Mike Leach was a force of nature, and that means there was both beauty and blight. He would commit dazzling acts of intellect and display maddening stubbornness. Leach's players marveled at how fun he made football, yet at times he seemed to be cavalier about their health and wasn't shy about lambasting them (and their "fat little girlfriends") verbally.
Controversy followed Mike Leach, who died Monday night at age 61, and so did victories. He was a brilliant coach, an innovative schemer of offensive football and an eclectic thinker who loved to hold court on the most mundane of topics.
It was the latter trait that most endeared him to the populace, and to that subset of the populace who chronicle sports for a living. Sometimes they didn't even realize that by filibustering with highly entertaining treatises on grasshoppers, mascot fights and the best Halloween candy, he never got around to answering the football questions. He steadfastly refused to discuss injuries; once when asked after a game about quarterback Luke Falk, who had been carted off the field with an apparent head injury, he replied flippantly, "Healthy as can be. Rested him in the second half."
Leach was a coaching lifer who never played the game beyond high school. He graduated near the top of his class from Pepperdine law school before realizing that he didn't have a passion for the law; instead, his passion was designing X's and O's that spread the field in a way that even Bill Walsh would call excessive.
Leach's Air Raid offense was predicated on simplicity, having players master a handful of plays rather than overwhelming them with too many things to think about.
"There's no such thing as a perfect game in football," Leach once said. "I don't even think there's such a thing as the perfect play. You have 11 guys between the ages of 18 and 22 trying to do something violent and fast together, usually in pain."
Leach always seemed perpetually distracted, as if his mind was racing so fast he was always about five topics ahead of you. He was endlessly curious, often peppering reporters he didn't know about their life story (perhaps another diversion tactic, but the interest seemed genuine). The author Michael Lewis described Leach, memorably, as entering a locker room with "the quizzical air of a man who has successfully bushwhacked his way through the jungle but isn't quite sure what country he has emerged into."
This was a guy who once picked his captain at Washington State because he made a successful appearance on "The Price is Right." Leach said the three people he'd like to take on a long road trip were Geronimo the Apache Warrior, Blackbeard the Pirate and Winston Churchill — not quite the list that, say, Nick Saban would give.
But Leach diverged happily from the Sabans of the football world. He was an iconoclast in rumpled clothing, who chose to do his mad-scientist work in remote outposts such as Lubbock, Texas; Pullman; and Starkville, Mississippi.
Maybe "chose" is not the right word; the baggage Leach lugged with him no doubt scared off the blue-blood schools despite the outrageous yardage numbers his team produced and the upsets he engineered. When he came to WSU in 2012, the Cougars had gone 9-40 under his predecessor, Paul Wulff. Leach revitalized the program, upsetting No. 4 USC in 2017 (WSU's first win over a top-five school in 25 games), winning a school-record 11 games in 2018 and reaching six bowl games in seven years.
Of course, he couldn't beat Chris Petersen in the Apple Cup, to the unending frustration of Coug fans. Especially when Leach refused to alter his Air Raid attack even after it was patently obvious in blowout loss after blowout loss that Husky defensive coordinator Jimmy Lake had it thoroughly figured out. Three years in a row, a win over the Huskies would have put the Cougars in the Pac-12 title game on a possible path to the Rose Bowl. But they lost by an average of more than 20 points.
That was the stubborn side coming out; and when Leach lambasted Spokesman-Review columnist John Blanchette after his final WSU defeat in 2019, calling him "a sanctimonious troll" who "can live your little meager life in your little hole" because he didn't like Blanchette's line of questioning, that was the petty side. Ditto when he said USA Today columnist Dan Wolken, who had criticized Leach for posting a doctored video of Barack Obama, would be "selling Big Gulps in a couple of years" at a 7-Eleven. Leach named one of his plays that week, "Big Gulp Left."
But there was also a magnanimous and empathetic side to Leach. Friends say he constantly offered random acts of kindness and charity, often away from the public eye. It can be seen in a recent clip of him presenting a game ball to a mentally challenged Mississippi State team manager. I witnessed it when I did a story on a WSU student from Sammamish, Ben Cushing, who died of a rare form of cancer in 2017. Leach's grace and caring in honoring Cushing both before and after his death will live with Ben's family forever.
Leach's agent, Gary O'Hagan of IMG., told Lewis, "He's so different from every other football coach it's hard to understand how he's a coach."
Leach once taught a five-week seminar at WSU entitled, "Insurgent Warfare and Football Strategies." He was an inveterate reader and even co-authored a book on Geronimo with Buddy Levy, an English professor at WSU, during his eight-year stint on the Pullman campus. Levy told me that Leach was no figurehead; he dived in and did the dirty work of research and composition.
"It was truly collaboration," Levy said. "A lot of people assume when your co-author is a big-name guy, the other guy is doing most of the work. Leach was fully engaged and fully involved in the entire process."
When I interviewed Leach on the book, an exhaustive examination of Geronimo's life, he said it contained "all the interesting stuff and none of the boring stuff."
Come to think of it, that's a pretty accurate epitaph for Leach's life.
