Within the family of George Prescott Bush, baseball is not only a sport, it’s a religion. At times, he says, that religion was “outsized.”
When he was a teenager, he watched his grandfather, President George H.W. Bush, put on a bulletproof vest so he could throw out the ceremonial first pitch at the grand opening of Baltimore’s Camden Yards. When he was in law school in Texas, he watched from afar as his uncle, George W. Bush, threw out a first pitch during the World Series at Yankee Stadium to unify the country for a moment following the 9/11 attacks.
“People forget it’s the baseball field where, whether it’s leaders that are in service or a community coming together, it’s just kind of like a home,” George P. Bush says. “Home away from home.”
Bush, the son of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and his wife, Columba, is perhaps the next in the long family line who could put his name on the national political stage. But he is out of that family business for now and heavily engaged in another one in Austin, where he lives with his wife, Amanda, and their two sons.
Bush played baseball as a high schooler in South Florida and then for a year at Rice University. Yet he felt the most powerful clutches of the game just about a year ago. He had just lost a Republican primary runoff election to Ken Paxton in the Texas attorney general race and would be out of politics when his term as Texas land commissioner ended in January.
He was looking for counsel on his transition back to the private sector. A challenge came from someone on his pastoral advisory board: Coach your son’s baseball team. You will never regret it.
You can now find Bush, 47, in dugouts and batting cages at his local Little League fields, coaching Prescott, 10, and Jack, 8. The lessons of his late grandfather are there, too.
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During an interview with USA TODAY Sports, Bush recalled moments when “Gampy” would pull out his old first baseman’s glove and throw a baseball with him at the White House or on the grass outside the vice president’s residence.
George H.W. Bush, once the captain of Yale’s baseball team in the 1940s, showed his eldest grandchild how to throw two-seamers, four-seamers and curveballs. Sometimes, they threw knucklers at each other just for fun. As the balls danced before them, generations of lessons from sports were being passed down — lessons grandson is now sharing with his sons and their teammates.
Despite the gravity of the moments around his public life, George P. Bush said his grandfather never lost sight of the important instructions sports — and the competition, unity and teamwork they breed — teach.
Here are some of those messages from his grandfather, and from what he has learned so far as a coach.
1. Honor the competition and respect your opponent
George H.W. Bush was the son of U.S. Senator Prescott Bush of Connecticut. His mother, Dorothy Walker Bush, was a guiding force in his life. She was also a highly skilled tennis player who taught him the sport, as well as good sportsmanship.
One of the lessons young George learned, according to author and political commentator Chris Cillizza, is that Dorothy didn’t let her kids beat her on the court. They had to earn it.
“She is not someone who’s just like, ‘Let’s just go out there and have fun,’ ” says Cillizza, author of “Power Players: Sports, Politics, and the American Presidency,” which was released in April. “She is very much someone who is focused on winning and who is very competitive.
“This is a super-competitive family. They play tennis, they play virtually any sport that they can get their hands on.”
As president, George H.W. Bush hosted hotly contested horseshoe tournaments at the White House. When spending time with his grandkids, he competed with them over who could fall asleep first.
But there was always a healthy respect for — and in his grandkids’ case, love of — the opponent.
“He was a guy who liked to be around sports, sportsmen, athletes. I think he liked the idea of competition. He liked the idea of pitting different sides against one another,” Cillizza said of the senior Bush. “I think he enjoyed all of that, but I really do think it’s the gentlemanly piece of it that is so important to him, too.
“He is a good loser — maybe not (a) great trait as a politician, but a good trait as a human. He is sort of good at accepting loss and understanding that’s part of the game, too.”
George P. Bush used that trait to teach his own son during a tough loss. Prescott had “owned the plate” for the first time of the season, going 2-for-2, but his team lost the game in heartbreaking fashion. Prescott still jumped into his father’s arms in celebration of his own achievements.
“I had to explain to him as his coach, ‘Son, we didn’t win. The team lost. We can talk about your night separately in the car, but right now, we gotta be with our team,’ ” Bush said. “And that valuable lesson of sportsmanship, of being there for your teammates, making sure that they’re doing OK and you’re looking out for them and you got their back is so key.”
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2. Embrace your teammates, and your role on the team
George H.W. Bush once met Babe Ruth. It wasn’t because Bush was famous, but because he was a good sport.
Bush wasn’t the best player on his Yale team. But he was the team’s captain, which drew the honor of formally accepting the memoir Ruth was presenting to the university.
It’s a moment captured in a photo that his grandson remembers hanging in Bush’s home or office.
“To be able to look up to a star that you loved and appreciated, to meet them in person, and then to play in front of him, I know for him, in terms of sports career, ranks up there,” George P. Bush said.” Of course he would brag about how he was Phi Beta Kappa as well while he was pursuing, at a high level, baseball. And he would rub it in — whether it was Uncle George or my dad or others — that he not only appeared in one College World Series but, actually, it was two. And he was scouted by the majors.”
Though he didn’t reach the major leagues, Bush took the lessons of sports with him. He seemed to struggle to understand how people could work as a team without a sports background.
“He’s a member of the team who winds up being the captain of the team, and I think that was always his M.O., be a leader, show good sportsmanship and sort of rise up through the ranks and don’t take yourself so seriously that people are rolling their eyes at you,” Cillizza says. “And I think that awareness — and that self-awareness — does him well in life.”
Bush, a left-hander, and his son Jeb were behind turning George P. into a switch-hitter, a savvy move for a kid who is of Little League age. But the move came with some of Gampy’s self-deprecating humor.
“He would often joke that the Bush family genes aren’t exactly strong in speed,” George P. recalled. “So, being a left-handed hitter, you’re a little bit closer to first base.”
Bush tried soccer (he remembers his dad coaching his team), basketball and football but started playing organized baseball in the sixth grade and was hooked.
“That’s another lesson I share to young players is that, if you look at a lot of college and professional players, a lot of ’em actually don’t pick up a bat until much later in life, some until well after Little League,” he says. “So, you know, it’s never too late to jump in there.”
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Sports can be the ‘most unifying aspect of what we have’
Bush went to Rice in Houston so he could be closer to his grandparents, George and former First Lady Barbara Bush. He has a flood of memories from that period of his life. There was the time his grandfather came out for a team practice. There were all of those Sundays of eating Tex Mex and barbeque and of seeing Gampy and Gammy.
Bush shares the loving sentiment for baseball that his grandfather had. He was reminded of that feeling one Saturday when he was coaching a game and found himself looking around at the activity of four baseball fields. He thought about four games in four different increments of two-hour time slots.
“You count up the amount of players per team, the amount of coaches per team, the amount of parents per team, and that’s several hundred — if not thousands — of people that are participating in their kids’ future,” he said. “And you had kids selling bubble gum to others, you had parents out there getting to know other parents, and maybe even teachers hashing out problems with parents of students in the bleachers. And grandparents watching their grandkids.
“Outside of church, I almost feel like that is the most unifying aspect of what we have.”
As we all know, sometimes youth sports aren’t unifying. Sometimes, they are like politics. Spectators in some of Bush’s local games, for example, are instructed not to cheer against the other team.
It happens anyway.
Bush sees a message here, too: Teaching the players to tune out the clatter and focus on the pitch, or the batter. It’s a good lesson, so far, for his life, which has included teaching, military service, holding an office and now, practicing law.
He still has the door open for a political run. That realm has been the family business. But so has sports, and more specifically, baseball.
Steve Borelli, aka Coach Steve, has been an editor and writer with USA TODAY since 1999. He spent 10 years coaching his two sons’ baseball and basketball teams. He and his wife, Colleen, are now loving life as sports parents for a high schooler and middle schooler.
