Jay GreesonGene Etter woke up Friday morning wondering if it was the final day of his 41-year Baylor School baseball coaching career.
He met the morning in the same way he’s met every game day for as long as he can remember — with wife and soul mate Eddie and eating toast with red jelly on it.
“When we met he was an oddity for a baseball player and had literally no superstitions,” Eddie said Friday before the Red Raiders faced Pope John Paul II in what was supposed to be a playoff doubleheader but became only one game, the second delayed till tonight. “Now he always eats red jelly on toast on the mornings of game days. I know: I put it out for him.”
Gene laughed at the story. He laughs a lot nowadays and carries a kindness that permeates through telephone lines and tension-filled situations.
He also admitted that he eats the jelly but said the superstition definitely is not his.
“I’m not sure when it started, but, yeah, I eat it,” the coach said. “But that’s her doing.”
They have made a wonderful duo at Baylor sporting events, regardless of sport. They are a comforting image as familiar as the red uniforms on the field.
The Etters have been the constant, merging the years from wooden bats to pre-teens digging on cell phones.
“His first state title (in 2004),” Eddie said when asked of her all-time favorite moment as the Mona Lisa of coaches’ wives. “And I listened to it over a cell phone. Technology today is nothing like when we started.”
When they started, there likely were some who thought the world was still flat. That’s hyberbole, of course, and a testament to the bond and the belief they share.
In fact, their journey has been so majestic and grand that the finish line should be somewhere between the Taj Mahal and the Astrodome. And the painful part, at least for Eddie, is the not knowing when it will come. Baylor needs a win tonight to keep the retirement at bay for another day.
“I am extremely nervous. I don’t know if we have watched them play our last game,” Eddie said. “It gets harder every day.
“We just don’t know.”
This is a couple that has raised their kids and participated in the shaping and sharing of thousands of teenagers. The Etters may not be national treasures, but they are a beacon for the example we should all aspire to be.
Forget the adage that it takes a village to raise a child; the Etters raised more than a village of teenage ballplayers.
So as we stare at the finish line, an imaginary mark that until now was forever placed somewhere between Paul Bunyan and a unicorn, let’s smile at the journey Gene and Eddie have traveled.
It has been one that has covered thousands and thousands of miles and countless numbers of names. He has witnessed almost every baseball scenario possible and handled it all with the grace of a debutante.
He also has adapted with the times and has forever been generous with the credit.
During the Red Raiders’ trip to PJP II earlier this season, Coach Etter explained that one player delivered a novel idea for motivation.
“Hunter Holland came up to me, and he’s always thinking of things,” Etter recalled of the three-game trip that would determine seeding. “He’s really good about finding better ways, and said, ‘Coach Etter, if we win this first game and beat them that night, could we go to Hooters?’
“I was thinking we were underdogs, so I said sure.”
The motivated Red Raiders — being talented baseball players and red-blooded teenagers — toppled the PJP II ace and ended up at the place that is renowned for tasty chicken wings among other things.
“I’d never been there before, and the manager was quite tickled that our team was there as a reward,” said Coach Etter, who was front and center in a soon-to-be-famous photo of the entire waitress staff. “The boys seemed to have a good time.”
Alas, that says so much.
A good time. Gene Etter was forever about his boys having a good time, and more than anything else that’s why we should all be a little heartsick whenever his final out is called.
Whether it was late Friday night or this afternoon or next week at the Spring Fling in Murfreesboro, the fact that the Etters were first and foremost about the experience rather than the scoreboard is a treasure that may never be replaced.
There are only two words that we should all share with the Etters whenever the final out in their Hall of Fame careers are capped.
It’s not “red jelly” or even “good time.”
It’s simply “thank you.”
Contact Jay Greeson at jgreeson@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6343. Follow him on Twitter at jgreeson@timesfreepress.com.