In November of 1996, Arizona baseball coach Jerry Stitt looked Ernie Durazo in the eyes and said “nothing would make me happier than to see you graduate.”
What happened next played out over two long and winding decades.
Durazo, a lefty with a sweet batting stroke from Tucson High, signed to play at Arizona but didn’t qualify academically. While leading Pima College to the regional finals, he hit the books and earned his associate degree in 1½ years, which is a killer pace for anyone.
At Arizona, he became an All-Pac-10 first baseman, hit .395, tied the school record with a 28-game hitting streak, and was drafted in the 12th round by the Toronto Blue Jays.
School?
“I left the UA while on academic probation,” Durazo says now. “In my last semester, I basically quit going to school.”
He played in New York for the Auburn Doubledays and in Georgia for the Macon Peaches. At 25, he got “the worst phone call of my life.” The Blue Jays released him.
Durazo came home, got married (to Patti), became a father (to Joey), coached high school baseball at Salpointe Catholic and Tucson, and for the last six years has been the hitting coach at Pima College.
About a year ago, at 36, he applied for readmission to the UA. Usually, something has to give when a husband, father of a 5-year-old and a man with two jobs goes back to school, but Durazo did not give in to anything.
He worked the graveyard shift, midnight to 8 a.m, at La Frontera, a mental health and crisis intervention center. Two days a week, he would go directly from work to a UA parking garage near his first class.
“I’d push the seat back and sleep in the car for two hours before going to class,” he says. “I wasn’t going to miss it.” After lunch, he would be on the field at Pima College, working with Aztec hitters. All of this included 56 games and nine trips to Phoenix.
This would be Durazo’s life for eight months: 30 hours a week coaching, 40 hours a week at La Frontera, five classes in fall semester, all balanced around the most important stuff, being a dad and a husband. Sleep? He had Wednesday and Thursday nights off.
Stitt, now an associate athletic director at PCC, knew all about Durazo’s round-the-clock pace and dedication to become the first in his family to earn a college degree.
“I figured there would be a time Ernie would wear out,” Stitt says. “But he never did.”
One day in early February, Durazo’s mail included an envelope from the UA’s Colleges of Letters, Arts and Science. It informed him that he had made the Dean’s List. Three As and a B.
He went to his father’s house with the happy news. The lights were off and his father, also named Ernie, was lying in bed. Ernesto Durazo II, who spent 25 years as a firefighter in Air Force bases around the country, has been fighting kidney cancer since 2010. His wife, Ernie’s mother, Dora, died in 1994 of leukemia.
Ernie woke his father.
“Dad,” he said, “I made the honor roll.”
As Ernie Durazo tells this story, tears well up in his eyes. He stops the conversation and looks down at a table.
“I am doing this for my dad and for Patti and for Joey,” he says. “I had so much motivation; I wanted to get this done so that my dad could see me graduate.”
As Durazo is telling this story, his old coach, Stitt, sitting nearby, shakes his head but stays silent and lets the moment play out.
“When coach Stitt was in my living room on my recruiting visit, he told me that getting a degree would be more important than anything I could do on the baseball field,” Durazo says. “And now I know what he meant.”
Ultimately, Durazo’s return to school became known to his classmates and instructors, especially in his sports management class, taught by Phoebe Chalk Wadsworth, the UA’s associate athletic director for major gifts.
One thing led to another, and when the UA stages its first-ever Student-Athlete Convocation next week, Durazo will be a keynote speaker.
The first baseman from the class of 2001 will speak to the class of 2016, to which he also belongs.
“I’ll be nervous, because I’m not an experienced public speaker,” he says. “But I’ve got a lot I can tell them about what comes after college.”
Patti Durazo, a Canyon del Oro High School grad who was an athletic trainer at Arizona during her husband’s college days, deserves a lot of credit for this remarkable success story. She is a full-time counselor at a Tucson behavioral health center who acted as her husband’s schedule-maker, proofreader and shoulder-to-the-wheel support system. Only once, in early winter, did the load become overwhelming.
“I actually broke down and cried,” Durazo says. “So we got in the car and drove to Disneyland, the happiest place on earth. We got back on Christmas Eve, and I was ready to go again.”
In the middle of back-to-back trips to Phoenix in early March, Durazo visited his father at the VA Hospital. The two squeezed together to take a picture. His dad wore a baseball cap that said “Durazo Hitting Co.”
His son hit this one out of the park.
