LEACH TO APPEAR ON TV SHOW "FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS"

Texas Tech football players get a bellyful of channeling their inner pirate and learning how to swing their swords. Mike Leach saw to that over the last decade and still does.

Now the fictional East Dillon High Lions might be exposed to the same techniques. In his cameo appearance on the hit show “Friday Night Lights,’’ Leach admonishes East Dillon coach Eric Taylor (actor Kyle Chandler) for “losing his inner pirate’’ and not “swinging his sword’’ with conviction.

Credit the dialogue partly to Leach and a little to the show’s writers.

“It was kind of scripted and then it was kind of, ‘Well, here’s the scenario; do what you want,’ ’’ Leach said. “’Include this, this, this and this.’ Actually, in the original (filming), there’s stuff about Napoleon, Daniel Boone, grizzly bears, raccoons, a bunch of stuff. We covered a lot of bases, and they picked from what they wanted.’’

The new season of “Friday Night Lights’’ is available only to DirecTV subscribers, and the reruns will appear on NBC sometime next year. Or it can be viewed on YouTube (hint: Type in “Mike Leach inner pirate.’’)

Leach taped the scene at a filling station outside Austin the night before Tech played Texas in September. In it, he pulls up to a gas pump and asks the customer at the next bay directions to Lubbock. Then there’s a glimmer of recognition as Leach realizes he’s pulled alongside the despondent coach of downtrodden East Dillon.

And he launches into a lecture.

“You’ve lost your inner pirate,’’ Leach tells the high school coach. “Have you ever heard, ‘Swing your sword?’ ’’

Leach demonstrates what a good sword swinging should look like, then scolds the coach for swinging his weakly. Taylor had been down in the dumps over being reassigned from powerful Dillon High to recently reopened East Dillon with no resources and no talent base.

“A lot of things happen for a reason,’’ Leach goes on in the scene. “We don’t know why God wants it that way, but you can’t make the best out of it ’til you get back your inner pirate. You might be the luckiest man alive and not even know it.’’

Message — and gasoline — dispensed, he climbs into his SUV and drives off.

The whole encounter takes less than 60 seconds.

If only Tech players got the microwaved version.

“We’ve definitely had that,’’ senior cornerback Jamar Wall said. “One meeting (this year), that’s all we did was talk about waving the sword one way or another. They just got a small taste of it. We got hours of it.’’

One visual left on the cutting-room floor: Leach said he grabbed a burrito out of Taylor’s hand and tossed it away to get the coach’s attention. Actually, Leach said in the filming they “loaded him up with burritos,’’ and Leach pulled one away from the coach during several takes. But that didn’t wind up in the episode.

Leach had no trouble speaking from the heart, because he said his and his team’s inner pirate had been tested this season.

“I think it’s always tested,’’ he said. “I think it’s tested in practice. I think it’s tested individually and team-wise. I think you’ve got to keep battling away. You don’t ever want there to be a level of resignation where (players think), ‘Oh well, that’s it.’

“If you don’t enjoy the battle, and if you don’t enjoy going from one point to the next, you’re kind of in the wrong business. Football’s just designed to have one obstacle after the next. That’s why it exists to begin with. There’s going to be ups and downs, but you’ve got to enjoy battling it every day, I think.’’

Story courtesy of www.redraiders.com