Remember Me? Randy Latta

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Sports

August 14, 2015 - 12:00 AM

On July 24, the sun shone brightly and intensely over the Kansas plains. Not long after sunrise, the temperature skyrocketed to 100 degrees. And then it’d just keep getting hotter.
The Adam LaRoche Baseball Complex in Fort Scott, though new and kempt, lacked enough shaded areas for fans to take refuge. So they fought for what little space there was to avoid baking in the stinging summer heat.
The players on the diamond sat during pitching changes. The umpires retreated to the dugouts in between innings. And to the dismay of everyone in attendance, even the lone cloud in the sky couldn’t help but evade the high-noon sun.
But there stood Randy Latta.
With nothing but the brim of his dusty ball cap to shield his eyes, the 61-year-old man settled dutifully by the Iola Indians’ dugout. He never asked to join the team inside for a brief moment of relief, and he never retired to the oasis of the concession stand where the other fans huddled beneath.
No, Latta just stood there. A wet rag in one hand and a bottle of Icy Hot in the other.
“Randy!” one of the Indians cried out from the dugout.
Latta hastily hobbled the three or four steps it took for him to reach the field’s entrance where the player was waiting for him. He gave the kid the wet rag, asked if he needed anything else and then reported right back to his post.
While the other fans were considering whether they had just paid $3 to stand somewhere between Dante’s sixth or seventh level of hell, Latta was in heaven.
“Maybe I spent too much of my life around sports,” he said. “But maybe not.”
———
In 1969, Randy Latta still had his old hip and his ankles didn’t yet have the power to predict the weather.
“It’s the barometric pressure,” he said. “I get this intense pain when it’s about to rain … (My wife) says I can get within the hour.”
As for the hip, Latta got a new one in 2001. And unfortunately no, his hip doesn’t anticipate storms, perform magic or let him know when the Dow Jones dips a few points.
It just helps him walk. Lame, right?
Anyway, in 1969, Latta was your average, healthy 16-year-old athlete enrolled in Iola High. He had a fervent passion for baseball and basketball as well as an evident knack for distance running.
“We’d play pickup basketball games and play to 100,” he said. “But we’d play by ones, there were no twos or threes. And of course, you had to win by two. Those games would wear you out.”
With his energy and love of the game, it’s not a stretch saying he should have graduated in 1971 with a varsity letter in basketball. But he didn’t.
In fact, he never made the team.
“Back then if you were small, they didn’t even look at you,” Latta said. “I could dribble and I could shoot. But that day and age, they didn’t look at you.”
Earl Boykins became a staple in the NBA at 5-foot-5. Muggsy Bogues was a star at just 5-foot-3. Clearly, there were some exceptions to the rule.
But no one, not even the Iola High basketball program, would take a chance on little Randy Latta.
He was just 4-foot-8.
If the rides at Disney wouldn’t give him a free pass, neither would the hoops squad at Iola.
So when Latta was a sophomore, he had a choice to make: Use every pent-up ounce of energy toward working on the family farm after school or find himself another outlet.
He chose the latter.
“One day I said, ‘I’m going to find something that I’m going to beat some people at,’” Latta recalled.
Since the school didn’t yet have a baseball program, he chose to run despite loathing the tiresome, monotonous activity. And although he hated it, he found the sport that didn’t judge him based on his size.
Well, it kind of did — at first.
“I don’t how many races I’d go in and other runners would go, ‘Oh is this going to be a junior high meet?’” Latta said. “And then some of my teammates would go, ‘Well he’ll be waiting for you when you guys finish.’ I didn’t even have to say anything. I’d just smile.”
But by the end of his first year on the team, Latta had proven to the region that he was a force to be reckoned with on the course despite his size. In 1969, the Mustangs cross country squad captured the school’s first ever state title thanks in large part to Latta, who would consistently finish in the top-20 of every meet.
Marvin Smith, who was a track coach during Latta’s high school days, said the novelty of Latta wore off pretty quick when his opponents found out how fast this 4-foot-8 kid was.
“Everybody knew Randy Latta because of his performance when at that time you wouldn’t have expected people to perform like that,” Smith said. “By his junior and senior year, people stopped being surprised.”
Instead, they’d just get frustrated.
Latta was the type of runner that never got too ahead of himself. He knew his pace and stuck to it — even if it meant starting the race in dead last.
“I never ran a race … where I wasn’t the last one out of the chute,” he said.
But when he eventually caught up with the others (and he always did), he wouldn’t just pass them. He’d let them know he was there.
“I would talk and it was hard to do but that’s how you psych people out,” Latta said.
He’d encourage his teammates and simply ask his opponents how they’re doing.
That’s all Latta needed to say to get in their heads.
With his strategy and his 10:01 two-mile time, which was a former Iola High record,
Latta continued his unlikely athletic career at Allen County Community College and eventually Pittsburg State.
Although he competed in the national JUCO meet twice while at Allen and succeeded at Pitt State despite stiffer competition, Latta most fondly remembers his time at Iola High.
He laughs now when he recalls being thrown into lockers (just like the movies, he adds) and hidden from coach “Doc” Stiles under a pile of leaves. He cringes when he describes how cramped and uncomfortable it was in Stiles’ old pickup truck that took the boys to their meets. But then he smiles when he mentions he mostly rode up in the cab with Stiles since he was almost always the No. 1 or No. 2 runner.
But when Latta speaks of a time nearly 50 years ago, you mostly see his pride. Not the arrogant, self-serving kind though.
He challenged himself to become the best athlete he could be despite his very non-stereotypical jock stature. And that challenge ended with a state championship along with a lifetime of memories.
“For all the stuff I did, probably the relationships you see and the people you meet are unbelievable,” Latta said. “And I think that’s what it’s all about. It’s not what you do. It’s who you’ve met.”
———
Latta Angus Stadium is the Fenway Park of handmade farm ballparks in Kansas.
As a kid, Latta constructed a backstop and cleared a field to play on. Today, that field by his house still stands.
“My brothers and I got to play on it when we were kids,” said Ryan Latta, Randy’s oldest son. “And whenever we wanted him to throw to us, he would never say no.”
All three of Randy’s children, Ryan, Jarred and Trent, grew up playing baseball. But with Trent, the youngest, recently having finished up his last season of American Legion baseball, Randy said he’s not sure what he’s going to do.
He and Patty, his wife, religiously attended each of their sons’ games throughout their childhoods. So he mentioned he might still hang around despite not having a child on the American Legion team for the first time since 2006.
But in the meantime, Randy continues to be his energetic self. Even though his ankles cause him pain every now and his hip prevents him from running, Randy works tirelessly on the family farm after finishing up his day job as an accountant for the Iola Nursing Center.
“I still like to mow the lawn, but not with the riding mowers,” he said. “It needs to be a push mower.”
Even at 61, Randy can’t help but be on the move.
He’s 5-foot-9 now, but he didn’t really hit his growth spurt until he was about 30. Ryan said he’s glad he and his brothers got their height from their mother’s side of
the family.
What the kids didn’t get was Randy’s speed. At least, not state championship speed.
“He would always tell us, ‘If I had my good legs, not one of you boys could keep up with me,’” Ryan said.
Well, to be fair, not many people could.

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