Mike Leach - Geronimo: Leadership Strategies of an American Warrior

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Tough terrain breeds tough men.

HERODOTUS

I N THE SPRING OF 2009, I traveled to Lubbock, Texas, to interview Mike Leach for a cover story I was writing about him for Texas Monthly. The preceding fall, he and his Texas Tech football team had electrified the nation with their dramatic run at a national championship. Though they had fallen short, for a few dazzling weeks the attention of Americas football fans had been riveted on the high plains of West Texas. I was going there to try to figure out how a team with players few or no other elite football programs wanted could possibly have pulled off such a season. How Leachs scrappy, underdog Red Raiders could conceivably have knocked off the Nos. 1 and 8 teams in the country on successive weekends. If this had been his only such exploit, he might not have merited the cover story. But he had been working this sort of dark magic for twenty years at five different schools in three collegiate athletic divisions. His teams came as close to unstoppable as anything the college football world had seen. It was hard to find anyone who did not think Mike Leach was a certified football genius.

Which was why it was odd, half an hour after I landed in his office at Texas Tech, that Mike and I found ourselves deep in conversation about Native Americans. I was working on a book at the time about the Comanches that would become a national bestseller a year or so later as Empire of the Summer Moon, so I was very current on Indian history. So, as it turned out, was Mike. I had heard that he was smart and had eclectic intereststhat included the history of piracy, surfing, Winston Churchill, chimpanzees, and the philosophy of John Woodenbut I wasnt prepared to encounter a scholar of the American West. We talked about Comanches, about whom he knew a great deal, and we talked about his own childhood in Cody, Wyoming, and his lifelong interest in Native Americans. Then we got around to Apaches, who turned out to be his true love. I knew a little bit about them. Mike knew a lot about them, especially their war leader Geronimo. I listened, enraptured, much longer than I should have. I was there as a reporter and was supposed to be interviewing him about football, not talking about General Nelson Miles and Geronimos renegade Chiricahuas. I had wasted valuable time. But it was fun just listening to him. I found out later that he used some of his Apache material in his talks with his players. Indians were an interest of mine. For Mike, they were a coaching tool.

It didnt occur to me at the time why Mike would be so interested in the character of Geronimo. But when he told me a couple of years later that he was working on a book about the Apache leader, it suddenly made perfect sense. Mike is not just a football coach. He is a renegade football coach, a man who has always done things differently, always operated on the margins of what the football world considered acceptable. That began with his decision, after having graduated in the top third of his law class at Pepperdine University, to attend a sports academy and then take a $3,000-a-year job coaching football at Cal State, San Luis Obispo. It continued in the form of his football teams, which did things that no one else did. I can remember moving to Austin and watching Mikes teams at Tech do things that seemedback thento stop just short of lunacy. He would spread his linemen out, four feet apart, leaving apparently giant gaps that just beckoned to defenders. He would empty out the backfield and cover the field with receivers. He threw almost every down. He never huddled. He rarely even punted, preferring to go for itthe ultimate football madnesson fourth down deep in his own territory. He didnt much like to kick field goals, either. Much of this is common in college and pro football today. Almost none of it was when Mike started out.

This sort of radically original behavior is what Geronimo: Leadership Strategies of an American Warrior is all about. Geronimos brilliance was both his eclecticismhe was a war leader, shaman, translator, negotiator, healer, and mentor, among other callingsand his defiance of conventional wisdom. With the entire postCivil War world stacked against them, Indians were not supposed to be able to continue fighting past the mid-1870s. There was no way to win. Even the ber-warriors of the Comanches, Cheyennes, and Sioux had surrendered. That did not deter Geronimo, who fought longer than anyone, finally tying up fully one-quarter of the active American army just to hunt down him and his band of Apaches. By the 1880s, write Leach and Levy, only Geronimo and the Chiricahua were still free and fighting.

Thus Geronimo, the greatif brutalwar leader, becomes a classic paradigm of leadership. The book rightly focuses on how he was able to do what he did, on the parts of his character that led him to achieve greatness. Mike is ably helped in this endeavor by Buddy Levy, a historian who has written two excellent books about the Americas and who is steeped in the histories of Native Americans in the nineteenth century. Together they have written an enthralling little history that I found very hard to put down.

S. C. Gwynne

Gwynne is the author of Empire of the Summer Moon, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His book Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson will be published by Scribner in 2014.

Cochise one of the great Chiricahua (Chokonen) chiefs. Born c. 1805. No known pictures exist but he was said to be very tall and imposing, over six feet and very muscular. Son-in-law to Mangas Coloradas. Died in 1874, probably from stomach cancer.

Chihuahua chief of the Warm Springs band (Red Paint people) of the Chiricahua. Fought alongside Geronimo in the resistance. Died in 1901.

Fun probably a cousin to Geronimo and among his best, most trusted warriors. Fun committed suicide in captivity in 1892, after becoming jealous over his young wife, whom he also shot. Only slightly wounded, she recovered.

Juh pronounced Whoa, Ho, or sometimes Who. Chief of the Nedhni band of the Apache, he married Ishton, Geronimos favorite sister. Juh and Geronimo were lifelong friends and battle brothers. Juh died in 1883.

Loco chief of the Warm Springs band. Born in 1823, the same year as Geronimo. Once was mauled by a bear and killed it single-handedly with a knife, but his face was clawed and his left eye was blinded and disfigured. Known as the Apache Peacemaker, he preferred peace to war and tried to live under reservation rules. Died as a prisoner of war from causes unknown in 1905, at age eighty-two.