University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: Being There
June 12, 2011 | Baseball, Featured Writers, Adam Lucas
June 12, 2011
By Adam Lucas
For Carolina pitching coach Scott Forbes, Saturday began at 5 a.m., sitting on the front porch of a gray farmhouse in Bridgeville, Delaware. It was one of the first times in three days that you could find him without his laptop computer on his lap. This time, he just had a pad of paper, a pen, and an expansive view across farmland.
In five hours, he would deliver a eulogy for his father-in-law, Earl Passwaters, the man Forbes called his "second daddy." Earl, whose daughter, Mandy, married Scott before he was one of the hottest pitching coaches in the country, had been a fixture in two places--the Bridgeville community and Boshamer Stadium.
Last weekend, he was in Boshamer watching the Tar Heels breeze through the Chapel Hill Regional. Monday night, Earl talked to Scott and Mandy and made plans to come back down for this weekend's super-regional. On a calendar hanging in the kitchen of Earl and Beth Passwaters--his wife of 39 years--there were two important dates marked in black ballpoint pen:
The word "regionals" was hand-written across the weekend of June 3-5.
The words "super regionals" were hand-written across the weekend of June 10-12.
Everything else in their lives would have to be planned around those dates. Anyone with any kind of experience at Boshamer Stadium knew Earl would be there, somewhere down the third-base line, wearing his white Carolina hat with the interlocking blue "NC," looking equally happy both to be at a baseball game and to be surrounded by Beth, Mandy, and the Forbes's young children, Hannah and Ally, who better knew Earl as "Pop-Pop."
On Tuesday morning, everything changed. Without warning, a massive heart attack felled Earl Passwaters. He was dead at the age of 58, and even today, those words still don't seem quite possible. It was almost exactly three hours before Carolina baseball head coach Mike Fox would speak at the funeral of his mother, Barbara Fox, who had passed away three days earlier.
Losing a parent is one of those life-changing moments that lingers forever, and Carolina Baseball had now experienced it twice in 72 hours. The stunning series of events came during a week the staff had prepared for professionally--to us, they are games, but to the coaches involved, it's their livelihoods--since last summer.
While the rest of the Tar Heel staff and their families sat in the back pew at Barbara's funeral, looking understandably stunned, Scott was on his way to Delaware with Mandy and his girls. At their urging, and with their insistence that Earl would have demanded it, he came back to Chapel Hill late Tuesday night.
On Wednesday and Thursday night, he slept at Boshamer Stadium. That enabled him to be closer to his DVR, which contained extensive video of Stanford. He was often joined for late-night film sessions by assistant coach Robert Woodard, and for early-morning film sessions by assistant coach Scott Jackson. They watched the Cardinal, and then they watched the Cardinal again, and then they watched the Cardinal again. They stopped when it was time for practice and, if they remembered, when it was time to eat.
On Friday, the coaching staff put the gameplan they'd developed into motion, placing it into the hands of senior Patrick Johnson and getting a timely two-run home run from Seth Baldwin. It turned into a 5-2 victory.
Within 90 minutes after the final out, Forbes was headed back to Delaware, his laptop in hand, footage of every Stanford at-bat from game one of the super regional loaded and ready to review. Before game two began less than 24 hours later, he'd watched every pitch twice, usually in slow motion while making notes on his clipboard.
But in Saturday's early-morning hours, the clipboard was put away. Nothing in coaching prepares you to speak at the graveside of your father-in-law. No, that's not right. Nothing in life prepares you to speak at the graveside of your father-in-law.
"The best compliment I could give him," Forbes would say as tears filled both his eyes and the eyes of the assembled crowd, "is that Mandy felt about him the way I want my daughters to feel about me. I always got the impression she thought he was superhuman, and sometimes I wondered if she might be right."
The family and friends eventually returned to that gray farmhouse. Children played and people ate ham biscuits and even though it had seemed impossible a few days earlier, life went on. And so, again, at the urging of his family, Forbes headed back to Chapel Hill, making it to Boshamer Stadium just in time to warm up Saturday's starting pitcher, freshman Kent Emanuel. The rest of his family stayed in Bridgeville, where they turned on the TV and cranked up the radio feed on the computer, the same way Earl listened to every game he didn't attend in person.
Eventually, after fighting through a lengthy rain delay, Carolina closed out the Cardinal with yet another top-to-bottom team performance, getting key contributions from virtually everyone in the lineup, including freshman Brian Holberton, junior Jacob Stallings, Emanuel, and sophomore Michael Morin.
They dogpiled boisterously on the field, and they took a jubilant team picture that will line the hallways in Boshamer Stadium along with very similar photos from 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009. Once the photo was taken, that's normally when Scott would have hoisted his daughters over the brick wall and onto the field. This time, he celebrated alone--but surrounded by the players and coaches who have formed one of the most cohesive units in Carolina baseball history.
Forbes will see his family soon enough, because he will spend Father's Day with them at the College World Series next weekend. No matter what happens on the field, you know that holiday will carry some sadness, and you know there will be tears. But no matter what happens on the field, you know it will also be a happy day, and you know there will be laughter, because there will be games and the zoo and a new stadium...and new memories.
"If there are two people on earth who need to go to Omaha, it's Mandy Forbes and Beth Passwaters," Fox said. "I was hoping and praying for it, because they need to get around a bunch of people and cheer and enjoy it."
As he walked back to the dugout, Forbes paused for a second. "Hey," he said to a bystander, "can you believe it?"
No, frankly, you could not believe it. It was not just what he had done over these five days. Simply getting out of bed and doing these things--the things you never imagine doing until you bury a family member--was monumental. But doing these things while coaching baseball, and coaching baseball at the highest level in the country, well, that was hard to believe.
Forbes held up his white cap with the blue interlocking "NC." He just pointed to it with a smile that didn't reveal the overwhelming day he'd just experienced, one with the lowest of personal lows and the highest of professional highs.
That's when it became obvious that this particular hat might have actually been a little too big for Forbes, which made sense--because it wasn't sized for him at all. It was sized for Earl Passwaters, and throughout the entire game, Carolina's pitching coach had been wearing his father-in-law's cap.
It was the first meaningful Tar Heel baseball game Earl Passwaters had missed in years. And he'd been right there all along.
Adam Lucas is the publisher of Tar Heel Monthly. He is also the author or co-author of six books on Carolina basketball, including the official chronicle of the first 100 years of Tar Heel hoops, A Century of Excellence, which is available now. Get real-time UNC sports updates from the THM staff on Twitter.
