Alright, it's my honor to sit down for a few minutes with LSU baseball coach Paul Mainieri. Coach, you’re the first guest on Tigers Win. I thought that was fitting for a number of reasons. One, because you're the winningest active coach in college baseball, and I was looking at the numbers: 1467 wins. Bill Franques does a great job writing up all the bios and everything on LSUsports net. I was reading that tidbit and I thought, well, you must be the winningest coach in all of college sports, right? Because baseball, you play so many games.
Well, thanks for not bringing up how many losses there were, Cody.
This is Tigers Win, not Tigers lose.
Well, thank you, first of all, for having me on the first edition of this. I'm very proud of that. I don't really get caught up in career wins and those kinds of things. It's funny, when I was a young coach I did. My father was a coach and I remember when he would have a milestone victory, his 300th career win or his 500th career win, and certainly his 1000th career win, he was the very first junior college coach to win 1000 games in his career. So that was a significant accomplishment. Of course, I was a young coach at the time, and I thought it'd be so cool to have a milestone win, and I remember the 100th win of my career against the United States Naval Academy when I was coaching at St. Thomas, and they gave me a plaque and I was so proud of it. Then as you go through and you get older, you're not really concerned with milestone wins, you're concerned with winning championships, you’re concerned with the development of young people under you that have been entrusted to you by their parents. You want to help them develop into men. You realize why you went into coaching. It's for the reasons that I just mentioned, to impact young people's lives. So the milestone wins didn't mean as much to me as we went down the line, until we won my 1012th win because that tied my father. That was pretty significant for me. I get a little emotional when I think about it, but now I just want to see LSU win as many games as we can, it's not Paul Mainieri winning the games, of course. I think one thing that it does demonstrate, though, is that we've had a long career, we've had wonderful kids for many, many years. I'm now beginning my 39th year as a college baseball coach, my 15th at LSU. I've enjoyed it. I've just been the luckiest guy in the world to be able to do something that I love doing, which is being around baseball — coaching baseball — and being around young people, and representing a wonderful institution. It's a lot more fun to win than lose. So let's see if we can win a few more before we call it quits.
No doubt. You know, one of the goals of this podcast, I grew up with coaches, both of my parents were coaches, my brother's a coach. And being at LSU, I'm with coaches all the time. I consider coaches almost experts in success, or at least the things that you try to build around you to generate success, right? Like a lot of us in our daily life. I go into my office, and I’ve got one picture on the wall here and a picture over there. I sit down at my computer and start working. I'm not really thinking about motivational techniques. I'm not really thinking about practical steps that I can take necessarily every day consciously.
that's all right.
Thought it was Matt for a second thought that was narrating the lead scoring the
interview.
Is that wife or was that wife or daughter? Okay.
That's good. Sorry.
No, we I mean, we'll edit some of it out. But yeah. Yeah, keep some of it for, for for posterity. We're talking about we're talking about,
you're talking about in your Oh, yeah, you have pictures, but you're thinking about motivational?
Sure. And I and I try to incorporate some of that in my daily life. But I realized I'm surrounded at LSU by people who think about that stuff all the time. And so I want to selfishly pick their brains and learn what I can but also share that with our fans. And so one of the things that we talked about when we came in here was was your actual physical space of your office and all the pictures that you have everywhere. And we had a good conversation about and I guess I could just ask you to repeat what you said because it was so profound, but I do find it interesting the spaces that we work in and how we you know, try to surround ourselves and there's a great Quote, I'm gonna botch it. But I'll paraphrase that, you know, your your external space reflects your internal space. So if you're organized external, you'll be organized internally, which I'm not the most organized person externally. So I've been I've tried to incorporate that, right. And so I come into your office, and there's just pictures everywhere. And that seems very intentional, right that you've surrounded yourself with in this way.
Cody, I don't make any apologies for wanting to be successful. I've never cheated. I don't take the shortcuts for success. In fact, every year I tell our team, ‘we're not going to look for shortcuts, we're going to purposely search out the hard way to do it,’ so that when we get to hold that big trophy up above our head, we're going to know we did it the right way. It's going to mean an awful lot more to us. I think it's the American way. I think you're supposed to try to succeed, I think that's what my job is here, not just to win games and win championships to keep the LSU fans and everybody else happy. But to teach our young men that are in our program what it takes to be successful, because today, hey, it's going to be on the friendly fields of strife, you know, representing LSU. But later in life, it's going to be more important; how to make that sale, how to be successful while you're performing surgery, how to maintain a wonderful relationship with a spouse or to guide your children through tough times when they're having them and all of the things that they learned through college athletics are the things that they're going to apply later on in life to be able to have a happy, successful life.
Earlier this week, I had a phone call with a former player of mine who's going through a real challenging thing in his life right now. He's very ill and it's a life threatening situation. He reached out to me because he needed to talk to me. He needed me to motivate him and inspire him to keep fighting. He was feeling sorry for himself and that's not what I taught him to do. He kind of needed me to chew him out a little bit and get him back in line and keep fighting this thing. You know, for me, that's what I do. That's what I'm supposed to do, you know, the fact that this young man reached out to me at a time when he desperately needed some motivation and to be inspired to keep fighting the good fight makes me feel like I'm validated as a coach, because that's why I went into coaching. My father was a coach, as I mentioned earlier in the interview, and when I told him I wanted to be a coach, that's basically what he told me. Don't go into coaching unless you're doing it for the right reasons. The right reasons are to impact young people, to teach them what it takes to be successful. Don't do it because of the prestige, don't do it because of winning, don't do it because of, maybe you make some money someday, you have to do it for the young men that you're going to be coaching. Whether I coached at St. Thomas, or the Air Force Academy, or Notre Dame, or here finally at LSU, maybe the pressure to win has been ratcheted up with each step along the way. But my vision of what my role is in these young people's lives has never changed. You mentioned all these pictures on the wall behind me. Basically, that's my life up there. I call it my humble wall. Because these pictures, some people are famous, you know, there's some famous people up there, but not most of them. Most of them are people that have been an impact in my personal life, that have either supported me, given me an opportunity, been with me at a key moment in life, had been very instrumental in the success that we have had. So whenever I start thinking, ‘Hey, I'm pretty good at what I do,’ I always look up at that wall and realize that you never did anything alone. There had to be other people that were there to support you, help you do the work, and so forth. I look at that wall quite frequently, because it just reminds me of how fortunate and how lucky I've been in my lifetime to do what I love doing, and that we've had enough success that I've been able to do it for a long time.
We talked before and you said you could literally go through every single picture (on the wall) and tell the story. We don't have time for that. But is there one that you've looked at, maybe recently in the last couple days, that you hadn't looked at in a while because I'm looking at the frame behind it and it almost looks like an Instagram grid for our millennial listeners. It's dozens and dozens of pictures. Is there one that stands out?
Where did I have it? It's the third row from the top. There's three pictures there. But the main picture is myself, my dad and Tommy Lasorda. That was literally the day — the moment — that I met Tommy Lasorda. So, when he recently passed away, I had kind of a private moment for myself, where I came back to my office, I think I had counted 16 pictures I have of him on my wall. But that day brought back memories. I was 25 years old, and I had met him after a golf tournament that my dad was hosting. He came down, we were having lunch, and he came down to grab me and said, Would you like to meet Tommy Lasorda? And I said, sure. And that was 1984, I guess. Lasorda had won the world championship in 1981 for his first championship and we struck up a conversation at that time, ironically, I was working at a school called St. Thomas University. After the luncheon ended, he and I went behind a wall in the lobby of the Doral Hotel in Miami, Florida and he spent like four hours with me just talking to me, just he and I, nobody, nobody saw us. And it began a relationship that I had with him until the day that he passed. It was a wonderful 38 years of mentoring, of guiding me, of teaching me lessons, of giving me experiences that you couldn't pay for. And, you know, when we lost him, it was like losing my father all over again. So I looked at that picture and the two men that I cherish most and in my life, my father and Tommy Lasorda, you know, that was the day that my dad brought Lasorda and I together.
Yeah — it makes me think of one of the qualities I think of when I think about you: mentorship. Because I know, me personally, finding mentors as I've tried to grow my career and expand my career has been very important to me. I talked a little bit about it earlier, I think athletes internalize a lot of what they are taught and coached growing up. So, while I don't consciously think about certain things, a lot of that stuff just becomes innate, right? I think mentorship is one of them. When you're an athlete, you have coaches, they're your mentors, right? They're by design your mentors. As you get into your career, you start to look for those same figures in whatever career you've gone into. When I consider your career, there's some very obvious ones, your father growing up as the son of a coach. Tommy Lasorda. I know you could talk about this for an hour. What are the most important things that you've learned from those mentors, and if there's ones that I didn't mention that you have embodied in your career?
Cody, obviously growing up the son of Demie Mainieri was a very big thing in South Florida. My dad was the most well known coach down there. This was before the Miami Dolphins were created and Don Shula came, before the University of Miami baseball program established itself. When my dad took over Miami Dade Community College, he won the national championship in his fourth year there and at that time, Miami was kind of a fledging big city. So he was kind of the King of the town and I was a son and I loved my dad, and I loved what he was doing. I don't remember conscious life before being in the dugout in Miami Dade and Miami, Florida. So obviously, not only was my dad a wonderful father, he was the best man in my wedding. He was a great mentor for me as I was growing up as a young athlete. I can still remember him dropping me off for the first day of high school football practice in the ninth grade and grabbing me by the arm as I was getting out of the car and giving me some last words of advice. He just was always there for me, you know. He was the coach that I measured all other coaches against. And unfortunately, you know, you always felt that they all came up short against what your dad represented. So when I went away to college, I first came to LSU. And at that time, we had a wonderful man as the coach here by the name of Jimmy Smith, but his main job, the equipment manager for the football team. He was literally a part-time baseball coach. And I had grown up in this really intense baseball environment where my dad, you know, was the first junior college coach to win 1000 games and produce 30 future major leaguers and won a national championship and had five second or third place finishes. So, you know, I needed to get into a program where I was going to be pushed, and I wanted to find out how good I was. I didn’t want to go through the rest of my life with any regrets and say, jeez, I wonder if I was good enough. If I would have gone into a program that really challenged me, could I have been a Major League Baseball player, that along with the combination of my heartstrings were kind of tugging on me. I decided to leave LSU after my freshman year and go back and play for my dad. But after I finished playing for my dad, my eligibility was up. So I had to find a new school. And this was my last opportunity to find a coach that could be somebody besides my father, that could be a great mentor for me. By the grace of God, I found Ron Maestri at the University of New Orleans. And Ron Maestri became that person that I had been searching my whole athletic life to get to play for, outside of my father. And mace taught me so many things. You know, his intensity was unbelievable what he also could have fun. He taught me that, you know, coaches are much more than just even coaches of players on the team, you know, they're there, they need to go out into the community and garner support and get people to like their program. And though they might get financial support, they might give emotional support, whatever, I saw Ron Maestri do the little things. He would literally drag the field before the game. My dad never had to drag the field before the game. So this was something that caught me by surprise. But I realized if you want to be a coach, there's no job that's too small for you to make sure that you develop the system of excellence that you want to have. And we had great teams that two years I played it, you know, for Ron Maestri and he's continued to be a mentor to this day for me, Cody, I probably don't go two weeks without talking to him. And then I mentioned, of course, Tommy Lasorda, and when I met him and for those years, so many years, he's been such a great mentor for me and I think what he taught me was that if you bring joy to the field the players will feed off of that. You know, if you have content players, if you have happy players, you know, they're going to give you everything that they had. And so you know, even though nobody likes to lose and especially me, you know, a loss on a given day you feel you feel like you're getting your heart ripped out. You have to sometimes put on a happy face, because you can't let the players get down. What happened yesterday should not affect today and the only way that you can control that is by your positive energy that you're bringing to the field and that's something I learned from my other mentor, Lasorda.
Yeah, I mean that's a cardinal rule for baseball, right? We joked about it early, you've won 1400 games but you've lost however many. Baseball is a game where failure is instilled in the core of it. I was looking at your numbers, the number of wins that you had, and thinking, I wonder if there's any major league coaches that are active right now that have more wins. I think there's like three, it's Dusty Baker, it's Terry Francona. There's one more, I can't remember the third one. But I was looking at the list that got me on a Wikipedia loophole. And I was looking at the list of all time winningest coaches in Major League Baseball and the list of the first top 100 winningest coaches in Major League Baseball, only one had won more than 60% of their games. So they lost all of them had lost at least 40% of games or more. And baseball to me is such an interesting lens. I played baseball growing up and I think it's maybe the best sport to teach you how to cope with failure and how not to dwell on failure and move on. As somebody that's spent, you know, I played baseball for 12-15 years, whatever it was, you've been doing this for 60 years now. What have you learned about moving on from failure, learning from failure, but not dwelling on failure?
Well, Cody, and as I think back through all the years that I've coached, we've had, I think, two seasons, I think I had one season at Notre Dame, and I think I've had one season at LSU, where we actually only lost single digit games during the course of the regular season. Remember, when we beat Oregon State a couple years ago, in the College World Series two times in a row, they went into the first game of the 56-4 record. I mean, that's ridiculous. Nobody does that. I think two of the teams I've coached had single digit losses through the regular season, okay. But most of the time, you're going to lose, obviously, at least 10, maybe between 10 and 20 games during the year, and you potentially are going to lose a third of your games, you don't know when they're going to happen. And you can't go into a game and say, today's probably the day we're going to lose one of those inevitable games, 15 games that we're going to lose this year. You have to believe you're going to win every game. So when you don't win that game, that disappointment is unbelievable. You've put so much into it. And you want to win so badly. And for whatever reason, the nature of the game, on a given day, you came up short. And I'm not a very good loser. I have to be honest with you, you know, if there's ever been a stress in my marriage, it's been on days that we've lost games. My wife has learned through the years that I need my space. Yeah, you know, and I'm not a very good father. And I'm not a very good husband. You know, within the three hours after we lost it lost the game. But after a little while, you've got to just fight it and put it behind you. And with our team, I tell them that we have a midnight rule. What does midnight signify? The end of one day and the start of another day. And as I tell them, the world rotates on an axis. When the world rotates every day, the person sitting on top of the world, he falls off. You could have a great win yesterday, but tomorrow the game starts 0-0, and you've got to do it all over again. Conversely, if you had a tough loss yesterday, tomorrow, the game starts 0-0 and you have a chance to make up for that loss that you — maybe not totally make up for it — but the worst thing you can do is let yesterday's loss cause you to lose today. And so it's something that I've tried to teach our players that life is this, you know, a baseball season was like the microcosm of life. Life is not a smooth sail on glass like water, you're going to hit potholes along the way. It's not a matter whether you're going to get knocked down. It's how are you going to react when you get knocked down, that's going to determine the success that you have in life, the happiness that you have in life, you're going to have sick children, you're going to not get job opportunities that you thought you're going to have, you're going to have spousal relationships that you have to work through some times, you're going to have problems with your boss at work you can have. I mean, you're going to have, you know, deaths that happened in your family that are going to break your heart. There's a whole litany of things that you're going to deal with that are real world stuff. I think one thing these kids are so lucky to do is to have an experience of college baseball, where they learn to deal with those things. Like I tell the kids: the greatest thing in the world is to win a college baseball game. The second best thing in the world is to lose a college baseball game, because at least you were in the arena. At least you had the opportunity and, even if you lost, you can lose and learn from that. That's going to help make you the person that you become.
There's a couple of directions I want to take that. I'll start here: I kind of cheated for this interview, I texted one of your former players and asked him for ‘Hey, you know any things that I should ask about’ or just any concepts or principles that you remember from Coach Mainieri, I'll tell you who after, I don't want to rat him out on air. But he said one of the things that you talked about, and this is kind of the inverse of that, versus dealing with failure, he said that you put so much pressure on them to be as good as they can possibly be on the field, in the classroom. I think I'm paraphrasing, but I'll paraphrase, you tell them to aim for perfection, because if you fall short of perfection, you still reach greatness. And he went on to expand that into like, I still use that in my marriage. I use that in everything that I do. And I'm so grateful to Coach Mainieri for instilling that in us. And so I'm curious about that concept of you know, we just talked about coping with failure. But baseball is a sport where it's almost impossible to be perfect in so many ways. And still, you push your players, hey, aim for the very, very highest that you can get. Because setting that high standard is going to set you up for success, even if you don't quite reach there.
Well, it's flattering to me to hear that a former player would remember those concepts, because when you're 18 to 22 years old, Cody, sometimes you just want to be patted on the back and told how good you are.
Sometimes when you're 32 years old, too.
It’s human nature. But the thing that is called tough love, is that somebody cares enough about you to tell you the truth, to push you, or to tell you you're doing things that are injurious to yourself. If I was doing something wrong, and nobody ever told me, I’d just continue doing something wrong. Is that really somebody caring about me? If you care about me, you're gonna tell me the truth. And it's one thing that I've always taken pride in. Listen, there's a lot of players that have played for me through the years that probably don't think that highly of me, you know, maybe they didn't get what they wanted out of the experience, you know, they didn't get enough playing time or whatever. But I don't think any player can ever say that Coach Mainieri didn't tell him the truth. And I always tell him the truth, because I asked him ‘Do you want the truth?’ If you want the truth, that means sometimes you're going to hear some things that you don't really want to hear. I don't mean it in a derogatory, demeaning way, why I'm telling it to you is to help you grow, to help you get better. And sometimes 18-to-22 year olds don't understand that when they're with you. But later in life, they understand it. I can't tell you how many letters or phone calls or, you know, literally every day, I hear from former players that will share with me something like you just said, and it's you know, it's like, why this player called me earlier this week and wanted to talk to me. I have no ego, Cody, I'm just happy to be able to help people and when this player called me or you hear something, it flatters me, it makes me feel good, because it makes me feel as though maybe I did have some impact on them while they were here. And maybe at times they were angry at me or they thought, you know that I was being too unreasonable and what I expected out of them or whatever. But now they understand the method to my madness, so to speak. And it's made them a better person. I know perfection is not attainable. It never is. We've talked about that. There's never been a college baseball team go undefeated. There's been some that have come close. And those are very unique years. When that happens, but in the striving for perfection, like I tell the guys all the time. It's not good enough just to practice, you have to practice being perfect. Practice as though you're fielding a ground ball with a runner on third base and two outs in the ninth inning, and if you make this play, we're going to Omaha. If you go into your practice days with that level of intensity, the games seem easy, because you put that pressure on yourself every day. I'll tell you a story that means a lot to me. When we won the national championship in 2009, of course, I had left Notre Dame three years earlier. The administrator that oversaw the baseball program when I was at Notre Dame was a guy by the name of Bill Shoal — Bill is now the athletic director at Marquette University and a dear friend, but when I left to come to LSU, Bill left, being the administrator of baseball to become the administrator for football. So he had an office over in the Notre Dame football area. And we were playing in the national championship game and he's watching the game from his office, and one of the football coaches from Notre Dame would walk and he had a game on, say, Bill, What are you watching? Oh, I'm watching Paul Mainieri coach in the national championship game. Another coach would be walking by and he'd noticed and before you knew it, he had a half a dozen Notre Dame football coaches sitting in the office with him watching us beat Texas for the national championship. So Bill called me a couple days later and he said, Listen, I gotta tell you something. He said, one of the coaches that knew you from your time here, made a really nice compliment to you. He said, Paul, Bill, I've been watching Paul's teams for several years, and they always seem to play their best and the big games and the pressure games at the end of the season. How does he get his kids to play with such poise and composure at that time of the year and in the most pressure packed games? When he asked me that question, I said I don't know. I'll call him and find the answer to that. And so when Bill mentioned this story to me, I thought about it for a second, I said, Bill, that's really quite a compliment. And thank the person for the nice words. But I think the best reason I can give to you for why the players play poised like that is because I don't hand them anything. If that player is out there playing third base, or shortstop or second base, or first base or anywhere, they had to earn that job. I made them earn it. And I didn't make it easy for them to earn it. I made it tough for them to earn it. So by virtue of them knowing that they had to earn that position and had to earn the satisfaction of Coach Mainieri. That instills a great deal of confidence in each individual player out there. He would know he's not out there playing centerfield for LSU unless he went through the rigors of trying to win that job. I think when players know that about themselves, it gives them a great deal of self-confidence. It gives them a great sense that they belong out there and that they can beat anybody in the country. And consequently, there's no need to panic in the big games because they know they're good enough.
Yeah. I played baseball for Leo McClure, who had a couple of his sons play through here. Trey McClure played baseball here. Todd played football. Great baseball coach. I think a lot of what he said was filtered down from from Skip Bertman. So we probably spoke a lot of the Bertman languages. But I remember, we were playing at the Triple S A World Series. We were 13 or 14, I don’t remember what and I was the leadoff hitter, and I was in the slump of my life right? 0-for-20, something like that. And I was really down. I mean, one of the challenges I had with the baseball is I'm a thinker, and I would, you know, lose confidence quickly overthink, and I'll never forget this conversation he pulled me over. And it's the same thing that you're talking about instilling belief. He said, You're here because you've earned it. And because I believe in you, and that's not going to change five games, 10 games, 15 games, I know you're going to come through and that stuck with me to this day. When I'm struggling with work or struggling with my relationship. I just remembered the belief that he instilled in me and I haven't talked to coach McClure forever. But you you keep that tool of instilling self belief because when you see the other people that have invested you and and believe in you, and I'm wondering from your perspective, as a baseball coach, building off what you said, this is a sport where mentally you can, it's not like football or basketball where you're going to have success, success success, there's going to be times where you go through these, these slumps or you get the yips and you can't feel the ground ball. And so I'm curious how you balance maintaining that pressure on them, maintaining the high standard, but still instilling that belief and, you know, balancing those two forces.
That's the challenge right there. I always present it this way by asking what comes first the chicken or the egg? You know, of course, that's the age old question. Right? Well, the egg. Well, who? Who laid the first egg? Well, chicken. How did that first chicken exist? Well, it came from the — you know what I'm saying. So my question is, what comes first? Success or confidence? Do you have confidence because you have success? Or do you need confidence to have success? And I know the answer to that question. The answer to that question is you have to have confidence in order to achieve initial success. But the more success that you have, the greater your confidence grows in yourself. So how do you get that initial leap, where your confidence allows you to have enough success that you earn that confidence of the coach? And I think this is this is one of the things that separates coaches through the years. It’s your decision on which players you're willing to hitch a wagon to. Those are the most important decisions that I can make. And every year, those are the decisions. ure, game strategy is certainly important and motivation is important. All this stuff is important. But there's nothing more important than selecting the players that you're going to put your belief in, like coach McClure did with you that day, okay? And I make it hard for players to earn that confidence from me, but hear the word earn, they have to earn that confidence from me, how do they earn it? Because when they're put in a tough situation, they show an inordinate amount of self confidence in themselves. And I say to them all the time, how can you expect me to believe in you if you don't believe in yourself. And I can't just instill the confidence in you, you have to have it to start with. But once you prove to me that you can handle the tough situations, because you're going to get your nose bloodied in this game. As you mentioned, this is a game of failure, this is the only sport where you can fail 70% of the time and still be considered the best there is. That’s a 300 hitter, failing 70% of the time, and still be considered the best. So the kids that know how to handle the short term failures and not let them turn into long term failures. I can put it behind them, and then be ready to go in that tough situation. Those are the ones that you say ‘that kid's got something special about them’. And you and you believe in Him, and then you try to take the other kids that aren't quite there yet. And you use those kids as examples, in the hopes that it might change the way that the player that hasn't arrived yet, will think and prepare himself mentally. And, you know, fortunately, through the years, I've picked the right kids enough times that we've been able to have a long career. But that's really the key is to know your own players, and to know which of them have the ability, but have the confidence in themselves, you know, and are dedicated enough. And it matters enough to them that they're going to go out and do it the majority of the time, knowing that there's going to be failure built in.
So as you were talking, it reminded me of one of the other things that your former player texted me, he said that you always made practices harder than the games. And that was my dad being a coach that was instilled in me growing up. But it's something that I still think about today, because I'll be having a rough day, you know, I got two young kids, maybe I didn't sleep well, the night before, maybe the three year old was up in the middle of the night. And you know, I'm at work and energy is low. And I think to myself, man, I remember being at practice at Nicholls state in the middle of winter, when every other student was at home holding a 45 pound plate over my head sitting on a wall for two minutes. If I could do that, I can do whatever I got to do today, right. And so when he texted me that it made me think of that as something that, you know, I know, that's a principle that you instill with your players making practice as hard as they can so that they can perform in the pressure situations. But then that carries over into life right, too. And I think that I'm remembering some research that I did. I'm a paraphrase a quote that you said, You said that you left LSU to become the best player that you could be, then you came back to LSU to test yourself as a coach, right? I didn't say it as eloquently as you kind of mess it up there. But and so I want to kind of go into that that aspect of it. You seem like someone who's always challenged yourself to, to be better to push yourself. And so I'm curious is that is that something that your dad instilled in us that something that you think comes a little bit both nature and nurture? Where did that come from? And then how do you try to implement it with your players?
Well, it's a good question about where it originally came from.
Chicken or egg.
You know, when I was young, I admired my father so much, you know, and and my father's teachings stayed with me, and will stay with me for the rest of my life, they certainly did during the rest of his life. But one of the things that he used to say to me that I say to my players all the time, is that the worst thing that you could have in life is regret. If you regret that you didn't give everything you had to something, then your life will feel unfulfilled. If you give everything you had and you've dedicated yourself and you committed yourself and you had the right attitude, and you did the very best that you could, and you know what, it just wasn't good enough to be successful enough to accomplish the goals that you had in your life. You're not a failure. You're a success because you maxed out your potential. Not everybody is going to play in the major leagues, even though everybody has that goal. But if you did everything you could do to try to make yourself a major leaguer, then you should have no regrets with the rest of your life now you can close that chapter and go on to something else. And so that's that's what has motivated me my whole life, hearing that from my dad. And I've tried to pass that on to my players. When I left St. Thomas University and became the coach at the Air Force Academy, it was the most wonderful experience, you could imagine at Air Force. I have four former players that are general officers in the Air Force, these guys are in charge of $30 million budgets, 30,000 troops. I mean, they’re leaders in the country, and they still call me coach, they still call me for advice. That's very flattering, okay. I mean, my role in those cadets lives to help them become officers and so forth, and leaders of our country, that was something I took very serious. I would have loved to have stayed at the Air Force Academy. But when the University of Notre Dame offered me the opportunity, hey, listen, it was going to be a gamble. You know, now you're leaving someplace that you're very secure. But, you know, I enjoyed winning too much. You know, and, and it was hard to win games at the Air Force Academy, they did the best they could. But if we finished 500, every year, that was considered a successful season. And I just wanted to challenge myself and see if we could do better than that, you know, when I went to Notre Dame, and, and, listen, there were a lot of challenges that we had to overcome there. But we had success, and I loved it. And I turned down, probably six or seven job opportunities, including a handful you know, three or four that were in the SEC that nobody ever knew about to stay at Notre Dame. But when LSU offered me the job, that was when I had to look at myself and say what kind of man are you? You know, you've been telling your players forever, don't be afraid, go for it, let it rip. If you go down, go down swinging, go with no regrets. And then I kind of looked in the mirror and thought, maybe I ought to do the same thing that I've been preaching to my players all these years. It was a big risk, a big gamble coming, I could have stayed at Notre Dame the rest of my career and been perfectly happy. But I needed to challenge myself, Cody, and I needed, like you said, at one point I had left LSU to find out how good I was as a player. And I found out how good I was. It was decent enough to play in college and get a chance at pro ball. But I was not a major league baseball player. But I was okay with that once I realized that, you know, once I knew when I challenged myself, I wasn't that kind of player. I was okay with it. And I knew I was a good coach at Notre Dame. And the Big East Conference was a tough conference. And we were getting a bid every year to the NCAA Tournament. We went to Omaha one time, it was the first time Notre Dame had been there in 45 years. But I also wanted to know, you know, given the resources, the access to players, the whole package that is LSU, could we compete at the very highest level of college baseball, would I be good enough as a coach to be able to lead a team to a national championship. And that's why I took the leap of faith at 49 years old, you know, it could have ruined my career. But I didn't think that way, I just believed in myself. I believed that there was magic in the name LSU. And I believed that we could get the right kids and that we could put together a staff. And listen, we won one national championship, I wish we'd have a couple more in the trophy case by now, we came pretty close one year in ‘17.
We've had probably three or four other teams that were good enough to win. And we just, you know, didn't get the job done at the time, we had the opportunity, but it's been a labor of love. People ask me all the time, what about the pressure of coaching at LSU? I honestly do not feel the pressure here. Because I learned the most valuable lesson I've ever learned from my father when I was a young boy. That was the only person you really have to answer to is a person that you look at every day when you're brushing your teeth. The guy that you look at in the mirror. If you know you're doing the very best that you can, and you're doing things the right way, and you're working as hard as you can, you have no regrets. You did the best you could and I thought if we did the best we could we would have enough success here that I could finish my career at LSU. And hopefully that will be the case.
Coach, I could sit here and pick your brain all day. It's 11:45 I don't wanna keep you too much longer. So I'll end on this. And you lead me there with that answer. As someone who's climbed the ranks, right. And you get to one point in your career, you accomplish a goal and then you set a new one, and then you accomplish a goal and then you set a new one. How do you do that in your career, especially now to where you've gotten to this level and you've won the ultimate prize, the national championship. So how do you self evaluate and and I guess I would summarize this question, what does success look like for you in the next 5-10-15 years of your career, however long you go for it?
It’s not going to be that long.
Wishful thinking on my part, maybe. But however long it is, what does success look like for you down the road? And how do you define it and set goals and reach those goals?
First of all, Cody, I never took the job at St. Thomas with the hope that it would lead to another job. I didn't take the job at Air Force thinking it was gonna lead to another job. It was hard to leave the Air Force to go to Notre Dame. It was equally as hard to leave Notre Dame to come to LSU. I told you, I turned down a half a dozen other jobs. So I've never taken a job with the idea it was going to lead to something else, I just wanted to be a college baseball coach, and impact young people's lives. So, I'm doing that. I've experienced that. This is now my 39th year of doing it. If we never won another game in my career, I think I could walk away and be very proud of what we did accomplish. You know, the trophies are awesome. I wish for a couple more of these before we call it a career. But I don't want that to define my impact on young people, on the people that have been entrusted to me that I told you before, I don't apologize for wanting to win, I want to win, I want to win the national championship. But more important than that, I just want to be there and be the right coach for the kids. And, and help teach them what it takes to be successful. If we recruit the right kids. And we teach them what it takes to be successful, and we're demanding, and we, you know, all the things that go into it, then I think the winning will take care of itself. And if we have that magic, magical mix, where it all comes together at the right moment, the right time, we play well at the right time. And I think we can win the championship again. And that's what I'm striving to do. I know Skip (Bertman) made it seem so easy. It's really not that easy. It's not, you know. I'm going to measure the rest of my career by the way that I will evaluate myself. I'll know when it's time to walk away, nobody's gonna have to tell me, hey, it's time for you to call it a career. I'll know. I don't think I'm there yet. I think I've got a little bit of time left in me because I still have the passion, I still have the love of what I'm doing. I still think I'm pretty good at what I do. And, you know, hopefully, the players of today, they respect what I'm trying to do with them. And though they'll be able to react to it. I know we have a great coaching staff that works with me here. I know we have a phenomenal support staff that works with us here. I still think our best days are ahead of us. So I'm just the optimist. I can't say I'm going to measure success by do we win another national championship or two or SEC championship or two. It's a tough league, man. It's a tough league. But we're gonna do everything within our power to bring in that seventh championship trophy back to LSU. And when we don't do it, I'm going to be the most disappointed guy in the world. But I'm not going to be disappointed if we left it all out there on the field and gave it everything we had. If we came up a little bit short, then that's the way it works. But what I really want to see us do is put so much into it that we're laying exhausted on the field of battle with our arms up raised victoriously, as Vince Lombardi once said.
Well, coach, I have no doubts we’ll get there again. I'm confident in that. Thank you for your time. I've got notes here on my computer that I barely even looked at because the conversation was so good. So, we’ll have to do it again because I’ve got a million more questions to ask you. You're an expert on this. It's been a real treat to pick your brain and learn from some of your wisdom.
Do I have to wait until we're off camera for you to tell me which player it was?
Yes. Once the camera’s off, I'll tell you. Thank you, coach.
