GLENN GUILBEAU, Tiger Rag Editor
It was a full house on Wednesday at the Jewish Congregation of Baton Rouge in the Garden District for the celebration of life for Sandra Schwartz Bertman, who died last week at age 87.
“Sandy Bear,” as friends and the LSU Baseball Family called her, was the rock for former LSU baseball coach and athletic director Skip Bertman long before he became a rock star.
They got married in 1962 when she was an elementary school teacher in Miami and Skip was a youth baseball coach and elementary school teacher as well working on a Master’s degree at the University of Miami.
“I was always my own person,” Sandy, a Brooklyn, New York, native, said during her husband’s previously announced last season as baseball coach in 2001. “I kept teaching after Skip became famous.”
That was first in Miami as Skip became the Director of Baseball at the Miami Beach Recreation Department and the Miami Beach High baseball coach in 1963 and then as the Miami Hurricanes’ associate head coach in 1976. She had to keep teaching. They needed the money as the family grew to four daughters – Jan, Jodi, Lisa and Lori – through the 1960s.
“He was always coaching baseball, but whenever there was a serious thing, I always had them talk to their dad,” she said.
“Sandy was a great coach’s wife and rooted me on,” Skip said as he retired from coaching. “Understood the game, loved the players, knows most of them.”
She was a fixture at the games in Miami and then in Baton Rouge as the games grew bigger when Bertman became LSU’s head coach in 1984, and there were full houses at Alex Box Stadium.
“People thought Sandy and I were married because we sat together in the Gold Seats at the old Box,” Baton Rouge business magnet and close friend of the Bertmans Richard Lipsey said in his co-eulogy with his wife Susan Lipsey. “Susan didn’t go to the games in the early years, so Sandy sat with me.”
The Bertman household was often full of family and friends and former players and coaches in Miami and in Baton Rouge. They even opened their home near LSU to the enemy – Mississippi State coach Ron Polk, who actually dropped by during huge State-LSU weekends at Alex Box. The Bertmans knew Polk from the Miami days. He was a Miami Dade College assistant coach from 1968-71.
And Sandy was a fixture at the Embassy Suites hotel, which became LSU’s headquarters at the College World Series in Omaha, Nebraska, from 1986 through 2000 before Bertman retired from coaching after the 2001 season and became athletic director. Family and friends crowded their suites.
Skip was working. Sandy was socializing.
But Sandy worked as hard as Skip.
“With four daughters and my being away at times, she was always there for our girls,” Bertman said. “She always had a hot dinner ready for me.” No matter how late after practice, or after a speaking engagement or after the games. In other words, Sandy worked extra innings.
“She ran the concession stands all the years at the baseball camps,” Bertman said.
“I’ve always given him his space,” Sandy said.
And Skip gave hers his. In Bertman’s later years as LSU’s baseball coach, Sandy, the daughters and the grandchildren were often in or around Bertman’s office not long before first pitch at times.
“She thinks I’m coaching some American Legion team,” Bertman kidded.
“Hey, 15,” Sandy once yelled to the dugout on a road trip before a game at Skip, who wore that number. “Can I get an autograph?”
Sandy Bear was always around.
“They just don’t make them like Mrs. Sandy Bertman any more,” said former LSU pitcher Doug Thompson, who was on the mound when LSU won the 1997 national title. He is an analyst now on the LSU Radio Network broadcasts of the Tigers.
“We’re definitely going to miss her, and it’s a sad day in Tiger Land,” he said.
Thompson was among the throng of Bertman’s former players to pay their respects at Sandy’s funeral and support Skip. Others included Ben McDonald, Chad Ogea, Ryan Theriot, Blair Barbier, Brett Laxton, Warren Morris, Patrick Coogan and Ronnie Rantz, to name just some, along with such former assistant coaches as Dan Canevari, Bill Dailey and Turtle Thomas.
LSU BASEBALL COACH JAY JOHNSON DEDICATES WIN TO SANDY BERTMAN
Current LSU baseball coach Jay Johnson brought his team to the ceremony. Everyone stopped to greet or hug Skip, who will be 87 on May 23.
“That was really special for Jay to bring the team,” Bertman said. “He didn’t have to do that. They had practice today. They’re playing at Texas this weekend. Means a lot.”
Former LSU baseball coach Paul Mainieri, whom Bertman hired before the 2007 season when he was athletic director, is now South Carolina’s coach. Mainieri has known Bertman since he was a kid because his late father, Demie Mainieri, was the coach at Miami Dade North Community College in the 1960s and ’70s when Bertman was in Miami. Mainieri flew in Wednesday after his team played at College of Charleston the night before.
Ole Miss coach Mike Bianco, who was Bertman’s catcher at LSU in 1988 and ’89 and coached under him from 1993-97 and helped him win three national titles, drove in from Pearl, Mississippi, after a game Tuesday night against Southern Mississippi.
LSU women’s basketball coach Kim Mulkey, assistant coach Bob Starkey, other assistants and son Kramer Robertson, who played for Mainieri at LSU and now works in the athletic department, were there. So were LSU athletic director Scott Woodward, deputy athletic director Verge Ausberry, associate athletic director Miriam Segar, associate communications director Bill Franques, who has been the baseball sports information director since 1989, and former associate athletic director Herb Vincent, who is now an associate commissioner at the SEC office, along with other LSU athletic department folks.
South Carolina associate athletic director Charles Bloom, who was one of Bertman’s first baseball sports information directors in the 1980s and later worked as an associate commissioner of the SEC, came in with Mainieri.
They were there for Sandy and for Skip. Because Sandy and Skip had always been there for many of them.
“I coached long hours,” Bertman said as his career ended. “And Sandy would call, and I’d say, ‘Honey, it’s not American Legion baseball. I’ve got to do this. We’ve got four daughters. They’ve all got to go to college.’ It was hard.”
But it was fun, which was usually the point for Sandy and Skip.
The night of that fifth and last national championship on June 17, 2000, Sandy and Skip and their children and grandchildren gathered around the big screen TV in the restaurant/bar at the Omaha Marriott and watched a replay of LSU’s come-from-behind, dramatic, 6-5 win over Stanford.
“We’d like to spend more time traveling and seeing our children,” Sandy said as everyone said good night. “Sometimes I think I’m getting too old for this, but I’ll let him decide to retire whenever. We’re all together here. I’d be just as happy if he stayed on coaching for 10 more years. I love it. I love it. It never gets old.”
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