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Dear Mr. Kiffin:
In 1989, when I was 13, you were my Little League Baseball coach in Bloomington.
Your son Lane was also on the team. He was very, very good at baseball. I was not. In fact, I was bad at baseball. Really, really bad even. I think the season you were my coach was my seventh season of Little League, and I had probably amassed about seven base hits total. Once I reached the age where the kids started pitching the games, I would do my best to coax a walk and maybe score a run, but most games ended with me going 0 for 3 with a couple of strikeouts.
The season you were my coach started as expected, with me being really bad at baseball. In the first game of the season I struck out in my first at bat, and as I was walking back to the dugout I threw my bat and helmet in disgust at myself for being so continually awful at a game that I had loved since I was old enough to walk.
But, boy oh boy, Monte, you were having none of that kind of behavior. You walked over to me on the bench, grabbed my arm, got in my face and let me have it like I was a professional linebacker who had just got called for roughing the quarterback on third and forever. “We do — DO NOT — throw our bat and helmet on this team,” you shouted in my face with the same voice that inspired 300-pound world-class athletes to reach the pinnacle of their chosen profession. “WE DO NOT DO THAT ON THIS TEAM. YOU GOT THAT!?”
I, of course, started to cry. The kid next to me told me not to worry about it, that everybody strikes out. He didn’t understand that I was crying not because I had struck out — I mean, I had struck out like seriously hundreds of times over the years — but I was crying because you, Monte, had yelled at me in front of the entire team, in front of all the parents, in front of my parents, in front of my dad.
