The Milwaukee Brewers are enjoying what will likely be the best season in the franchise’s history, and former Milwaukee All-Star Jonathan Lucroy recently learned he will be among the Class of 2026 inductees next summer in the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame.

But today I’ve got a Louisiana-bred story about one of Milwaukee’s all-time baseball greats, albeit when their nickname was the Braves — slugger Joe Adcock from Coushatta.

I’m retelling the story because it was first told to – and reported by — me some 26 years ago. But with the Milwaukee baseball team riding high, it seems timely.

Adcock, who went to LSU on a basketball scholarship after being a star for Coushatta High School, led the Southeastern Conference in scoring for the 1945-46 season, averaging just better than 18 points a game. The late Bobby Lowther of Alexandria, his LSU roommate and, like Joe, a member of the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame, was among Adcock’s teammates on that LSU basketball team. The other starters were Baton Rouge’s Bill Walters and Frank Brian – another luminary from the state’s sports shrine — and Bubba Webb of Shreveport.

When Adcock died at age 71 in May of 1999, he had an impromptu ride to the cemetery that his old LSU teammates thought was kind of poignant.

The funeral procession along the five-mile stretch from the church to Holly Springs Cemetery in the Red River Parish village of Martin was about a mile from its destination when the hearse had a flat.

Walter said a deputy sheriff riding in the procession in a pickup truck was summoned for emergency help.

Adcock’s coffin was taken from the hearse, and Joe Bill Adcock, who spent his post baseball years raising thoroughbreds on his Coushatta farm, rode down the stretch to his personal finish line in the back of a pickup truck.

Walters, Lowther, Brian and Webb were all there for the service and afterwards they were talking to Joe’s sister from Baton Rouge, Mary Ann Brown, about how they were sorry about what happened with the hearse.

Walters said Joe’s sister answered, “You’re not going to believe this, but before he got real ill, he told us when he passed along, he’d just as soon we put him in the back of a pickup truck and take him to the cemetery.”

And that’s what happened.

“It didn’t surprise me when she said that,” Walters said. “That sounded just like what Joe would say. All the fame he had, (it) never did go to his head. He always drove a pickup truck around when he raised thoroughbred horses.”