My favorite Russ Milligan moment came a little less than three years ago, a few weeks into what turned out to be his final season as Center Grove’s softball coach.
His team had just put together a 15-2 bludgeoning of an Avon squad that had reached the Class 4A state final the previous season, and I stood between second and third base waiting for him to finish his postgame chat with his players out in center field.
As he strolled toward me, smiling and shaking his head, he opened the conversation by summing the game up in about the most Milligan way possible:
“We’re so (freaking) good …”
Anyone who knew Russ knows what adjective he actually used.
I could always count on two sets of quotes from Milligan — the ones that were fit for publication, and his actual thoughts. I never knew which order they’d come in, but I always looked forward to getting both.
Less than three months later, Milligan retired from coaching after leading Center Grove to five state championships, all in the state’s largest class, and winning 741 games in 27 seasons.
He is the GOAT (greatest of all time) among Indiana high school softball coaches, but his personality might have been even greater than his coaching résumé.
Milligan died Tuesday as a result of COVID-19 complications. The disease has taken the lives of nearly half a million Americans, including about 12,000 Hoosiers — and this one hits particularly hard for me. Not being able to talk to him after softball games on a regular basis was bad enough. Knowing I’ll never be able to talk to him again at all is an entirely different level of crappy.
I only had the chance to cover Milligan for two seasons, each of which ended in the semistate. After the first of those runs came to an end in Bedford, on a red-hot day against a red-hot Gibson Southern team, the coach stood cooking in the parking lot and offered up the usual two sets of quotes, then pondered how many cold beers it would take him to forget about the defeat. (I never did ask what the final answer was.)
That conversation, and the one after the Avon game, were probably such ordinary ones for him that he wouldn’t have even remembered them if I brought them up. They were just who he was. But I always looked forward to them, whether after a win or a rare loss or during a random practice.
Jokes of varying degrees of crudeness. Petty beef with a longtime rival coach. No real filter to speak of. Yet for as off-putting as Milligan might have seemed to some on the surface, he was genuinely one of the good guys. At his core, he was a teddy bear.
A teddy bear with coarse sandpaper for fur, maybe, but a teddy bear nonetheless.
Milligan exited the coaching game with no fanfare in the summer of 2018, still in his mid-50s and eager to spend a few decades quietly enjoying more leisurely pursuits with his wife. Most of that time has now been stolen from them.
They deserved better. Russ deserved better.
As a coach — and far more importantly, as a human being — he was so (freaking) good.
Ryan O’Leary is the sports editor for the Daily Journal. He can be reached at [email protected].
