Swordplay and wordplay

 I never got to listen live to Mike Leach hold court. 

I never got to hear him veer off on wild tangents -- history, politics, social issues, you name it -- or talk about swinging your sword or releasing your inner pirate or any of the other buccaneer imagery of which he was so fond. He was a piece of work in news conferences, Leach was, and I never got to watch him work.

I figure my sportswriting career, terrific as it was, takes an L for that.

Leach, the head football coach at Mississippi State, died Monday in a hospital in Jackson, Miss., after suffering what was reportedly a massive heart attack Sunday. He was 61, and a man of many parts: Student of history, football mad scientist, at one point allegedly a bully to some of his players. But endlessly fascinating.

There are people in this world so uninteresting you're never tempted to wonder how their minds work, only whether or not they actually have one. Leach was the opposite. Leach was a guy about whom you always wondered how his mind worked, and what sent it down the odd pathways is sometimes followed.

From a football standpoint, he was a damn genius, inventing some contraption called the Air Raid offense that asked the question "What would happen if we took the West Coast/spread offense and went completely nuts with it?" And thus was born an offensive scheme that strung receivers like Christmas lights and threw and threw and threw, and then threw some more.

Leach won with that offense at Texas Tech and won with it at Washington State and was winning with it at Mississippi State. In the last game he coached, the Bulldogs beat Ole Miss in the Egg Bowl rivalry game to finish 8-4 and head off to the ReliQuest Bowl on January 2.

It's a measure of how he was regarded by his players that they've declared they'll go ahead and play the game in his honor.

It's a measure of Leach's eclectic nature that what came to my mind first when I heard he'd died were two things: Rick Majerus, and the TV show "Friday Night Lights."

Rick Majerus because, like Leach, he was a savant at his profession -- coaching college basketball -- and because, 24 years ago, I sat in news conference at the Final Four and listened to him talk about everything under the sun, a lot of it only peripherally related to basketball. Like Leach, he was a man of many parts and enthusiasms, and thus endlessly fascinating.

And "Friday Night Lights"?

Well, I thought of that because I remembered the cameo he made one season late in the show's run. In the scene, East Dillon coach Eric Taylor (Kyle Chandler) is sitting in his car at a gas station feeling low when a man comes up to ask for directions to Lubbock.

It is, of course, Leach. Who then launches into a pep talk, telling Coach Taylor he needs to find his "inner pirate" and start swinging his sword again.

"You might be the luckiest man alive and not even know it," he says.

Words to live by.