Inspirational hero for Aggies
Texas A&M's Jonathan Ducoff, rear right, is the man of the hour after a hitting the game-winning single in the 10th inning of an 8-7 victory over Florida in the SEC tournament. Ducoff survived a cancer scare before transferring to A&M.
For about three weeks late in the regular season, Texas A&M senior outfielder Jonathan Ducoff didn’t touch the field during a game. It didn’t matter. The former Kingwood Park star kept grinding and kept grinning with the panache of an every-day starter.
“A great teammate,” A&M coach Rob Childress said. “He stayed prepared.”
That preparation paid off in a big way in Tuesday’s opening game of the SEC tournament in Hoover, Ala. The Aggies defeated Florida 8-7 in 10 innings on the strength of Ducoff ’s threerun homer with two outs in the bottom of the eighth and his game-winning hit with two outs in the 10th.
The sixth-seeded Aggies (3719-1) survived the single-elimination segment of the SEC tournament and will face thirdseeded Georgia (42-14) at 9:30 a.m. Wednesday in what kicks off the double-elimination portion of the league’s postseason event.
The Aggies also likely solidified one of the 16 regional sites of the NCAA Tournament with Tuesday’s triumph. No. 17 A&M, on a roll of late following some midseason bumps, defeated No. 4 Arkansas in two of three games this past weekend to set the foundation for snagging one of the 16 host slots.
Meantime, Ducoff couldn’t fathom his good fortune Tuesday after not earning playing time from April 27 to May 16.
“No doubt about it, this is probably the most special moment of my career,” Ducoff told reporters at the Hoover Metropolitan Stadium.
It’s been quite a college career for Ducoff, one spanning three conferences at Baylor, Houston Baptist and finally A&M as a senior. Childress has said Ducoff has the best story in the Aggies’ locker room, and it’s easy to see why: He overcame lymphoma — cancer of the lymph nodes — in the past year.
“He’s a special kid and certainly an inspiration to our team,” Childress said following Tuesday’s comeback victory. “I’m thankful he’s with us. Whether he got two hits (Tuesday) that were very important or he was oh-fer, he’s very important to our team, and we’re lucky to be around him.”
Over the holidays before his junior season a little more than a year ago at HBU, Ducoff visited an urgent care center to get treated for what he thought was simply a hernia. That initial visit eventually led to the lymphoma diagnosis, and he was treated last year at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. He has been in remission since last spring.
He transferred to A&M last summer with the intention of focusing on academics and pursuing a master’s degree but wound up calling Childress to see if he could walk on for one final senior swing in a new setting.
“From what I’ve been through the last year and a half, I never would have thought this is where I would be,” Ducoff said Tuesday following his lategame heroics. “I would have called you crazy if you would have said that. But God is good and faithful, and it’s really an awesome thing for me.”
Ducoff entered A&M hitting .250 over two seasons at Baylor and one at HBU, and his playing time declined as this season wore on. He’s up to .257 this season for the Aggies following Tuesday’s heroics, and he said he never questioned why he wasn’t earning much action of late.
“I 100 percent trust in my coaches. They’re the ones making the decisions,” he said with a smile. “And they make the right ones most of the time.”
In another example of Ducoff ’s resiliency, he was hitless in his first three at-bats Tuesday before coming through in the eighth with the clutch two-out, full-count homer that lifted A&M to a 7-5 lead. He was down 0-2 in the count when he swatted the game-winning single to left field, touching off a raucous on-field celebration by the Aggies.
“I actually called it,” Childress said with a smile of Ducoff ’s improbable home run, only his third of the season. “I don’t call them very often, but I called that one. … It was just the moment.”
As for the Aggies solidifying their chances of hosting a regional with the comeback victory?
“You hope, and you wish,” Childress said. “But you want to take it out of everyone’s hands and just play well. That was the message to the team in the (SEC tournament) — just go play well. At the end of the day, that’s what matters most.”