Life lessons; our in-depth interview with Clemson baseball coach Monte Lee

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CLEMSON -– In the summer of 1999, Monte Lee was drafted by the St. Louis Cardinals and moved to a different country. At least that’s what it felt like for a small-town country boy from Lugoff to land in Newton, N.J., and begin playing for the New Jersey Cardinals of the New York-Penn League.

A totally different place and a totally different culture, 55 miles northwest of New York City, was only the start of it. Lee was also a totally different type of first-year professional baseball player, with his wife and two kids joining him in the move far away from their comfort zone.

It’s common for minor-league baseball players to stay with host families because generally they can’t afford to rent out their own places. But most minor-league baseball players are single.

The only answer to this problem was for Lee to rent out an RV at a campground.

“You’d cut the toaster on and all the fuses would blow,” Lee recalled. “There was no AC. It was awful. We had to use a community shower at the campground because our shower had sulfur in the water and you couldn’t use it. We loved road trips because we got to stay in a hotel. Sleeping in a hotel bed was a godsend. We had AC and a good shower.

“So I don’t ever complain about hotels. I don’t complain about anything. You spend a summer in a camper, and you learn to appreciate a hot shower and a good bed and things like that. I don’t understand why people complain about anything, really.”

This snapshot is but one of many from Lee’s life that tell the story of why he now occupies a plush office overlooking Doug Kingsmore Stadium as Clemson’s baseball coach. On the surface you might assume this is a life-changing experience for him, earning a bunch of money and celebrity status in a small college town that loves its baseball.

But when you get to know him, as Tigerillustrated.com did when spending most of his 39th birthday with him earlier this week, you quickly learn that he’s the same dude he’s always been. You learn that what he’s experienced in life greatly supersedes whatever he experiences as an exalted figure in charge of a distinguished baseball program.

You also learn that he’s a lot like the man who just guided Clemson’s football team to within a whisker of its first national title in 34 years. If you like Dabo Swinney – and these days it’s hard to find anyone who doesn’t absolutely adore the guy – you’re going to like Monte Wesley Lee II. And for a lot of the same reasons.

When Dan Radakovich made the decision to part ways with Jack Leggett last summer, he went in search of someone who could be marketable and personable and an embraceable figurehead – and, yes, someone who could win a lot of games and get the Tigers back to Omaha.

Lee has all the desired PR skills, but in what has to be at least a small stumble upon good fortune for Clemson he also has a genuine, straight-shooting personality that doesn’t change based on his audience. There’s nothing at all artificial about him, no evidence that his ego has grown proportionally with his bank account or job titles over the years. He wears the same shoes every day, same blue jeans, and is content driving a pickup truck to work instead of a fancy SUV. He likes hunting and fishing and coaching baseball.

This, without a doubt, is the product of growing up in a hurry and then facing a series of massive challenges early in his professional life as he tried to pursue his coaching dreams (dreams, by the way, that never included a blueprint to end up with this sort of high-profile job).

When you’re a 19-year-old in your first year at college and you learn you’re about to become a father, your world changes very quickly. That’s precisely what happened for Lee at College of Charleston when he and his high school sweetheart welcomed Madie Lee into the world. By age 22 he was a married father of two as a senior at C of C, and not long thereafter the family of four was in that camper in New Jersey.

If you ask Lee to cite the formative event in his professional and personal life, it’s that day when he was surprised to hear a child was on the way. A kid who was previously serious about baseball and not very serious about academics became a 3.5-GPA student and, later, a public-school educator. Quite simply, there’s no way he’d be where he is now had he taken an easier, more conventional path.

“You don’t know what perspective is on life until you’re 19 and you have a child,” said Lee, who was going to walk on at The Citadel before C of C came forth with his only Division-I scholarship offer.

“That’s a life-changing moment. One of the things that is hard for us as coaches is to get 18- to 22-year-old men to understand, because they haven’t had life-changing moments. They don’t understand perspective quite as much because everything in their life to that point has been pretty good.

“I didn’t have the typical college experience. I was a student. I was studying when the other guys were partying. That part of life was over. The idea of being a young college kid, there was none of that. It didn’t take me long to figure that part out. Now, there was something more important in my life than just me.”

Sometimes things are more complex than they appear on the surface, so when Lee showed up with his wife Eryn and four daughters at his introductory press conference last summer there was more to the story than just a photogenic coach and his family moving from Charleston to Clemson after he accepts the opportunity of a lifetime.

Lee’s first year at College of Charleston, a 31-year-old head coach taking over his own program after serving as an assistant at South Carolina, was storybook on the surface but cold hard struggle on the inside. He spent that season going through a divorce, a period he recalls as maybe the most difficult of his life.

He later remarried, so his family consists of his two daughters (Madie, Shelby) and two stepdaughters (Blaire, Alexa). Madie is at Charleston taking classes. Shelby and Blaire are at Seneca High School, and Alexa in middle school. The family is temporarily renting a home on Lake Keowee as they figure out where to live long-term. His wife works full-time for Johnson & Johnson, traveling frequently.

Lee’s long and winding coaching path began when he was working a concession stand at Wando High School during a fall travel baseball tournament. Lee went back to school in the fall of 2000 to complete his degree in elementary education, and at the time he was set on becoming Wando’s junior-varsity baseball coach. Austin Alexander, who played with Lee at College of Charleston, happened to come by and told him about a position at Spartanburg Methodist College coaching hitting and outfield. Alexander was the pitching coach at SMC.

So Lee took the family to the Upstate to live in Pacolet, where he’d lived a few years as a child before his mother and father took the family to Lugoff. Lee still had plenty of extended family members in Pacolet to help out, but times were tough. The position at SMC was unpaid, so Lee made $1,200 a month teaching fourth grade at Buffalo Elementary while his wife at the time worked as a substitute teacher.

Lee has vivid memories of leaving Buffalo Elementary at 2:45 in the afternoon and driving 30 miles to Spartanburg Methodist for practice that began at 3. He’d change into his uniform in his truck as the team was stretching. When the team went on road trips, he’d use his sick days at school.

Lee also remembers the house in Cherokee County they rented for $400 a month: “Just an old block house. Had termite damage. No shower. Just a bathtub, one of those old above-ground bathtubs. I’d take a bath at night when I got home after practice, and in the mornings I’d fill up a cooking pot with water to wet my hair, brush my teeth and go to work.”

In the summer of 2002, Lee took a job as baseball coach at Lockhart High School. The school had less than 200 students, and the baseball diamond was located in the corner of the school’s football field. Lee still remembers the chicken wire that surrounded that corner, the bags of cat litter that were placed in the dugout to soak up the water, the batting cage that consisted of PVC pipe and a net, the hand-held scoreboard, the maze of base plugs for the baseball and softball teams. The center-field fence was basically the home football bleachers. Hit one to right-center “and you run for days,” Lee said.

About six months earlier, South Carolina coach Ray Tanner expressed interest in Lee joining his staff as a volunteer but there wasn’t a position open. Then in August of 2002, when Lee was getting started on his new job at Lockhart, he heard from Tanner. Gamecocks assistant Stuart Lake left to join John Pawlowski at College of Charleston, freeing up a position in Columbia. Tanner had taken interest in Lee after he worked at the Gamecocks’ winter hitting camp in late 2001.

Lee’s income at South Carolina consisted of a mere $12,000 from camp money, so he had to find a job in a hurry. He called the school districts in Columbia looking for a teaching position. He was put in touch with the principal at Blythewood Middle School, who arranged for him to teach three classes in the morning so he could go coach in the afternoons. He moved his family to Lugoff, which is just outside of Camden, and made the early-morning drive to Blythewood every day to teach English to sixth-graders, world geography to seventh-graders, and South Carolina History to eighth-graders. From that point until 2007, when Tanner made him recruiting coordinator, Lee made just enough to get by.

So now maybe you begin to understand why Lee isn’t awed by his awesome new job. His plush new office, part of a brand new $9 million facility that’s the home for Clemson baseball, is high above the field. But Lee remains grounded in the routine of just being himself and being totally comfortable in his own skin.

He makes a point to note that he didn’t call Tanner begging for that job. Nor did he call College of Charleston when that job came open. Nor Clemson last summer when the patience with Leggett ran out. Point being: He’s always been happy right where he is, focused on that day’s task and aspiring to win baseball games regardless of the level.

“It’s just a message that it can happen to anybody,” he said. “People ask ‘How did you get here?’ I don’t know how I got here. I just tried to do the best where I was. Young coaches call me all the time and tell me I started out on the same path they’re on, being a junior-college coach and a teacher.

“Well, I tell them I got to where I am the same way a player gets to play at a championship level: You just focus on the next pitch. Just do your job that day. Maximize the day. Don’t worry about the end result. I never worried about getting to Clemson. I certainly hoped I could get to this level. But when I was at SMC, I could have been there for 10 years if that’s where I was supposed to be. I just focused on that job.

“I would do it again right now. If I had to go back to being a volunteer at a junior college and teach at an elementary school, I would do it right now. I’m just older and more experienced. I’m not any different as a person than I was then. I did it because I loved coaching. I loved being at the field every day.”

Lee shares Swinney’s penchant for catchy phrases, and one of Lee’s favorites is “Be where your feet are.” The message is the same as Swinney’s “bloom where you are planted” philosophy of making the best of your situation, and just the other day Lee was emphasizing it to his players.

He hasn’t coached a game here yet, but so far the new baseball coach at Clemson sounds a lot like the football coach at Clemson. And Clemson fans have to like the sound of that.

Tigerillustrated.com will release part II of our interview with Lee tomorrow in a behind-the-scenes feature.

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