake things up. But it can be suffocating, or at the very least, stifling.

I have always encouraged my kids to go away for college because I valued my own experiences away from my home turf. It allowed me to carve out my own deal, to reinvent, or more specifically, to develop myself.

If you go away for a fresh start, people have no expectations- they don’t know you, so you’re not bound by your past. You can build on your best qualities without being pigeonholed by the expectations of people who may have known you your whole life. Even though I went to one of the more conservative schools in the country, because I struck out on my own, I found college to be amazingly liberating.

Leach did book signings that fall in Texas and Oklahoma and would get so excited by what the Barnes & Noble person told him were record turnouts at some of those stores. “I almost beat Ozzy Osbourne’s number,” he relayed once. He was a star, and those personal interactions meant a lot to him after his career had run into a ditch. He loved meeting people. I think being this complete outsider who had never played college football but had navigated an unconventional path into coaching was so validating for him.

Leach was the most accessible coach in the history of football. You could give Mike’s cell number to anyone, and if they texted him, they’d probably end up in a rambling yet profound conversation. One day when I was in Lubbock working on the book, I was watching practice and noticed a shorter guy in his 50s standing next to Leach as he ran his offense. I asked a Tech staffer if the guy was a Red Raiders booster.

“Nah, I think that’s a homeless guy who was standing near the building and Mike brought him out to practice and has been talking to him the whole time.”

That was Leach.

One in-season Monday night, which was a big game-planning night for the Leach guys, the offensive staff sat around the big rectangular table while Leach talked on the phone for what seemed like an hour. They waited on him, knowing the longer he talked on the phone, the later they’d have to stay. Now, that meant maybe 2 a.m. Finally, Leach hung up and an assistant asked who it was.

Advertisement

“It was some fella who dialed the wrong number and I was trying to help him out,” Leach said.

For an hour?

That was Leach.

That’s also why Leach’s coaching tree extends way beyond just those who have Cal Poly, College of the Desert, the Pori Bears of Finland, Iowa Wesleyan, Valdosta State, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Texas Tech, Washington State or Mississippi State in their bios. New Wisconsin offensive coordinator Phil Longo never wore the same logo as Leach, but he’s one of hundreds who is a proud product of Leach U.

At the annual coaches’ convention, the big-name coaches usually try to be discreet and avoid mingling with the thousand or so smaller-school coaches who might be looking for jobs. But Leach would walk around, look at someone’s name tag, see where they were from and start up a conversation. He was infinitely curious about people and places, and as one of his proteges told me Sunday night, it was because Mike remembered when he was one of those guys and had a genuine appreciation for them.

The last few days have been excruciating for the Air Raid family. Leach is the Godfather. They all know they owe a big part of their careers to him. Many met their wives around his program and built families from there. Often, Leach’s relationships with proteges became strained. Maybe they left for bigger programs or bigger jobs or just a chance to branch out and do their own thing. Leach could be maddening at times. In a profession of insanely stubborn men, Mike could take it to another level. He never thought he was wrong. That stubbornness, though, is what made him such a trailblazing coach. A mutual friend of Leach’s had the same feeling I had when I first heard that Leach had been hospitalized over the weekend: Mike’s like a stray dog who can fight through anything. He’ll bounce back.

On Monday morning, after I realized how dire the situation was, I tried to explain to my 8-year-old son who Leach was, and why he’s so important to football and to me. I don’t think as a third grader he quite understands the word “influential,” and I struggled to explain at first why Mike was such a big deal. Finally, I told him, “He’s the reason why you know Kannon,” a friend and football teammate of his and a child of one of the coaches who moved his family out here when Lincoln Riley brought his staff to USC. From there, we talked about the relationships of all the people connected by Leach.

Advertisement

“And that’s why we run ’92’?” he asked me, referencing a Leach staple play he had learned for his pee-wee football team.

Yep.

I cringe when I hear people talk about Leach’s impact on the sport of college football. Leach’s impact was on football. All of it. The offense he and his mentor Hal Mumme came up with, and the way that he coached it, changed everything. Texas high school football. Seven-on-seven football. Bill Belichick’s Patriots. Patrick Mahomes’ origin story looks completely different if Leach had never gotten the job in Lubbock. What Leach did was way bigger than just college football, but yes, four of this year’s top 10 Heisman Trophy vote-getters were coached by Leach proteges. There was Lincoln Riley’s guy Caleb Williams, who won it for USC. Sonny Dykes’ quarterback Max Duggan came in second for TCU. Josh Heupel’s quarterback Hendon Hooker finished fifth after helming Tennessee’s explosive offense. Longo’s quarterback Drake Maye finished 10th after a breakout year at North Carolina.

I hurt for his family, especially Sharon, his wife. She was there for Mike every step of the way since BYU, from the places where she was making the money that kept things afloat to the creepy trailer they lived in — covered walls, floor and ceiling in bright red shag carpet — to all the ups and downs and twists and turns of a coaching life. Everyone who really knows Leach knows how special Sharon is.

Earlier this year the Air Raid family was devastated when one of Mike’s proteges Dave Nichol, who had been hired on Riley’s first staff at USC, died rather suddenly. Dave was only 45 and a gem of a person. Mike and I traded texts afterwards, and in the wake of tragedy, two very stubborn people opened up. I went back and re-read that exchange Monday night, and there was a line in something he wrote that gutted me. “… We need to hang out more…”

That line sits heavy right now.

I feel fortunate that Mike chose me to write his book. I’ve learned so much from him and from his football family. My only regret is that I didn’t get the chance to see him these last few years.

(Photo: Donald Miralle / Getty Images)