ANALYSIS: Tug Baughn made the world a better place
Bartlesville Sports Hall of Fame member Tug Baughn passed away on Monday. He was 90 years old.
By Mike Tupa
February 11, 2025
BARTLESVILLE AREA SPORTS REPORT
E.L. “Tug” Baughn was a composite:
The ultimate husband, father and grandfather.
The ultimate gentleman.
The ultimate friend.
The ultimate coach.
The ultimate referee.
The ultimate smile.
Baughn strolled through life like a giant warm shadow of benevolence, enveloping with love those that came within his presence.
His life — which spanned 90-plus years, the final 60 in Bartlesville — ended peacefully on Monday morning.
The mourners are many.
“I’ve always thought extremely well of Tug,” said former player Terry Hughes about his beloved mentor, adding that: “His wife Phyllis was a part of that.”
“We enjoyed being at the field every evening because he made it a place we wanted to come to,” recalled another former player, Rick Johnson, about his time in the latter 1970s when Baughn coached Bartlesville American Legion Baseball. “But most of all he was able to teach us things about life that to this day I still carry with me.”
If movie director Frank Capra had made a movie about Baughn’s impact on this globe it might well have been titled: “He Made It A Wonderful Life.”
From his birth in March 1934 to his passing this week, Baughn made it a wonderful life for those around him.
It’s hard to get a grasp on where Baughn made his biggest impact.
He served as a paid referee or game official for a half-century, beginning when he was a teenager and established himself as one of the best men in stripes in a multi-state region. He was assigned to officiate in 23 state championship basketball games and 21 state championship football games.
One of his former field crew of officials, Mark Hittner, went on to be one of the most respected officials in the NFL.
Baughn continued to run up and down basketball courts or football fields into his late 60s or early 70s before he hung up the whistle.
When not umpiring games, Baughn spent countless hours as a coach.
Tug Baughn coached the Doenges Ford Indians in the American Legion baseball program.
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In 1966 — two years after his job with Phillips Petroleum brought him to Bartlesville — Baughn began coaching the Redbird Ranch team in Bartlesville Little League play.
By the mid-1970s, his volunteer coaching journey advanced to the 18-and-under Doenges Ford Indians in the American Legion program.
That’s where he exerted his considerable influence on Hughes, Johnson and a score of other young men.
They not only enjoyed playing the game the way Baughn taught it — they also created immense success, including winning multiple American Legion state titles and finishing within one win in 1978 of qualifying for the American Legion World Series.
During Baughn’s four years as the Indians’ skipper, the team posted a 204-54 win-loss record.
“Tug had the greatest baseball mind I’ve ever known,” Johnson said. “The way we played the game was so much fun. We were so innovative back in the 1970s. To me he was far ahead of everybody else. … I’ll always be indebted to him for making that summer of 1978 one of the best summers I’ve ever experienced in my life.”
“He was a master,” said Hughes, who like Johnson spent many, many years following the footsteps of Baughn as far as coaching. “As a manager in the third base box he could control what the pitcher threw you.”
Baughn also managed to get the best out of his players, recalled Hughes.
“We were pretty successful,” said Hughes. “We were one game away from the World Series. He also surrounded himself with good coaches.”
During an interview in 2024, Baughn assessed his strength as a coach.
"I felt there were better coaches than me coaching hitting and pitching," he said. "But, once the game started I felt like I could hold my own with anybody in managing a game."
Baughn also excelled as a competitor, one of the best-ever in this area to play men’s fastpitch softball, which used to be a major sport.
He belongs to the Oklahoma Softball Hall of Fame (as a player) and enjoyed being named a decade apart a two-time All-American by the International Softball Conference (1957, 1967).
In 2013, Baughn also accepted induction into the Bartlesville Athletic Hall of Fame (BAHOF). Eight years later, his son Stan also was enshrined by the BAHOF, making Tug and Stan third first father and son to be inducted as individuals.
In the Hall of Fame of his heart, Tug’s number-one inductee was his wife of 70-plus years Phyllis — the ultimate definition of a help mate, a protector, nurturer and backer. They produced three sons together, Steven, Stan and David.
“I could have looked the world over and I would have never found a better image for a mother, for a wife and for a supporter,” Baughn said in 2024. “She is the ultimate. With our handicapped son (Steven, who died in 2019 at age 63) she never missed a day in her life talking to him on the phone.”
One other experience about Phyllis’ devotion is telling.
It took place in 1976 after the Indians beat a Texas team in the American Legion Mid-South Regional.
Immediately after the game, the upset Texas players wanted to fight — a sentiment that extended to the parents.
Baughn was confronted behind the dugout by a Texan who loomed gigantic at 6-foot-6, 240 pounds.
As the man reared back to throw a punch at Baughn, the petite and small Phyllis clobbered the Texan from behind with a metal stadium seat.
“He turned and ran with his tail between his legs to the bus,” Baughn recalled in 2024.
Phyllis loved Baughn from the start — after attending the first game he ever officiated.
“Somehow she saw every game I ever coached in Legion baseball and Little League,” Baughn said in 2024. “I would have been nothing without her.”
Tug and Phyllis Baughn
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Among Baughn’s early college basketball officiating assignments in the early 1950s was to work a game that included Northeastern Oklahoma State (Tahlequah).
Among the players in uniform was Joe Gilbert.
Perhaps no one could have prophesied at that time both Baughn and Gilbert would settle in or near Bartlesville, Gilbert becoming a coach for 66 seasons (1954-2020) at Barnsdall High School.
Not surprisingly, both men — giants in character and soul — became close friends throughout their adult lives. One night in the early 2000s, Baughn drove up to Barnsdall to speak up for Gilbert at a school board meeting arranged by a small group of disgruntled individuals that wanted to strip Gilbert of his coaching duties.
Baughn stood up with majestic style — in the meeting room overflowing with anxious wall-to-wall people — to advocate for Gilbert. In the final result, Gilbert gave up two of the four varsity teams he coached but added a new one (slowpitch softball) and continued to coach up until he died at approximately 90 years old in 2020.
Baughn, meanwhile, and Phyllis continued to attend their grandchildren’s sports events. They were welcome, popular and beloved fixtures at the Price Complex, Bill Doenges Memorial Stadium and other sports venues.
Within a few weeks of his death, his phone voice continued to resonate with boisterous good-will and gentle kindness.
His energetic soul had been tempered with heartbreak and challenge but whether in person or on the phone he always exuded positiveness, strength and genuine interest in whoever was the object of his attention.
Baughn seemed always larger-than-life and seemingly indestructible.
But, as the great English statesman Thomas More said: “Death … comes for us all, my lords. Yes, even for Kings he comes.”
As for me, I hope wherever Tug is right now there’s a basketball court, a ball diamond and a football field nearby.
I hope he can once again run free on youthful knees and legs, unfettered by the pain of old age.
I hope he’s already embraced his older brother Richard — who 11-year-old Tug watched march away to war nearly 80 years ago, only to never return.
I hope when each of us feels burdened by crushing adversity or too tired or discouraged to show grace to others that we will remember Tug’s grace and commitment to put aside his own hardships in the service of others.
In conclusion, perhaps a fitting eulogy can be found in the words of the former British poet John Donne:
“No man is an island, Entire of itself; Every man is a piece of the continent, A part of the main. … Any man’s death diminishes me, Because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.”