Spotlight - Larry Hardy

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Posted by: Content Administrator	2/19/2007
By May of 1973 my baseball career was over – and that was all right. I was accepted to UT and would start classes in the fall. I had a good ride at Bellaire High School. I had eked out an All-District honor my senior year and ridden the coattails of some great players to the state finals for two years. I was prepared to hang up my cleats until my high school coach, Ray Knoblauch, suggested I play in the summer “Beer” League as a last gasp effort to prolong my baseball career. As fate would have it, some of my teammates on that Lone Star team were from Rice, including All-Conference performers Mike and Dave Pettit. I had a career season (all 2 months), and suddenly everything changed. Coach Doug Osburn called in August and lured me away from a non-descript life as a student at UT to play for the Owls. I began the season in ‘74 as a true freshman starter in the outfield and rewarded Coach O with a .025 average (the only stat my wife likes to quote) and a prolonged ride on the bench. The quantum leap in the competition level between high school baseball and the Southwest Conference overwhelmed me on the field. In the classroom, too, I was in over my head. Despite good grades in high school, the rigors of the Rice pre-med curriculum were demoralizing. It was during the spring of my freshman year that I considered quitting. Sixth Street in Austin was looking more and more appealing. But little by little, I dug myself out of that hole, and by my junior year, things were looking up academically and athletically. I became a regular starter in right field and contributed mightily to our mediocrity in the mid-seventies. Now baseball at Rice in the seventies was slightly different from the program you see today. The “field” was actually, well, an empty field between Weiss College and the track stadium. In January they would roll out a 4-foot hurricane fence in the uneven terrain we called the outfield and plop down some bases in roughly the same spot as the year before. A couple of sets of bleachers would be dragged behind the backstop and then it was,” Play Ball!” You can imagine the incredulous looks on the faces of the visiting teams when they arrived at OUR HOUSE. Texas, in particular, seemed somewhat rattled by the, uh-hum, ambiance. Just two years earlier the visiting Horns had been swept by the Owls. You see, despite the lack of facilities, Rice managed to field some pretty good teams back then. Dogs would occasionally interrupt play as they strolled across the infield and, against UT in’74, the lack of a retaining fence allowed about twenty orange-painted streakers to dash, unabated, across the infield in one of the more memorable game delays. Then there was the time my teammate in the outfield leapt for a ball at the fence and wound up stuck, upside down, hanging from his belt, which had snagged on the top of the short fence. Admission to this spectacle was free…and worth every penny. My baseball career ended, unceremoniously, with my graduation from Rice in 1977 – but my experience there had an enduring effect. There were no awards, but plenty of rewards from my time on campus. Some of my closest friends, fondest memories and, eventually, an MD degree arose from that arduous journey. I take great pride in having been a student-athlete at Rice. And thanks to Wayne Graham and the incredible success of the program over the past decade, some people mistakenly assume I was a pretty good ball player.

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Comments (2)

Re: Larry Hardy

By rdeleeuw on 3/4/2007

Everybody needs to know that Dr. Larry made an unbe;ievable catch against Texas in Austin that saved a game in 1977 in which Rice beat Texas in extra innings to stop Texas' 34 (?) game win streak. On a wet right field Astroturf a diving Larry Hardy snagged a dying blooper with the winning run on base. All that could be seen was water splashing around and a glove popping up out of the wake with a white ball sno coned in the center of the picture. It was great play in a great game.

Re: Larry Hardy

By Bboyne on 3/6/2007

Perhaps Larry's success story would have had a very different ending had it not been for a kind upper classman who took the struggling frosh under wing. I must admit that was a bit embarrasing to have a roommate on the road who traveled with a vaporizor. Had it not been for his hot girlfriend who got me dates with her friends, it might not have been worth it.
But over the past 30 years I have been rewarded with a wonderful friendship with Larry and his wife Suzanne (the hot girlfried). His story, told so well above, captures the essence of what the Rice student-athlete is all about. And I think we are not the first teammates to be bonded for life by our experiences playing ball at Rice.