As a point of personal privilege, sometimes I like to deviate from what seems like the far too often practice of calling out stupid, corrupt, and/or inept elected officials and appointed hangers-on in order to reflect on some of the things that make life worthwhile.
Like loyalty.
Like friendship.
Like honesty.
Those are qualities you can’t buy with a campaign contribution or a political promise. Those are the qualities you cling to, that you hang on to for dear life.
That’s because they are so rare when they all come together in a single individual that you treasure them with almost as much fervor as you would a spouse or a child.
That’s why I’m taking a break today to write about one of the best friends a person ever had, a friend who served as my best man when Betty and I were married nearly 50 years ago.
It’s a friendship built on a rock that has never wavered—unless you count a fateful tennis doubles match that admittedly interrupted that friendship ever so briefly and made the two of us absolutely miserable until we came to our senses a few weeks later. (It was for that reason that we agreed to never play tennis together again. We also won’t be going to any more Tech football games because we two old farts found the loud public-address system so annoying that we couldn’t carry on a decent—or even an indecent—conversation.)
I won’t mention this friend’s name because I don’t want to embarrass him, but his initials are Gene Smith. Gene is every one of those qualities rolled into one—and then some. A friend any man would be lucky—and damned proud—to have in a lifetime.
Some of my most memorable times have been with Gene and I treasure every moment.
There was a time, for instance, when Gene and Brenda, Betty and I and another couple celebrated New Year’s Eve at, of all places, a Chinese restaurant in Monroe. The highlight of the evening was a lounge lizard in an adjoining room who served as the perfect but purely unintentional parody of Bill Murray’s Nick the Lounge Singer Saturday Night Live spoof. It was unadulterated torture to Gene, but unforgettable, unsurpassed hilarity to the rest of us.
Don’t get me wrong. Gene was far from the butt of the joke most of the time. He could, and did, perpetrate his own brand of humor, often at the expense of baseball or softball umpires.
You see, Gene and I played baseball. Well, I owned the team and called myself coaching it and when short of players, actually played. I still hold the North Central League record with 28 consecutive strikeouts—as a hitter—before finally guiding a ground ball between first and second one night in Magnolia, Arkansas. That was the night Gene pitched a perfect game into the seventh inning before allowing his first baserunner on a walk. He kept the no-hitter, though, until the 11th inning when he gave up two straight singles and I, in attempting to field the ball, gave up two consecutive errors when the ball rolled through my legs. Because of me, we lost, 3-2.
We had pickup players for that game who hadn’t played in years. Andy Clark was our catcher and Gene said Andy was throwing the ball back to him harder than he pitched it. God, those were fun days.
We also played in softball tournaments all over north Louisiana and south Arkansas. We played one tournament in Jena where they had a public-address announcer who was having more fun than the players. I was the pitcher and he called my pitches “radio pitches,” because “you can hear ‘em, but you can’t see ‘em.” (It was slo-pitch, for heaven’s sake.) Once when our third base coach tried unsuccessfully to hold a runner up at third and the runner was still safe at home because of a bad throw, the announcer boomed, “Never holler ‘whoa’ at a horse race!”
But the highlight of it all was one of the last tournaments we played together. It was in Farmerville and like all the tournaments, was a double-elimination event, meaning if you lost two games, you go home. We lost the first game early on and were struggling through the loser’s bracket with little hope of making the finals. In the last game, Gene had been riding the umpires especially hard (he said it kept them honest). Finally, the base umpire turned to gene, his face contorted with anger, and said, “One more word from you and you’re out of the game.”
So, we stagger into the last inning, trailing by five or six runs, our fate predetermined. Finally, it’s two out and no one on base and our batter hits a routine grounder to the second baseman who threw into the dirt at first. The first baseman had to come off the bag to field the ball but he got it in plenty time to reach back with his foot and tag the bag long before the batter got there. Third out, we’re eliminated.
But wait. There’s Gene bounding out of the dugout, shouting, “HE PULLED HIS FOOT OFF!”
The umpire swung around pointing at Gene and shouted even louder, “YOU’RE OUT OF THE GAME!,” forgetting for the moment that it was the third out of the final inning and we were officially out of the tournament as a team.
As we started packing up our gear, I looked over at Gene and said, “He got back to the bag in time, Gene.”
Gene looked at me with a mischievous grin. “I know it,” he said.
It was the most fun I’d ever had losing a game. I laughed until my sides hurt at the idea of Gene baiting that poor umpire into being the jerk and Gene walking away unscathed. Well, in comedy they say timing is everything and Gene’s timing on that occasion was flawless.
And then there was the time after I was finished playing when I duped Gene into thinking that McGregor Sportswear was going to send his team to the (nonexistent) National Slo-Pitch Softball Tournament in Chicago, all expenses paid. By the time I got around to telling him otherwise, he had recruited a brand new All-Star team from all over Louisiana to make the trip. He even recruited me to be the third base coach. How’s that for loyalty?
But like the friend that he was—and is—he overlooked that otherwise unforgiveable sin on my part and our friendship endured.
It has endured in spite of the abyss that separates our respective political leanings—probably one of the strongest tests of a friendship.
His loyalty was such that he stood by our friend and my high school classmate Jimmy Gallagher (we went to Ruston High, Gene to nearby Simsboro High), who sadly passed away Sunday of Alzheimer’s Disease. He would take Jimmy to breakfast at Ryan’s every Saturday morning until Jimmy was no longer able to continue. Friendship. Loyalty. Those traits define Gene Smith.
I write all this because today is Gene’s 74th birthday and sometimes you just want your special friends to know you’re thinking of them.
Happy birthday, old boy, from me and Betty. And give Brenda a big hug for me.
You’re the greatest.
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