Brown Swaps Schools, Not Careers

Perhaps it was indicative of just how burned out Vince Brown had become. He didn’t spend last year fantasizing about tropical beaches or exotic vacations or climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro.

He was thinking, instead, about acres and acres of auto parts.

Tie-dyed T-shirts.

Naugahyde sofa sets.

And sunglasses--three for $10.

Call it a swap-meet fantasy, call it a cry for help. All Brown knows is that after 20 years of coaching baseball--including the last seven at Tustin High--he had to get out. He had to leave coaching so he could rediscover what it was like to live a normal life. And being able to spend weekends meandering around the swap meet, Brown figured, was normal life in a nutshell.

But a funny thing happened on the way to Ozzie and Harrietville. Two months after he coached his last game at Tustin, Brown accepted a job at Woodbridge. Normal life was out, baseball was back in.

His decision surprised some, shocked others--especially the players at Tustin. Brown told them he needed to take a break from coaching, at least for a year. Now here he was starting anew just 10 miles away. And at a rival Sea View League program no less. The hurt, it seemed, would last for eons.

Career moves rarely are easy. In coaching, they’re often less so. A business executive may switch from one corporation to another and feel a touch of sadness in leaving behind a loyal staff. A coach makes a similar move and leaves a piece of his heart. The kids make the difference. Sounds trite, but it’s true. It’s the reason Brown still wears Tustin Baseball T-shirts to some of the Woodbridge practices. He isn’t ashamed of wearing his former colors. He hopes his current players understand.

If it bothers them, they don’t show it. Most of these boys did a double-gainer, emotionally, when Brown accepted the job last August. Woodbridge won only one league game last year, and finished 7-16-1 overall. With Brown’s arrival, the Warriors believe they’re on to something special. Look at what Brown has done in the past, the players say. Four league titles in six seasons, a career record of 138-53. It doesn’t seem to bother them that Brown--a perfectionist-workaholic to the nth degree--could out-tantrum the Tasmanian Devil.

“He’s a miracle worker,” one player says, stars in his eyes.

“A baseball god,” says another.

Some coaches might at least fake a grimace when they hear adoration like that, but Brown, 32, soaks it up. He’s an egotist; he admits it. You can hear in the oft-sarcastic comments that boom from the bullhorn he uses during practice. You can see it fueling his intensity and somewhat outspoken arrogance. His sensitive side--surprisingly substantial--is drowned out on the field by a do-it-my-way-or-no-way mentality. At times, coaching seems his sole identity.

It isn’t unusual. People, whether they’re coaches, actors, writers, doctors, salespeople or CEOs, become not who they are, but what they are. Their role becomes their everything. Their role becomes their soul. Brown started coaching at 11. At 16, he threw fits if his youth league football players failed to run the right play. At 25, he was more intense. He set high goals. He made it his life to reach them. By 30, he had reached them all.

Burnout--total, man overboard, collapse of enthusiasm--hit him two years later. It was last spring. He and his fiance had called off their engagement. His days of working until 11 at night, working harder than anyone else because that’s the only way to get it done, had become drudgery. His life, it seemed, was no longer his. It was if he were the puppet and somebody, some unseen force, was pulling the strings.

So cut back, his friends told him. Lighten your load. Lower those damned expectations. Perhaps they forgot who they were talking to. This was Vince Brown. Coach Anti-Slack. Coach Wonder Boy. He couldn’t cut back. The program would suffer. He would suffer. Hadn’t he always told his players to never, ever quit? Hadn’t he always demanded 100%?

He had. But he knew it was time to take some time for himself. Time for the guy who loved to play golf but never gave himself a free afternoon. Time for working out and psyching up and freeing the kid within.

What a wild two months it was.

Brown will tell you he returned to coaching--at a rival school--partly because he wanted to get back at the Tustin administration for demoting him. At Tustin High, he taught health and life science for kids who still needed help with the English language. A week after resigning as baseball coach, he says, he was reassigned to a Tustin middle school as a physical education teacher. He is bitter because of it. He misses the connection he had with his Tustin High students. He says he feels betrayed by the administration.

But there are other reasons for his return. Without baseball-- without practices and games and scouting and working late and running five summer leagues simultaneously--Brown seemed lost. It’s a strange paradox. A man burned out on baseball is now working harder than he has in 20 years. A coach who says he has an intense fear of losing can’t wait for the next game. A guy who describes himself as a “major S.O.B.” has become the Sensitive Male of the local baseball community.

He talks, without being specific, about wanting to break down emotional walls that he has spent his life building. He says he hurts to think that the Tustin players might feel abandoned by him. He says it bothers him that his parents still worry about him, their eldest son. But he understands they might have good reason.

“I thought I could mellow my life a little, take a year off,” Brown said quietly as he gazed out on the Woodbridge baseball field this week.

“But my whole life revolves around this. I need the program. I need the publicity, the hype . . . I don’t go home to someone who tells me, ‘I love you’ or makes me feel wanted. I have to get that from my players.

“That was part of the problem being sent to the junior high. It was like, suddenly, I was nobody. Nobody. But for these 22 kids here, and the others in our program, I am somebody.”

And right now, Vince Brown wouldn’t swap that for anything.