(EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second of a two-part series on retired St. Bonaventure baseball coach Larry Sudbrook who will be honored this afternoon with an honorary “Last Lap” around the bases at Fred Handler Park at McGraw-Jennings Field after the game against Fordham.)
When Jim Crowley, St. Bonaventure’s women’s basketball coach, left for Providence College in 2016, I was at a loss.
Every spring I taught a sports writing class at SBU and the second session was students interviewing a coach … normally, Crowley. Not only was he a “great talker” but also quick to tell them what a coach expected from journalists.
Who could I find to replace him?
That was easy.
Bona baseball coach Larry Sudbrook was a Hall-of-Fame talker and that’s not hyperbole. Bona alum Mike Vaccaro, lead sports columnist at the New York Post called him “the best quote in sports.”
So, for the next few years until I left teaching, Larry was my guest coach. The students loved him, laughed at his hysterical lines and learned plenty in those 75 minutes.
I was hardly taking a chance as, despite coaching a Div. I sport, for years he also mentored a class with a waiting list.
“I TAUGHT Coaching Baseball and Softball and loved it … it was a riot,” he said. “I dealt with real-life issues. We talked about true things that happen in coaching not just things out of a book … how we’re going to do run-downs, or cuts and relays on a double in the gap with the bases loaded. I took some pride in that.
Sudbook recalled, “The school had a cap on the number of students, I think it was 28, and constantly kids would ask if I would sign them in and I’d end up with 35, 36, 37.
“It was a good time to talk about all the things I’d seen. They had to make up their own rules sheet, write up their own coaching philosophy and we’d talk about what you do when somebody you know and like needs discipline.”
That was one of the topics we discussed on the eve of the “Last Lap” around the bases he was taking this afternoon in honor of 36 years coaching at Bona.
We also talked about three tough times over his glittering career: an embarrassing mistake, a tragedy, and an oversight that cost him 16 wins:
EMBARRASSING MISTAKE
In May of 2007, the Bona baseball team was at Buffalo Airport getting ready to board a flight to Charlotte. As Sudbrook’s briefcase rode the conveyor into the TSA x-ray machine, “the woman’s eyes got twice their size and I thought, ‘Oh, oh, I forgot to take the gun out.’”
A hunter and gun collector, Sundbrook hadn’t removed a .357 magnum before he left the house that day. He could have been charged with a federal felony and fined up to $10,000, but even the TSA people realized a college baseball coach traveling with his team wasn’t going to try to sneak a handgun on a plane in carry-on luggage.
He was detained until a later flight and ultimately fined $1,000 and had to forfeit the firearm.
“I remember saying to myself that I won’t just be remembered for (that incident),” Sudbrook said. “Are there people who have it tucked away somewhere in their memory? Absolutely. I was very straightforward about it with any recruits and their parents. Are you embarrassed about it? Absolutely.
“It happened in 2007 and it wasn’t that long after 9/11, so the world was so much more cognizant of that. But I was never going to be a different person … recruit differently, coach differently or act differently.
He did admit, “I do think it gave me a better understanding of being a little more compassionate. When you see somebody and say, ‘How could they do something that dumb’ … and you realize, you did.
“I was fortunate and paid a fine that was like the one for double-parking at a federal building.”
TRAGEDY
Twelve days short of nine years ago, Andrew “Dice” Revello, a St.. Bonaventure pitcher, was involved in a serious auto accident while turning into a fast-food restaurant in Butler Township, Pa. The Ohio native was playing for a summer league team and after being examined at the hospital, he was sent home. But his condition worsened and a little over a week later he was dead.
“In 2013 when that happened, he had an injury and he was coming back for a fifth year,” Sudbrook recalled. “He was like a 3.7, 3.8 student … a hard worker. The ironic thing was, he was in great physical shape because he was a workout fanatic. And when that horrible accident happened, he could withstand it better than some and (the hospital) sent him home.
“Then all the problems cropped up and the day we got the phone call that he had passed … anything sports-related that I’ve been involved with, that was the toughest day ever … standing in that parking lot in July in Ohio with 30 other guys dressed in suits all crying. These were all 18-to-23 year-old men who are all bulletproof and to be out there was unbelievably emotional.”
A 16-WIN OVERSIGHT
“When I got hired by St. Bonaventure, there was the athletic director (Larry Weise) and his secretary … that was the department. Larry would walk around to our offices, drop off the NCAA manual and say, ‘Make sure you’re up on this,’” Sudbrook remembered. “There were no compliance meetings, no coaches tests, none of that stuff existed, at least at St. Bonaventure. Back then (the school) was trying to meet the rules … if you wanted to play Div. I basketball you had to sponsor 14 sports, but there was no compliance (training).
He added, “When Tom O’Connor took the (athletic director’s) job in ‘92, one of the first things he did to bring St. Bonaventure into the NCAA world was to hire a young compliance director, Barb Questa (nee Hick). My season was over, she came in during the summer and started going through all the rosters. We had a young man who was a junior college transfer, Bubba Gary Jr. whose father played hoops at Bonaventure.”
Sudbrook related, “Bubba could run like a deer and was a tremendous outfielder but he couldn’t hit water if he fell out of a boat. So we would use him as a defensive replacement late in games when we were ahead.
“That year he played 16 games of our of 22 wins. Barb found that he had gone to South Carolina out of high school for one semester. They encouraged him to go to a JUCO, and went to Onondaga Community College for three more semesters. That made him a four-two-four-year transfer and to do that you had to have 60 credit hours, he had 58.”
He continued, “We had no idea that he had gone to the University of South Carolina. The registrar’s office at St. Bonaventure didn’t check things like that back then. But Barb found it and she went to Tom and said ‘We have to forfeit every game this young man played in’ and he played in probably 95% of our wins because he was a defensive replacement.
“So a guy who, over the course of the year, had probably 40 at bats, where a good college player has 200 a year, we had to forfeit (16 wins) and I tease Barb about that to this day.”
(Chuck Pollock, an Olean Times Herald senior sports columnist, can be reached at cpollock@oleantimesherald.com)
