An LSU baseball history Story

As we get to baseball season, here is an interesting baseball history story about Coach Bertman that I recently learned from a former HS coach at my own parochial HS in north Florida. It was at a function that established our HS's baseball Hall of Fame in 2015 which I was enshrined as a pitcher that I became friends with that coach.

I'm going to refer to him as CG (out of respect to him because he is a very humble man), who was a very successful coach in his own time and now retired. He was not my coach but was our first HS coach after I played that took our HS baseball team to a state championship. He coached after me and after I had graduated from LSU.

This is a time period just after Skip was hired at LSU in 1984. Coach Bertman had coached in Miami Florida at the HS level and won one or two state championships before he became a Coach at Miami. Our HS coach CG met Skip at the state tournament in which CG coached our HS to the finals before losing. Coach CG went on to take another mid-Florida HS to two state championships winning both and developed a friendship with Skip that remains today. They also coached against each other once in an annual HS North Fla vs. South Fla all-star baseball game that is played in the summer.

Now the reason why I relate the background; the rest of the story in deference to Paul Harvey a great orator. When Skip hired Smoke Laval, Smoke was not his first choice as his assistant. Coach CG was Skip's first choice because Skip admired CG's disciplined approach to all things baseball and details which both would teach their players. I had the benefit of meeting some of Coach CG's former player who to a person said that CG was the best coach they had ever played for at my HS as well as afterwards. Coach CG also had a lot of contacts in pro-baseball that would have added his value to Skip. In the end Coach CG didn't take the job but it wasn't because he didn't want it.

Other factors entered his decision like he had young children and wife that wanted to be near family and he had been accepted to grad school at App. State going to school during summers working on a master's degree.

Coach CG went on after that to coach very successfully at the Junior College level for many years until he retired about ten years ago. I asked him one day last year during an email conversation what he thought about the LSU job and without hesitation he said it is considered the best collegiate job in the US. It is also conceivable that Coach CG would have become LSU's head coach after Skip became AD and not Smoke Laval; and in my opinion would have been likely have equally successful as Skip. Amen and thank God our baseball is back