From across the practice field, John Cohen saw coach Mike Leach step away from drills to take a phone call.
That’s odd, thought Cohen, then the athletic director at Mississippi State.
As it turns out, Leach, unlike many coaches, took plenty of calls while at practice. He even filmed Cameo video messages from the practice field that he eventually sent to fans. In fact, during special teams portions of practice, he was known to pop in his ear buds and listen to Duolingo Spanish classes.
But on this particular day, Leach took a most important phone call. After practice, Cohen asked about it.
FORDE: Mike Leach Was a One-of-a-Kind Football Coach
It was Donald Trump. “When the President calls, you feel compelled to answer,” Leach said.
In the fall of 2020, Trump and Leach communicated quite often—even in the middle of Mississippi State practices. Their relationship began when Leach visited the White House after the ’18 season, and it steadily blossomed into a friendship.
This is but one Mike Leach story. There are hundreds more about the late coach, who died Tuesday at age 61. Some of them are bizarre. Others are quite unbelievable. They are quirky, funny and wholly unique.
They are stories that you find from no other person walking the Earth, let alone another major college football coach.
“There will never be another Mike Leach,” says Washington State athletic director Pat Chun. "He was the most interesting man alive."
On the day of his death, more than a dozen people in and around Leach’s final stop, Starkville, Miss., shared stories about the coach.
They paint a picture of a peculiar man who meandered through life on his own accord, a guy intrigued with life’s mysteries, fascinated to find answers and fearless of his surroundings.
“You’re going to be dead in a hundred years anyway,” Leach once said, “so live dangerously.”
Always a walker
For about 20 years, Dave Emerick worked with or for Mike Leach.
In that time, he saw the coach operate a vehicle once.
“I rode in a car, with him driving, in 1997 when we were at Kentucky and we played Vanderbilt,” recalls Emerick. “That was the last time I ever rode with him as the driver.”
If Leach went some place, he was driven there or he walked. He much preferred walking. At Washington State, he walked from his home to campus each day. During his early days at Mississippi State, he actually lived on campus, residing in a condo overlooking the school’s baseball stadium. The condo, owned by a donor, was primo seating for Bulldogs’ baseball games.
At some point, as the baseball season approached, school officials asked when he planned to move out of the 900-square-foot condo. Leach replied, “Never.” Eventually, under strong encouragement, he moved out and into a home a few miles from campus. No longer walkable, graduate assistants and other support staff members drove him to and from the office.
It made for a much less eventful route than those walks to the office in Pullman, Wash., where he often encountered wildlife. Deer, quail, rabbits and, most famously, raccoons. During one of his walks, Leach tracked a raccoon through the snow.
Strolling through a neighborhood, he saw the animal’s tracks and followed them for a half mile. Why would he ever do that?
Said Leach: “I was curious where the sucker lived.”
