Mike Leach had a 90-minute phone call with a wrong number for some reason

Mike Leach is a man prone to strange interactions. He’s a guy renowned for a pirate fascination, for instance. But this anecdote from Lincoln Riley’s Players Tribune story really takes the cake as far as Leach’s aesthetic.

He picked it up and said, “Hey, how’s it going?” And then he listened for a second and asked, “Where ya calling from?”

He kept talking on the phone and I eventually sort of tuned out. Now, a short phone conversation for Coach Leach is an hour. So he was talking about this and that, and I was kind of hunkered down working on my own stuff. At some point, the call got dropped. They must have lost reception. Coach said, “Can you hear me? Are you there?”

Then he closed his old-school flip phone, swung it back open and redialed. He said, “Hey, sorry I lost you.” And then they resumed their conversation for another 30 minutes or so before Coach finally hung up.

After he was done, we started talking and I said, “Hey Coach, who was that on the phone?”

And he said, “Oh, they had the wrong number.”

The best part about this seems to be that Leach knew it was the wrong number almost from the second he got on the horn, but enjoyed the conversation so much that he called the number back after dropping. Leach has, in the past, talked about the future of interpersonal communication. He gave quite the screed on how technology is changing the way we interact.

But the Washington State coach certainly seems like the type who can talk to literally anyone. College football coaches are the sort of folks that treat time like the rarest of commodities, but Leach spent a pretty decent chunk of this random day with this peculiar human interaction.