KEY WEST, Fla. — I used to be operating circles across the bar at Captain Tony’s and I used to be getting angrier with every lap accomplished. It needed to be there. I knew it was there. However the place the hell was it?
It was Monday. Jan. 22, 2024, precisely two weeks after the Faculty Soccer Playoff nationwide championship sport. My spouse and I had been in Key West. The mission of the getaway was to quiet my school soccer mind amid the rum-soaked breezes of the southernmost level of the US.
However on this second, the mission had modified. As a result of as has all the time been the case every time I’m in flip-flops on the streets of the Conch Republic, all I may take into consideration was a school soccer coach.
Solely this time was totally different.
This was the primary time I used to be within the land of Ernest Hemingway after I knew Mike Leach wouldn’t be. There can be no unintended sightings as he passed by on his rusted seashore cruiser. No waking as much as 3 a.m. texts that learn, “Did I see you strolling down Duval tonight?” No calls from Pullman or Starkville as a result of he knew I used to be there and to demand, “Pay attention, if you will keep in that lodge the place you do on the finish of the road then you need to get in that water and swim as a result of that is the place Tennessee Williams swam each morning.”
None of that was going to occur throughout this go to as a result of Leach died Dec. 12, 2022. Now, like Hemingway, Williams, Leach’s beloved Jimmy Buffett and all of the pirates and rumrunners who fascinated Leach a lot that he purchased a house in Key West to faucet into their spirits, his spirit now floats across the island. As a lot part of its ambiance as key lime and conch fritters.
So yeah, I used to be determined to seek out the spot the place I might final seen him in a location that wasn’t a stadium or press convention podium. The nook seat at Key West’s darkest but most colourful watering gap, the stool upon which Leach had parked himself so many instances that the proprietors determined to color his identify atop the seat. That is what I used to be on the lookout for, the dark-wood barstool with the golden block letters: MIKE LEACH.
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This week, as his March 9 would-be 63rd birthday approached, I’ve thought loads about that January journey and that second of hysteria, me endlessly strolling round and staring on the butts of irritated Captain Tony’s patrons, hoping they could scoot over so I may see what identify they had been sitting on.
Robert DeNiro … Dan Aykroyd … “Excuse me, ma’am, however may you shift your hips so I may see if … Okay … No… Sorry … That is Clint Eastwood.”
It was six years in the past that Leach known as me whereas sitting at that bar. I requested him what he was ingesting and he stated it was Crown Apple. Then he spent the subsequent quarter-hour explaining to me that his reply to that query would rely on what time of day or evening it was, and even the time of 12 months. “Typically, to combine it up, I’ll simply drink tequila,” he stated. “I like rum, however I need to be certain that there’s sufficient left for you while you get down right here as a result of I do know you are a rum man. But when I’m feeling significantly good, then I’ll order Brandy Alexanders.”
I informed him I did not know what that was. He replied, “That is since you aren’t as fancy as I’m.”
“Anyway …” he continued with fun pushed by a cough. “These guys had been telling me that Dale Earnhardt Jr. was in right here yesterday and I used to be considering, ‘I need to meet that man and I do know a man who is aware of these NASCAR guys,’ so, do you may have his quantity?”
I did. I despatched it to Leach. They met up. I considered that second in January as I stored sifting by barstools and a reasonably massive gentleman stood as much as regulate his jorts to disclose the lettering beneath his behind: DALE JR.
It was at this bar atop a kind of stools that Leach fell in love with Key West. The story goes that within the early 1990’s, he and boss/brother/mentor/co-creator of the Air Raid offense Hal Mumme had been in South Florida on a recruiting journey for his or her jobs at Iowa Wesleyan, an NAIA soccer program situated 1,700 miles northwest of Key West. Throughout their drive down from Miami, rolling over the blue waters atop the Abroad Freeway, they blasted Buffett to get into the temper. Leach significantly liked the tune “The Final Mango in Paris,” a biographical tune a couple of gambler and arms runner-turned-shrimper and businessman named Anthony Tarracino.
Leach being Leach, he began researching Tarracino and discovered the previous scofflaw had been elected mayor of Key West. Not solely that, the person operated a bar simply off Duval Road, in a constructing that was as soon as town morgue, the place pirates had been embalmed. Captain Tony’s — named for himself — was constructed across the Hanging Tree, an oak from which practically 20 ne’er-do-wells took their last breaths, some buried within the floor instantly beneath the place the bar now sits, proper subsequent to the tree that also grows proper by the center of the room.
“The place throughout the road, they declare to be the place Hemingway used to hang around,” Leach growled to me throughout a go to to see him at Washington State in 2017, referring to Sloppy Joe’s. “However the place that grew to become Captain Tony’s, that is the place Hemingway normally was. Harry Truman went there. John Kennedy went there. So, that is why I went there. Mumme went to mattress that evening. We had a gathering with a recruit the subsequent morning. However I sat there, ready on Tony. And as quickly as Hal left, a man got here in and took his seat. It was Tony!”
Captain Tony and Coach Leach grew to become buddies. That friendship lasted till Tarracino’s demise Nov. 1, 2008.
The friendship made in that bar prolonged to the person who took over possession from the Captain, Joe Felder. Leach and Mumme stored coming again, whilst their jobs migrated to Valdosta State and Kentucky, and Leach moved on to Oklahoma as an assistant coach after which head coach at Texas Tech. The official cause was a soccer camp/fundraiser for native Key West athletics, organized by a college administrator named Joe Clements, who finally grew to become Leach’s finest pal. It was there, on America’s southernmost soccer subject, at Key West Excessive College — Go Preventing Conchs! — sitting in metallic grandstands rusted by the ocean throughout the road, that Leach and Mumme brainstormed big chunks of the pass-happy offense that has slowly taken roots beneath each stage soccer like, effectively, a dwell oak rising in the midst of a bar.
“The truth is that Mike liked Key West a lot that he discovered any excuse he may to get down there, even when that meant that all of us needed to go down there with him,” longtime Leach assistant and present NC State particular assistant Ruffin McNeill recalled final 12 months with fun. “That is a spot that has all the time welcomed each sort of distinctive character with open arms. And there is by no means been a extra distinctive character than Mike Leach.”
Distinctive and imperfect. Each identify on each stool, from Hemingway and JFK to Arlo Guthrie and City Meyer, got here with flaws to go together with their fame. Leach actually did, too. His solely full-time residency within the city was between jobs, when he was pushed out of Texas Tech amid an investigation into his remedy of a participant with a concussion. As he fought for his profession and fame, he calmed his thoughts by sitting on the seashore and deep sea fishing. Identical to Hemingway and Williams. And simply as Key West’s characters nonetheless do each single day.
This previous January, these characters jogged my memory of Leach, regardless of the place I went. On the Tipsy Rooster, as a neighborhood crooner labored his means by the Buffett catalog, a gaggle of men rode by on rented bikes, all sporting Texas Tech soccer jerseys. On the Key West Historic Seaport, the place Leach used to host visiting athletic administrators on the town to interview him for jobs, a lady in a Washington State Cougars T-shirt stood up on the bar and randomly toasted, “To Coach!” and all of us knew who she was speaking about. Even in a Duval Road boutique known as Nu Shuz, amid cabinets stocked with vibrant inexperienced floral ankle strap closed-toe high-heeled mules, stars-and-stripes sequined booty shorts and, within the phrases of the shop supervisor, “every thing anybody must look fabulous,” there was a sequin-covered clutch purse adorned with the maroon block M emblem of the Mississippi State Bulldogs.
“We have now different faculties, however this one stays out entrance as a result of I get a number of requests for that one,” the supervisor defined. “You already know, the coach used to dwell right here.” The supervisor then recalled an hourlong dialog with Leach about Key West drag exhibits and that they nonetheless catch themselves searching for him, regardless that they know he will not be strolling by once more.
I knew that, too. But it surely did not cease me from wanting. Not at each middle-aged man using by on a creaky bike. Not as our tour bus went down the road the place he and his spouse Sharon used to dwell. Not as we drove by Key West Excessive College headed to and from the airport. And positively not at Captain Tony’s, the place sure, I knew Mike Leach wasn’t going to be sitting on his stool on the bar, however a minimum of I may discover the stool, proper?
Again on the bar, my spouse, bored with watching me run laps, requested the evening supervisor the place the seat was. “It is not sitting,” he stated, directing us previous the bar and across the stage the place, on Jan. 2, 2023, Captain Tony’s regulars watched Mississippi State’s first sport after his demise, a ReliaQuest Bowl win over Illinois, as they spent halftime on an open mic sharing their favourite Leach tales. We descended into the decrease stage and there, between the pool tables, he pointed up. “We had to do that as a result of individuals stored attempting to steal it. And since he belongs there.”
Nailed to the ceiling of Captain Tony’s, on the identical altitude the place pirates as soon as swung useless and the place their ghosts are presumed to drift now, cling 4 barstools.
PAPA HEMINGWAY … HARRY TRUMAN … JOHN F. KENNEDY … MIKE LEACH.
I snapped a few dangerous photographs with my telephone and excused myself to hit the boys’s room. There, I finished being unhappy and all of a sudden began smiling once more. There, framed over the bathroom was Jimmy Buffett’s hand-scribbled lyrics to “The Final Mango in Paris.”
I went right down to Captain Tony’s to get out of the heatWhen I heard a voice name out to me, ‘Son, come have a seat’I needed to search my reminiscence as I regarded into these eyesOur lives change just like the climate, however a legend by no means dies.
