Canzano: Impact of Mike Leach lingers

Former coach comes up all the time.

Mike Leach died in December of 2022.

Mike Leach had a persistent hacking cough during the final football season of his life. He didn’t sleep well. The coach had always been a night owl, but close friends will tell you there was a spike in late-night calls that season.

He’d fought off pneumonia. There was fluid around his heart and lungs. Then, he was gone. It was three years ago today that Leach died.

He was 61.

I was in Maui at the time. When I got the call, I slipped out on the porch of a ground-floor condominium facing Maalaea Bay and wrote 1,500 clumsy words. It hardly captured what the guy meant to college football.

Anyone else notice how frequently Leach’s name still comes up? On TV broadcasts? In casual conversations? Almost weekly? For a while, I attributed it to frequency illusion. It was like the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. Was my brain just trained to listen for his name and notice it?

Confirmation bias?

Or was it actually happening?

This week, my phone rang. It was a Division I athletic director calling.

I picked up, “Hello.”

No answer.

“Hello?” I said again.

I lingered for a second, listening for a response, before I realized it was a “butt dial.” I could hear two muffled voices talking on the other end. I hate when that happens. I’ve done it myself. It’s embarrassing. I always try to hang up as quickly as I can.

I don’t know what’s worse: accidentally making that call, or having the person on the other end later realize they’ve called your phone and think you sat and eavesdropped. As I hung up, I heard something— one of the voices made a reference to “… Mike Leach.” Because, of course, he’d come up.

Did I ever tell you about the time Leach called me, unprompted, via FaceTime? It was early in the pandemic on Saturday night in November of 2020. Mississippi State was scheduled to play a game that day against Auburn, but it got canceled due to COVID-19 testing protocols.

The test results and contact tracing had wiped out Mississippi State’s roster. Leach didn’t have the minimum 53 available players. The SEC postponed the game. I was sitting on my living room sofa, watching television, when my phone lit up. Leach never used FaceTime. I was horrified. Was it a misdial? But I scrambled out of the room and straightened up.

Miami coach Mario Cristobal FaceTimed me like that once, in some ungodly hour on Sunday morning from the East Coast. When I answered, Cristobal was sitting in his office at his desk with pristine posture. He was bright-eyed, his hair was combed perfectly, and his orange team-issued Hurricanes polo shirt popped off the screen.

He looked like an applicant for a job interview.

Me? I was drinking my morning coffee, unshaven, and still in the same T-shirt I wore to bed. I wiped the sleep from my eyes as Cristobal announced, “What’s going on, brother?”

Leach’s FaceTime call that night was nothing like that.

He was sitting in an RV with his good friend, Wade Hogg. They became buddies when Leach was coaching at Washington State. Hogg had driven his rig from the Pacific Northwest to Starkville, Miss., for the Auburn game.

When the game was canceled, they decided not to waste a good tailgate opportunity. Hogg and Leach, who vacationed together and even bought homes near each other in Key West, Fla., were holding cocktail glasses filled with whiskey. They grinned and raised them together.

“Bubba,” Leach toasted, “how soon can you get here?”

When I opened my laptop to start writing that somber morning, Leach was listed in critical condition at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. He was on life support. His family was saying goodbye.

Leach wasn’t perfect. Far from it. But he was never boring. And when we talked, he frequently brought up his children. One of them, a daughter, lived in the Portland area for a spell. He was always asking, “Where can I get the best pizza when I visit her?” I’d give him a suggestion. Then, several months later, he’d text and ask, “Where’s the second-best pizza place?”

He was working his way down the list.

Mike Leach’s wife, Sharon, had discovered him napping on the sofa that final day. It wasn’t an unusual occurrence. She soon realized he wasn’t responsive. His heart had given out. Then, he was gone.

I don’t know what you think about when there are 12 days to go until Christmas. Shopping for presents? Holiday work parties? The lights in the front yard? When mid-December comes, I always think about Leach.

The world has been less interesting without him.

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