“It would kill some men to get so close to their dream and not touch it. They’d consider it a tragedy,” Ray Kinsella said to Dr. Moonlight Graham in “Field of Dreams.”
Graham, a minor league player who was called up to a professional baseball game but never got an at-bat, responded, “If I’d only gotten to be a doctor for five minutes — now that would have been a tragedy.”
Few athletes are able to make a difference outside their respective sport — former Tiger Eddy Furniss was one of the few.
The 6-foot-4-inch, 220-pound first baseman was more than an imposing figure. Thirteen years after his final college game, Furniss is still the all-time Southeastern Conference leader in hits (352), home runs (80), RBIs (308), doubles (87) and total bases (689).
Those numbers put him third in total bases, fourth in home runs and doubles and fifth in RBIs in the history of college baseball.
“He was loved by his teammates and respected as a competitor,” said former LSU coach Skip Bertman. “Fans would get on him wherever we’d go but by the third game would be standing and clapping.”
Furniss won three SEC titles, went to three College World Series and won two national championships in 1996 and 1997.
He received the Dick Howser Trophy in 1998 as college baseball’s most outstanding player, hitting .403 with 28 home runs and 76 RBIs.
“I had this irrational certainty that I was going to get a hit every time I went to the plate,” Furniss said.
Even greater than his athletic prowess was his ability to give it up. Furniss did something most athletes would never dream of doing. He walked away before he ever made it past Double A ball in the minor league system.
It wasn’t to sulk after five injury-plagued minor league seasons or to wallow in self-pity about a dream that faded. It was to focus his energy on a new vision.
He wanted to be a doctor like his father, who worked more than 300 miles away in Nacogdoches, Texas, but attended every weekend series at LSU while Furniss was a Tiger.
“I saw how people approached him in town, how much difference he made in peoples’ lives,” Eddy Furniss said. “He saved their mother or their kid. He saved lives. You can’t put a price on that.”
Furniss married his high school sweetheart, Crystal, who was with him through every tough decision, from LSU to the minor league affiliates of the Pittsburgh Pirates, Oakland Athletics and Texas Rangers.
She said she remembers when Furniss realized his true passion. In 2002, he called her before a baseball game in Shreveport while he was playing for the Rangers’ Double-A affiliate.
Crystal said she was worried because she never received phone calls from him before games. He proceeded to tell her he was released, and he felt relief rather than sorrow.
“He knew it was time,” she said. “He started studying for the MCAT and started medical school and never looked back. I think this was his calling, and baseball was an avenue and a path but not what he was meant to do.”
Furniss, a three-time Academic All-American, had the grades to achieve that goal.
He went to John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth to complete his medical residency, the same facility his father attended. Furniss was one of only seven in his class of 215 to choose family medicine, the same profession his father selected.
“I chose it because I felt I could do the most good for the most people, and I had a good example in my father,” he said. “I always wanted to be a small town doctor.”
Furniss was inducted into the College Baseball Hall of Fame in July 2010 and continues to practice medicine in Nacogdoches.
He has three children and has coached his 7-year-old son in baseball for three years.
“That’s really how I get my joy out of baseball now,” Furniss said. “I have not missed playing baseball. I don’t want that to sound bad, but I really played for so long and so hard.”
Though he has left Baton Rouge, he isn’t forgotten. LSU coach Paul Mainieri asked junior shortstop Austin Nola why he wore the No. 36, a unique number for a shortstop.
“He said, ‘That’s because Eddy Furniss wore No. 36, and I want to be like Eddy,'” Mainieri said.
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Contact Rowan Kavner at [email protected]