Another Garrido Story: Temper, Temper

So I thought I would share a couple Augie Garrido stories just for fun.  For those that don't know Augie, he is the winning-est college of all time.  He has won over 1500 games in his life and 5 national collegiate baseball championships.  And for about 3 years he was  the coach at the University of Illinois.  I was hired as Augie's Director of Baseball operations and basically my job was to keep him out of trouble.  And trust me, that was a challenge.  In the meantime I helped set up the marketing plan, summer camps and game day experiences, the sound, the entertainment and giveaways in the stands, and just plain worked at making the games fun to come to.

In Augie's first year at Illinois he inherited a bunch of "hard working" Chicago kids.  They all were great student-athletes but not necessarily the greatest baseball players.  A new stadium was built upon Augie's arrival and that along with just the drive Augie has as a coach had propelled them to a great record going into the Big Ten season.  The team was about 15-3 or so playing Minnesota in a 4 game home series.  Augie gathered them all in the clubhouse before the game and gave one of the most inspiring pregame talks I have every heard.  I call it the "I am a champion" speech.  For 20 minutes Garrido talked about the game being played one pitch, one out, one inning at a time and the key to great teams was winning each increment of the game.  "Battle for every pitch, every out and every inning.  Win every inning and you will win the game." But to do that Augie said you have to believe you are the best man in that spot.  "Say to yourself 1000 times a game, I am a champion, I am a champion... and if you say it enough you will believe it and your actions will follow what you believe...."   A great lesson in life, to break tough situations down to their most basic elements and be successful in each little piece.  

I wish I would have recorded this speech, it was truly one of the greatest I ever heard.  However...we lost all four games of the series and slid back in the conference standings never to recover that season.  But, I'll never forget the speech.  Sometimes when I talk to Augie I'll joke, "have you tried the I am a Champion speech on the team?"  :)

Another of my favorite Augie moments happened at a NCAA regional championship.  Now for as intense as Augie was in the regular season using every moment possible as a "teaching moment", Augie was very laid back in the post season.  Perhaps this is the secret to his success.  He explained to me once that in the regular season he needed to "get their attention."  The players were thinking about going out at night, or their girlfriends or a test they had the next day, and he needed to get on them so they refocused on the game and on the moment.  But in the post season, Augie said "I need to get them to relax."  He said, "they all want to win the ring or the trophy and I need them to relax so they play better."  So he was laid back, that is, except at the NCCA at Mississippi State in 1990.  

We were leading MSU in the mid innings despite the fact we weren't getting all the calls.  A win would put us in the regional championship game, one win there and we go to the College World Series. A loss would send us to the loser's bracket where we would need to win three in a row to go to Omaha.  Augie had a dialog going with the home plate umpire and finally he jumped out of the dugout and gave the umpire his best Earl Weaver imitation.  He kicked dirt on him, yelled at him and gave him "his opinion" of his work.  He grabbed a pair of sunglasses off his head, and not just any pair, but a $300 pair he got the week before, threw them on the ground and stomped them.  Then he stopped, looked at the glasses, picked them up and walked back to the dugout.  

He bee-lined to me, and said very discretely, "Todd, if you ever let me wear a pair of $300 sunglasses when I go to yell at an ump you're fired."  He smiled and we both got a good chuckle out of that.  The bad news was in the 8th inning, still up 3-2 over MSU we got another bad call on a balls and strike.  A strike would have ended the inning.  Two pitches later the batter hit a home run and MSU took the lead 4-3.  We lost and didn't win the next game either.  Augie called this one of the singular most disappointing calls in his life in a story written several years later.  I know he feels as I do that getting out of the inning would have sent us to the College World Series.  And that would have been huge for a program like Illinois.

I have many Augie stories, but these are two I share for now.  In the locker rooms he has coached at Garrido puts up a sign that says, "It's amazing what can be accomplished when no one cares who gets the credit."  That is just one of those things I cherish in my friendship with Coach Garrido.