Rob Leary has been involved in professional baseball for nearly 30 years, but one of his toughest workouts may have come last month while sitting on a couch.
Leary and a few other fellow members of the 1986 LSU baseball team met at the home of their former coach, Skip Bertman, to reflect on that historic season.
Four-and-a-half hours, a few brews and countless stories later, Leary was as sore as he once was after a spring training workout.
“It was one story after another,” Leary says. “I felt like I did a whole core workout, because I was laughing the whole time. We picked up right where we left off. It’s like it was yesterday, even though it was 30 years ago.”
That get-together was just the start of a weekend of festivities honoring the 1986 LSU baseball team, which became the first club in program history to work its way to Omaha, Nebraska, for the College World Series.
Several former Tiger players and coaches from that squad flew to Baton Rouge from all across the country and met at Stadium Sports Bar & Grill at L’Auberge Casino & Hotel for a reception that featured a buffet, a bin of ice cold beer and framed pictures from their playing days.
The group of 10-15 former players and their families exchanged more stories throughout the afternoon as they settled in to watch the current Tigers take on Alabama in Game 1 of a doubleheader. They marveled at how far the program has come.
“We were the team that took the cellophane off going to Omaha,” says former pitcher Pete Bush, who was a freshman on the ’86 team. “We called ourselves the bricklayers. I went three times and never won it, but we got a little better each year. Then, in ’90, after I left, they were third again, and of course in ’91 they won it.”
The 1986 squad laid the foundation for an LSU baseball program that has now gone on to win six national championships and make 17 appearances at the College World Series.
But as notable as the team’s accomplishments were on the diamond, their off-the-field antics seem to have made the most
impact.
“In those days, we spent every waking moment together,” Bush says. “It was a band of brothers for sure, and it’s never faded. This team is really close.”
Perhaps the group’s toughest competition came outside of baseball, too.
Multiple guys were quick to mention the blockbuster Halloween parties the team would throw, at which Michael Papajohn—now a stuntman and actor—was always the main event.
“We were very competitive with our Halloween costumes,” says Papajohn, proudly recalling asking a football trainer to collect extra gauze for nearly three months so he could make a realistic mummy costume.
Everything was going great until Papajohn ended up riding in a car with the windows down, and one lengthy piece of gauze got caught in the car’s axle, nearly strangling him.
“Being a stuntman and actor, people always ask me if I’ve ever been hurt real bad or nearly killed doing movies,” Papajohn says. “I always say, ‘Not doing movies—but maybe Halloween at LSU.’”
