July 2005 Cover Courtesy: W.W. Norton & Company Inside Coach: Lessons on the Game of Life • The 10 Spot's review | Read an excerpt | Buy it Hot Off The Press Praying for Gil Hodges: A Memoir of the 1955 World Series and One Family's Love of the Brooklyn Dodgers By Thomas Oliphant ($24.95). A rememberance of the affection one boy, his parents and the borough of Brooklyn had for their team. Lance Armstrong's War: One Man's Battle Against Fate, Fame, Love, Death, Scandal, and a Few Other Rivals on the Road to the Tour de France By Daniel Coyle ($25.95). A chronicle of Armstrong's '04 cycling season. License to Deal: A Season on the Run with a Maverick Baseball Agent By Jerry Crasnick ($24.95). The true inside story of the sports agent business is exposed as never before. Juicing the Game: Drugs, Power, and the Fight for the Soul of Major League Baseball By Howard Bryant ($24.95). An in-depth look at the impact of steroids on today's game. How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization By Franklin Foer ($13.95). A study of soccer and its cultural role in society. Five Under $5 Think words are cheap? These books won't break your bank (prices from barnesandnoble.com): • Seabiscuit: An American Legend By Laura Hillenbrand ($3.95). Biography of the underdog horse. • Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream By H.G. Bissinger ($3.99). The impact of high school football in Texas. • What a Time It Was By W.C. Heinz ($3.99). A collection of Heinz' best sports writing. • Serious By John McEnroe ($3.99). An auto-biography of the controversial tennis star. • The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea By Sebastian Junger ($3.99). New England fishermen try to survive a meteorological disaster.

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Welcome to the SI.com Book Club. Each month we'll review a sports book and offer an excerpt. July's selection: Coach: Lesson on the Game of Life.

Now that Larry Brown and Phil Jackson have landed contracts that will pay them each some $10 million a year to squeeze the greatest effort out of professional athletes, the question of a coach's value has rarely been more in the forefront. Yet, as Michael Lewis' slim tome, Coach: Lessons of the Game of Life, reminds us, many of the most influential coaches labor far from the spotlight.

Billy Fitzgerald (aka Coach Fitz), the baseball and basketball coach at the Isidore Newman School in New Orleans, Lewis's alma mater, is just such a coach. "The man was born to drill holes into thick skulls," writes Lewis, "and shout directly into the adolescent brain."

Shouting, it seems, does not play as well in today's elite prep schools as it once did. Lewis was spurred to visit his former coach because at the same time his former players were raising money to rename the school's gym in Fitz's honor to thank coach for transforming their lives for the better, angry parents of some current players were simultaneously lobbying to have him fired for being too harsh and demanding. Had Coach Fitz changed, or had society?

In some ways, Coach is a book for those who feel they don't have time to read books. If the airy 90 pages read more like a magazine story, that's because it was one; it originally ran in a March, 2004, edition of the New York Times Magazine.

Even so, Lewis's ode to Coach Fitz is worth reading, especially for its heartfelt description of the enduring power a coach can have over a teen-ager, even decades later. Lewis details how as a high school pitcher his nose broke by a ground ball back to the mound in part because he was strainining to hear Coach Fitz's criticism from the dugout. Rather than feeling that the blood belonged on his coach's hands, though, Lewis regarded the incident fondly because it showed him how fiercely Coach Fitz cared about the way he approached the game.

Lewis had to don a mask to protect the nose, Rip Hamilton-like, and viewed the apparatus as a badge of honor. "I became, in truth, something of a zealot, and it didn't take me long to figure out how much better my life could be if I applied this new zeal acquired on a baseball field to the rest of it. It was as if this baseball coach had reached inside me, found a rusty switch marked Turn On Before Attempting To Use, and flipped it on." Rarely will one find a more eloquent explanation of the potential character-building effects of playing team sports.

The subtext of the Coach Fitz story, though, is that a teen-ager who today found himself in the same situation might well blame the broken nose on the seemingly out-of-control coach who's always riding his players unmercifully. It's telling that the young Coach Fitz would pull out the collected works of Bobby Knight and read aloud from them as far back as the 1970s.

While Lewis discovers that, Fitz has sanded down some of his rough edges over the years, but his demanding ways are viewed far less benignly by the current generation of players and parents. In this account, the parents (all fathers) don't fare well. Though Lewis concedes most players' fathers are well-intentioned, he portrays them as cowardly meddlers who do their complaining largely behind Coach Fitz's back. In trying to protect their children from discomfort, Lewis argues that they are also preventing them from learning the tough lessons that are the most life-transforming.

One can't expect comprehensive answers to society's ills in less than 8,000 words, of course, and Coach doesn't pretend to offer them. In the end, Lewis essentially makes a plea that today's schools -- which increasingly kowtow to overprotective parents/customers -- and the parents themselves simply back off a bit to let the Coach Fitzes of the world do their work.

That's a reasonable prescription, especially after hearing Lewis' vivid account of how Coach Fitz changed his life -- and those of many of his peers -- for the better. Coach Fitz might not hop around as much as Brown or talk zen like Jackson does, but Lewis demonstrates that his lessons on playing and living the "right way" are no less powerful and enduring.