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SIAC Baseball Tourney Offers Life Lessons
On May 4, at the SIAC Baseball Tournament, my alma mater,Tuskegee University, was preparing to play a baseball game that would put them in position to play in the championship game, if they won.
A Tuskegee player ran pass me and said, “Mr. Harvey, you know anything about this.”
I smiled and replied, “Yeah, I’ve been here before.”
He laughed and replied, “No, you don’t know anything about this.”
Little did he know that almost 45 years to the day, May 5, 1973, I had a similar date with destiny.
My Tuskegee teammates and I had already won the 1973 SIAC Baseball Championship by virtue of finishing first in the conference. We did not have a separate baseball tournament to decide the conference champion. In that day, there were no automatic NCAA bids for HBCU conference baseball champions. So in order to strengthen our chances of receiving an NCAA bid, Jim Martin, our coach, convinced the conference to host an All-Star game.
The All-Star game was played in Herndon Stadium on the campus of Morris Brown College in Atlanta. Herndon Stadium was the site of many Negro League games and the venue where Jackie Robinson would bring in a troupe of Negro major league players to play white major leaguers during the off season in the 1950s.
