Stanley “Skip” Bertman may have passed from this life still owing former LSU basketball coach Dale Brown.
Lyle Mouton, when he was a sophomore on Brown’s 1988-89 basketball team led by Chris Jackson (Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf), Ricky Blanton and Wayne Sims, announced he was going to forsake a promising basketball career to play baseball under Skip Bertman. He followed in the path of Ben McDonald who, two years earlier did the same thing, with unprecedented success as a pitcher.
“We have developed an excellent farm club for Skip Bertman,” Brown quipped at the time. “So, I hope when he wins the College World Series, he will remember to send me a thank-you note.”
Mouton did go on to help LSU advance to three straight College World Series, including the national championship as a senior in 1991. The Lafayette native then played parts of seven seasons in Major League Baseball for four different teams. I don’t know if Bertman ever sent Brown a thank-you note. Don’t recall any stories about that. If he did so privately, Bertman probably did so with a smile as he lit a cigar.
Before he became LSU’s athletics director, Bertman showed signs as a potential AD as early as 1993, when Joe Dean held that post. Curley Hallman was in the middle of his third rough season as the head football coach, and Bertman came to Alexandria to speak to the student body at Alexandria Senior High to kick of the school’s “Red Ribbon” drug awareness week. After he was finished, he talked with me about the hot topic of Coach Hallman’s fate as LSU’s coach. Hallman was catching lots of heat with his team losing five of its first seven games. This was on the heels of two straight losing seasons (5-6 and 2-9) in his first two seasons as head coach.
“In my opinion,” said Bertman, speaking with authority, “they must play well against Ole Miss and Alabama and beat Tulane and Arkansas.”
He went on to elaborate how “bad football affects all of us in the athletic department,” and that the decline in football revenue meant a decline in revenue for the athletic department, meaning each team in the department would be required to take a 10 percent cut in 1994.
He said Dean was in a difficult position of possibly making another change at head coach since LSU was on its fifth head coach since Charlie McClendon left after the 1979 season. And Dean had hired Hallman after Mike Archer, his predecessor, resigned in 1990 after consecutive losing (5-6) seasons. Hallman was sitting at 2-5.
“Curley hasn’t failed yet,” Skip said. “Give him ’til the end of the season. If you bring him back next year, he may start turning it around. It’s a tough call. It’s a call I wouldn’t want to make. I’m glad I don’t have to make it.”
Hallman, perhaps vividly imagining and ardently desiring and sincerely believing he could enthusiastically act upon an effort to turn things around, led LSU to victories over Ole Miss and at heavy favorite Alabama (“Pigs can fly!”) and Tulane before losing to Arkansas – a little better, on balance, than Bertman suggested Curley needed to accomplish. Dean let him coach again in ’94.
But Hallman was in over his head. His ’94 team posted another losing season, and Dean fired him after the Tigers lost to Southern Mississippi – the team Hallman had coached before LSU – in the next-to-last game of the season.
Bertman said he didn’t want to make that decision to fire Hallman. He never had to make a tough like that as AD at LSU although his successor as the head baseball coach, Smoke Laval, resigned under pressure. Meanwhile, Skip hired four coaches who won national championships: Les Miles (football), Paul Mainieri (baseball), Chuck Winstead (men’s golf) and Dennis Shaver (track and field).
Former Menard star Ronnie Rantz, who pitched for Bertman on national championship teams in 1991 and ’93, has a ton of great stories about Bertman, including one from when the big lefty made his first start as an LSU pitcher – a night game against Louisiana College.
“Gary Hymel was the catcher,” said Rantz, now the CEO/President of the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame Foundation, “and I had trouble seeing some of his signs when he was calling pitches. We got crossed up a few times. … He came out to the mound a few times, asking what the heck I was doing shaking him off, and I told him to quit getting on my case and go back and catch. Coach Bertman finally came to the mound about the third inning and stood there with his hands on his hips silent for a few moments. Then he looked at me and said, ‘Rantz, you and Hymel are BUTCHERING the game of baseball. If you keep getting your wires crossed and keep throwing the wrong pitch, you’re coming out and you’re not going to pitch for a long time. Now pull your head out of your butt, breathe through your eyelids and play ball!’”
ASH graduate Jeff Leaumont, who played at first base and in the outfield for Bertman in the late Nineties, said he and teammate Trey McClure one game went to sit with the pitchers near Skip as he would try to educate them on why he called for certain pitches. Maybe three times in a row he called what pitches he wanted and predicted what would happen, and it happened each time just as he called. “Then he shrugged his shoulders and put his hands up as if to say, ‘I do this all the time.’ Then he did say, ‘It’s not a science, just believe in me and we’ll be there.’”
Pollock’s Russ Springer, who notched 313 strikeouts in three seasons at LSU (1987-89) and then had an 18-year big league career as a hard-throwing relief pitcher for 10 different teams, likes to recall how he shook off a few called pitches by Bertman early in his sophomore season. “He came out and said, ‘You probably think you can call a better game than I can.’ I said, ‘I know I can.’ He said, “All right, you got her.’ Russ said he’s the only pitcher he knew of that Skip allowed to call his own pitches.
Finally, Warren Morris of Alexandria, the 1996 College World Series hero, told a humorous vignette about Bertman that reveals how he could be honest without being brutal in dealing with a player’s deficiencies.
Morris, a middle infielder, had to redshirt in 1993 and he had little chance to play either position in 1994 with Russ Johnson at shortstop and Todd Walker at second base. Johnson finished runner-up that season in balloting for the National Player of the Year. Walker was a consensus first-team All-American.
“I hit well enough to play, and my first chance was an early SEC game at Kentucky, so Skip decided to put me in left field,” Morris said. “I was trying a new position, and it was really windy, and during batting practice I went out there to try to gauge what it’s going to be like chasing balls left and right. I was doing some 360s out there trying to make some catches. When I came to the dugout, Coach called me over and said, ‘We’re going to use you today as the designated hitter. I caught your circus act out there trying to catch fly balls.”
Bertman knew about circus acts. The bald guy with the bulbous nose and big ears was the emcee, the impresario, the clown and the guy who “held the rope” on the flying trapeze, all in one.
His legacy as a colossus of not only LSU baseball but college baseball “must,” as he would say, “absolutely must come to pass.”