Giants' Aubrey Huff will return to place of humble beginnings

When Aubrey Huff was a baseball-loving boy, his mother had a surprise for him and his younger sister. She had gotten free tickets at work to go watch their favorite team: the Texas Rangers.

But her son had practice that night, so Fonda Huff decided to not even tell the kids about the tickets. She would just take them some other time.
"Well after we got home, he turned on the TV and called out to me, 'Mom, come here, Nolan Ryan is throwing another no-hitter!" Fonda recalled. "I said, 'Oh Aubrey, we could have been there.' And he was like, 'What!"

Huff went a decade in the major leagues without ever making the postseason. Now that he has reached the World Series, the carefree Giants first baseman who wears a lucky "rally thong" beneath his uniform is facing his boyhood team and his one-time idol Ryan, now the Rangers president.

"Well, they're not my favorite team anymore," Huff said. "But it will be pretty neat going to my first World Series and playing in Texas."

But this series represents something much deeper for Huff. His single-parent mother will be attending the three games scheduled in Arlington. She raised her two children in small-town Texas after her husband was murdered in a workplace shooting when Aubrey was just 6 years old.
When she saw how her shy boy had thrown himself into baseball, Fonda paid to have a batting cage built in their backyard -- even though she really didn't have the money for such an extravagance on her Winn-Dixie supermarket-clerk salary.

She wasn't thinking about a future major-league career for her son.

"I just didn't want him to be without because his father got killed," Fonda said. "I think it was a way to make up to him for not having a dad. He didn't have anybody to pitch to him."

But Huff never felt like he went without.

"When I lost my dad, she put all of her efforts into me and my sister," said Huff, who has a tattoo on his upper left arm featuring a guitar to honor his country music-loving dad. "It's a pretty cool story when you think about everything she did for us. It's safe to say that I wouldn't be here right now without her."

When Giants manager Bruce Bochy talks about his team being a bunch of "cast-offs and misfits," Huff is Exhibit A. He posted some strong seasons -- like in 2008, when he hit .304 with 32 homers and 108 RBIs with Baltimore -- that were lost on dreadful teams.

But last off-season Huff, 33, was on his couch, listening to his phone not ring and wondering if his career was over. The Giants signed him almost as an afterthought in January.

He responded with a bounce-back year, hitting .290 with 26 homers and 90 RBIs that epitomized these surprising Giants. Just as important, the self-styled "Huff Daddy" has eased the clubhouse mood with his wise-cracks and stunts, such as prancing around in a red thong with glitter on the waistband.

You would never suspect that his childhood was tinged with tragedy and sadness.

His father, Aubrey Huff II, was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Newspaper accounts describe how he was an apartment electrician in Abilene, Texas, when an estranged husband shot his wife and tried shooting the complex manager. The elder Huff intervened and was killed in the struggle.

It was left to Fonda to raise their two young children, mostly in Mineral Wells, Texas. She coached her daughter Angela's softball teams and went back to school to earn a teaching degree. And she did everything possible to encourage her son's love of baseball.

"I took both kids to all the little Rangers camps when they were growing up," said Fonda, who now lives in Florida where she helps develop instructional strategies for math teachers. "They got to meet all the players and got their autographs. It was a really big deal for them to go to three or four games a year."

Huff, of course, wasn't there to see Ryan throw his seventh, and final, no-hitter against Toronto on May 1, 1991.

"By the ninth inning, I was crying because we didn't go," Huff recalled. "I was pretty upset. I've still got those framed tickets somewhere."

But most kids also didn't have their own batting cage. Fonda and her father constructed the cage themselves and added a self-loading pitching machine at a cost of more than $2,500.

"Other boys would say it's too hot outside or they wanted to stay inside and play video games, but not Aubrey," she said.

While her son was quiet, he showed no bitterness or anger that might be expected from someone who loses his dad at such a young age.

"Maybe it was when it happened, right before his seventh birthday," Fonda said. "It might have been harder for him if it happened when he was older."

As he blossomed into a star player at college powerhouse Miami, he came out of his shell thanks, in part, to the constant ribbing he took from current Giants teammate Pat Burrell.

Today, he is the life of the playoff party. Just look, if you dare, at the magical thong.

He began wearing it under his uniform on Aug. 30 as a joke, telling teammates: "Guys, here's 20 wins right here." The Giants proceeded to go 20-10 and clinched the National League West title on the last day of the season.

A legend was born.

"It was just something to kind of loosen the guys up when it started, and it turned out to be kind of a nice run," Huff said. "I couldn't stop and it's actually gotten quite comfortable in the last month and a half."

The fashion trend does not seem to have caught on with the rest of the clubhouse even though he recently distributed samples sent to him by thong maker.

"I don't think anybody wants to see me in one," said manager Bruce Bochy. "And I don't really enjoy seeing Aubrey in his."

For her part, mom doesn't quite know what to make of the thong.

"Every time I ask him about it, he changes the subject," Fonda said, laughing.



(mercurynews.com)