ARCHITECT OF THE AGGIES Foundation for Aggie Baseball built by Chandler By Rusty Burson

Inside his cozy College Station home, 76-year-old Tom Chandler leans forward in his recliner – slowly and gingerly, but also quite eagerly – as the conversation in his living room shifts from rather meaningless small talk to hardball memories.

It would be a stretch to say that Chandler, the man who first put Texas A&M on the NCAA’s baseball map from 1959-84, could recall all 999 games he coached during his illustrious 26-year career in Aggieland. But probably not as far of a stretch as you might think.

Chandler still remembers – often in vivid and meticulous detail – so many of the big wins, too many of the tough losses and even the 10 ties.

Names of his former players, even reserves and walk-ons, still come to mind as quickly and effortlessly as if Chandler were being asked about his children’s names (Tom Dean and Nancy). And he can easily retrace enough stories, brushes with greatness and bizarre events to feed a baseball junkie’s appetite for countless hours. Or days.

He is, quite simply, a living encyclopedia of baseball history, a man who once shared a dugout seat with legendary Pittsburgh shortstop Honus Wagner; a man who once coached future Hall of Fame pitcher Gaylord Perry in summer ball; and a man who has probably forgotten more about "America’s Pastime" than most will ever know.

Tom Chandler used to pick weeds out of the outfield just so his Aggies could play a game in the stadium that bellied up to Kyle Field.

"He’s a legendary baseball man with a passion for the game," current Texas A&M head coach Mark Johnson said of his former boss. "And he’s the best baseball storyteller I’ve ever heard."

That’s probably what makes this relentless disease that has afflicted Chandler seem so excruciatingly cruel.

It’s called progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), a rare and ravaging form of Parkinson’s Disease that affects less than one of every 100,000 Parkinson’s patients in the United States. And in Chandler’s case, it has shown no mercy whatsoever.

Chandler does not have the tremors that are often associated with Parkinson’s. But while PSP has spared him of the "shakes," it has rocked virtually every other aspect of the life he once lived with so much energy.

It has stolen his balance and ability to walk, confining Chandler permanently to a chair or the aid of others. It has attacked the muscles in his eyes, allowing him only to look straight ahead.

The twinkle is still there, but peripheral vision is gone. So is his ability to read, because his eyes can no longer move to follow words across a page.

And if all that weren’t enough, this wretched disease, for which there is no known cause or cure, has all but robbed the personable Chandler of one of his true passions in life: talking baseball.

Much like a cancer can metastasize, PSP has maliciously and laboriously broken down Chandler’s ability to swallow, control his tongue and speak. Three years ago, when he was first diagnosed with Parkinson’s, Chandler’s words had begun to slur.

Now, they are often barely recognizable, even to Willowdean, his wife and soul mate for the last 53 years.

"It’s been so very hard on him and me," Willowdean said as she gingerly patted her husband’s knee. "One of the hardest things has been that Tom is still the same person on the inside. Thankfully, his memory and his mind are still sharp. But he just doesn’t have the ability to verbalize something when he wants it to come out.

Chandler and then athletick director Jackie Sherrill enjoy an awards ceremony at Olsen Field.

"He still wants to visit with friends. He still wants to talk baseball. It’s just that now every sentence is often a battle. That’s the nature of this form of Parkinson’s."

It’s the nature of Chandler, however, to battle this disease with the same vigor that helped him win 660 games and five conference titles at Texas A&M.

In baseball vernacular, life has tossed Chandler a nasty curve. But he has resolved to fight off anything PSP throws his way.

He is part of a local Parkinson’s support group and has lent his name to the local American Parkinson Disease Association in its effort to raise funds for research.

On April 28, the local APDA Information and Referral Center will hold the Tom Chandler 5K Run/Walk at 8:30 a.m. that will begin on Tom Chandler Drive, the street recently named for him that is located along the south side of Reed Arena.

Proceeds from the event and dinner later that day in Chandler’s honor will be used to fund support group classes and to expand services offered to local Parkinson’s patients. A portion of the proceeds will be used to fund research to help find the cure to Parkinson’s Disease.

Chandler knows that he may never experience the full benefits of the funds that he is helping to raise. But like a batter who has resolved to wear down a pitcher for the next inning or hitter, Chandler is digging his cleats in the dirt.

"I’m extremely honored," Chandler said regarding his name being used for the run. "I want to help. (I want) to do my part."

A LIFETIME PASSION

Chandler is certainly no stranger to battling long odds. When he was hired by Texas A&M prior to the 1959 season, the Aggies were coming off a rather forgettable three-year run. A&M went 26-39 from 1956-58 and had virtually no baseball tradition.

In fact, the Aggies had virtually no baseball stadium.

"When we came here in ’59 – Tom was hired for $7,000 a year – there was just an old wooden, broken down ballpark," Willowdean said. "We played there one year. Then they tore that down, and we played one year down at Travis Park.

"Then when they expanded the football field, they put a little wire fence up and put these little bleachers up in front of a little stand just big enough for two people to get up there and broadcast the game. Needless to say, baseball wasn’t a real high priority back then."

Despite his limited facilities and resources, it didn’t take long for Chandler to begin turning things around at A&M. In his first season, the Aggies won the Southwest Conference title. And by his sixth year, he had his second SWC title and took A&M to the College World Series.

Chandler even made the most of his run-down facilities.

"One year we won the conference and beat Texas," said Willowdean, who with her husband spent countless days in the early years of Chandler’s A&M coaching career pulling weeds in the outfield. "A Texas pitcher threw the ball, and it hung in the fence and that was a fair ball. The kid couldn’t get it out of the fence. Our players were circling the bases, and we won that game. That was the bottom of the ninth inning. That was in the old park that just had the wire fence around it. Tom always made the most with what he had to work with.

"And heck, we didn’t know much better back then. We washed uniforms in those days, and Tom even coached football. But we did whatever we needed to do, because Tom was coaching baseball and loving it. It was a dream come true. Baseball has always been his passion."

It has been a lifelong passion that has taken Chandler to some of the most historic venues in the history of the game and has introduced him to some of the true legends in baseball history.

Take, for example, the time when a 12-year-old Chandler hopped a streetcar in Dallas when he found out that the Pittsburgh Pirates were in town to play an exhibition game against the Chicago White Sox. Chandler, who practically lived at the minor league ballpark in Dallas, took the streetcar to a Dallas hotel and asked the desk clerk for Pie Traynor’s room.

Traynor, the manager of the Pirates from 1934-39, opened the door to find Chandler, who was looking to serve as the Pirates’ bat boy that day.

"(Traynor) said, ‘Well come on in, let’s talk it over.’ So they went in and ate breakfast together," Willowdean said. "He told Tom to come out to the dugout that afternoon. And Tom ended up sitting on the equipment box during that game."

The person who Chandler sat next to that day was none other than Honus Wagner, who had 17 consecutive .300 seasons and was one of the original inductees into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

"Unfortunately," Tom says, "I didn’t get anybody’s autograph."

No matter. What Chandler missed out on in terms of memorabilia, he made up for in memories. And Chandler’s passion for the game and his daily obsession to be at the ballpark certainly paid huge dividends. By the time he graduated from Baylor and decided to make a career of coaching, Chandler’s baseball wisdom went well beyond his years.

By the late 1950s, he had become the head coach at Dallas Adamson High School and spent his summers managing a semi-pro team in West Texas. In fact, it was during one of those summers that Chandler began teaching Gaylord Perry how to pitch while Willowdean helped Perry pass a correspondence class in English.

"He was afraid to throw the ball, because he was afraid to hit somebody," Willowdean said of Perry, who won 316 games from 1962 to ’83 and was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1991. "He showed up from Alabama with an old cardboard suitcase with a rope tied around it. He didn’t have any baseball shoes, he had tennis shoes. And he had another bag with dried tobacco in it.

"Believe it or not, he was also so skinny, such a raw-boned kid. I taught him senior English that summer by correspondence from Texas Tech, and Tom began working on his confidence."

Chandler’s pep talks obviously worked, as Perry would go on to become the first player to win the Cy Young Award in both leagues.

While Chandler was always a tremendously knowledgeable baseball man, his real gift was with relating to his players. That’s what helped Perry turn the corner, and that’s certainly what helped A&M turn the corner under Chandler’s reign.

"He had a very personal interest in each one of his players," said Mark Johnson, who served as Chandler’s top assistant at A&M in 1983 and ’84 before becoming the Aggies’ head coach in ’85. "His relationship with his players was just phenomenal. He cared about them. The thing that is interesting, being around him for so long, he doesn’t forget any of them.

"He still knows their names, knows what they’re doing, knows where they’re at. They stay in contact. I think I learned a lot from him in that respect – his relationship with the players, his caring for the players."

Said current A&M sports information director Alan Cannon, who walked on for Chandler in 1981: "The thing that set Coach Chandler apart from some of the other coaches is that he would remember the name and face of a walk-on as well as the full scholarship, home run hitter. He really went out of his way to be a player’s coach. Not only was he concerned about your baseball abilities, but also what’s going on in your life. He really took a genuine interest I think in everyone. I think that rubs off on the players."

BUILDING A LEGACY AT A&M

By the mid-1970s, Texas A&M had begun to establish a tradition of baseball excellence under Chandler. From 1961-77, A&M had produced 17 straight winning seasons and three consecutive NCAA regional appearances from 1975-77.

Then, in 1978, the critical piece of A&M’s baseball tradition was put into place as Olsen Field was dedicated on March 21, 1978. The stadium is named for C.E. Pat Olsen, a 1923 graduate of Texas A&M, who went on to play with Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig on some of the great New York Yankees teams.

Olsen provided much of the necessary funding for the new ballpark, but the real architect was Chandler.

"Mr. Olsen was interested in the baseball team and asked Tom how he could help the program out," Willowdean said. "Tom said, ‘We need a new ballpark.’ And Pat said, ‘Then let’s go build one.’

"They started up right away going around to different ballparks and getting different ideas. But Tom is the one who really agonized over all the specific details."

When it opened in 1978, it was considered the palace of collegiate baseball. And even though it is almost 25 years old, it remains as one of the premier baseball facilities in college athletics.

"(Chandler) was really the architect of this thing," Johnson said. "He wanted to build the best one out there. To this day, as I look at other stadiums and I look at our double-tiered stadium where there isn’t a bad seat in the house, I haven’t seen one that duplicates that.

"He should get a lot of credit for that. He helped design that part of it . There aren’t a lot of stadiums like that. When I got here, he had already established the integrity of the baseball program at Texas A&M as well as getting, at that time, what was the best facility in the country. Now, of course, there has been a lot more stadiums built, but when you put our stadium together with the work of (athletic fields manager) Leo Goertz, you’re hard-pressed to find another as attractive in my mind."

The Aggies christened the new par by winning the 1978 Southwest Conference title. Chandler continued to put together winning seasons into the early 1980s, but he came to the conclusion that recruiting had become too cut-throat for his liking.

He was not, however, simply going to hand over his creation to anyone. So, in 1983, he hand-picked an assistant coach from Mississippi State as the man he hoped would succeed him.

Johnson, who had already worked for collegiate baseball coaching legends such as Frank Sancet and Jerry Kindall at Arizona and Ron Polk at MSU, helped the Aggies go 41-21 in 1984 and earn another NCAA regional bid.

With the program in solid shape and Johnson firmly entrenched in the A&M family, Chandler retired following the ’84 season. But he’s kept a proud eye on Johnson and the Aggies ever since.

"I’m extremely proud of Mark," Chandler said. "He’s a great man, a great coach. All these years, he’s made me look pretty smart (for picking him as Chandler’s replacement)."

Said Johnson: "I know that he and Willowdean support me. He’s the reason I’m here. They’ve supported me through the good times and bad times. I know they’re there. Sometimes in your life, you’ve got to have a few folks back there that are always going to be behind you. He and Willowdean are a couple that I’ve felt their strength all along. Their total commitment to me and what I’m trying to do has been such a blessing."

Following his retirement from A&M, Chandler spent the next 10 years scouting. He misses those days, especially being able to go to the ballpark under his own power. And, of course, he misses the long talks with former players, friends and fans of the game about his lifetime passion.

He would love to tell more stories, share more of his lifelong experiences in the game. Unfortunately, PSP is making that more difficult by the day.

But Chandler is not giving in. Besides, he takes a great deal of comfort in knowing that his legacy will carry on long after he is gone. Not just in baseball, but more importantly, in the lives he touched along the way.

"Tom is so proud of the boys he has coached, and how well so many of them have done," Willowdean said. "He got a letter from one boy years ago who had been in Vietnam and wrote to tell Tom that the lessons he learned from him as a baseball coach helped him survive. And there are more success stories from so many players than I can even remember.

"That’s what Tom is most proud of. Those things are more important than the wins and losses. Those things are reminders of what a positive difference he made in the lives of so many young men."