Mike Leach lives in Key West, hoping to coach again

KEY WEST, Fla. — There are palm trees in purgatory. He walks by them without paying much attention. Here, each is just another pixel on a postcard disguised as paradise. Mike Leach stops at a wooden shack for a Cuban coffee. “What was I talking about?” he asks.

Doesn’t matter. He hops topics like lily pads. The Cuban caffeine only makes matters worse. The need for a college playoff system. Unemployment. Hunting pigs. Sarah Palin. Eating fast food in Japan. The University of Maryland.

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“Excuse me,” says a woman with a French accent. Leach is recognized often down here, which isn’t too surprising. Before he was ousted as Texas Tech’s head football coach, his Red Raiders teams won 84 games in 10 seasons, appeared in a bowl game each year and featured one of college football’s most exciting offenses. His star was on the rise. He was profiled on CBS’s “60 Minutes,” had a cameo on NBC’s “Friday Night Lights.” Leach was going places.

“I’m sorry, where is Ernest Hemingway’s house?” the woman asks.

“You go — it’s about 10 blocks down. If you see the lighthouse, it’s right across the street from the lighthouse,” he says. “Ten blocks. Brick wall around it.”

Well, not everyone recognizes him. This is purgatory after all. This is the place an innovative football coach escapes to between jobs. Leach left Texas Tech under a cloud of controversy. He had been a cowboy in West Texas, unique among football coaches for his quirkiness, his coaching style and his success.

Until the accusation. A player said the coach locked him in a dark closet. Leach was run out of Lubbock, branded like a steer. A man who prided himself on being an educator suddenly came to represent all that was wrong with the modern-day coach.

Now, while the courts sort out the details, he’s untouchable. School presidents are scared to hire a man who’s simultaneously battling two giants — suing not only his previous employer but also the nation’s largest sports network.

The University of Maryland tried. School administrators danced briefly with Leach in December and were on the verge of hiring him to replace Ralph Friedgen, but they got cold feet.

“I don’t have any control over it,” Leach says of his coaching prospects. “I just worry about what I can control.”

So Leach, 50, is in Key West, the southernmost spot in the contiguous United States. Waiting. Trying to keep busy. On days when the water’s warm, he swims in the ocean. He goes to his son’s baseball games. He fishes offshore every few weeks. And on weekends, he flies all over. Sometimes for fun, sometimes for football, sometimes to network. Sometimes to remind others he’s still a football coach. Other times to remind himself.

‘Kind of an obvious choice’

You can rollerblade in purgatory, too. You’ve got to get around somehow, right? When Leach was in Lubbock, the university paid for his family’s two cars, which he lost when the school fired him in December 2009.

They weren’t sure what to do or where to go, but the Leaches knew they needed to catch their breath. They’d bought a vacation home in Key West five months earlier and decided it was time for a vacation.