Pat Durr points his thumb back over his shoulder, toward Rocky Miller Park. These days, as ladybug hibernation nears, the Northwestern baseball team is taking its final cuts outside before winter. Durr’s eyes wander from the adjacent football practice field to the action on the diamond.
“Coming out here in the fall and seeing the guys on the baseball diamond, I’m like, ‘Wouldn’t it just be nice to be out there, relaxing, throwing the ball around?'” Durr said. “And I’m stuck in here, hitting guys and running around.”
That’s what linebackers do and Durr takes pride in his duty for the Wildcats. But two years ago, as a high school senior in St. Charles, Ill., Durr had opportunities to chose a laid-back fall and winter as a professional baseball player.
“I don’t like to brag. I’m not like that,” Durr said. “But I had a handful.”
Scouts drooled over Durr in his senior year. His baseball coach and various scouts discussed the chances of him being drafted as early as the sixth round. When you’re drafted in the first eight rounds, Durr said, “that’s when you usually want to go — that’s when you have enough money involved.”
And here’s a list of teams for whom Durr could be playing pro ball: the Cincinnati Reds, San Diego Padres, Los Angeles Dodgers, Pittsburgh Pirates and Chicago White Sox.
Instead he’s playing for free as backup football player at NU.
“The whole thing was, I committed to Northwestern early and a lot of teams knew education was so valuable (for me), they felt they couldn’t deal with it,” Durr said. “They thought, ‘Well, wow, that sucks. Great. There’s no way to convince him.'”
NU coach Randy Walker hasn’t observed Durr’s skills in centerfield. So he’s a little skeptical.
“Unless you’re a real high draft choice coming out of high school, you probably ought to go to college,” Walker said.
“He wasn’t a big bonus baby,” Walker continued with a smile. “He’s a good baseball player, but they weren’t offering him $2 million. If they were, I would’ve told him to take it and I could’ve been his agent. I would’ve said, ‘Hey Pat. I’ll be your agent. You take the money. Let’s go play major league baseball. I’ll be your personal attaché.'”
As much as Walker quips, he has trusted Durr as his fourth linebacker and a mainstay on the kickoff coverage squad. In a season of Big Ten title possibilities, Durr, who made just eight tackles last year, already has 26, including three for loss.
In the Cats’ win over Indiana, Durr showed the skills of a starter. He finished second on the team in tackles with six, one behind roommate and starting linebacker Kevin Bentley.
That was Durr’s introduction to the NU faithful, who had probably heard more about Bentley, Napoleon Harris and Billy Silva at the linebacker position. After the game Durr walked into the news conference for the first time in his NU career and exuberantly said, “Hey, I’m Pat!”
“We do most of the talking for him,” Bentley said. “He’s a great athlete and he’s so good on the field, but it just so happens that me and Napo have been playing pretty well ourselves. We tell him all of the time, if he was anywhere else in the Big Ten, he’d be a starting back there.”
Added Walker: “There’s times when we feel like we haven’t played him enough and we need to play him more. A lot of times, you get hung up with the guys who are in there. It’s hard to pull Kevin Bentley out of the game … but we’ve just got to increase (Durr’s) time at linebacker because he’s a good player and he can play.”
In the offseason, Durr wants to sit down with Walker and discuss walking onto the baseball team, where he would join punter J.J. Standring, a pitcher.
Durr may have sacrificed a couple hundred thousand bucks to play at NU. He would like more than just grinding it out on the gridiron, but even so, he doesn’t look back with regret.
“I’m going to try to play baseball here,” he said. “Obviously, I’m not talking about it now.
“If you ask me, college football is the best sport — by far, the greatest sport. You go to the pros, it’s more like a business. In college, you play for the fun of it. Just look at here. You’ve got Ohio State-Michigan. You’ve got Northwestern-Michigan coming. This atmosphere is incredible. It’s indescribable.
“By far, college football is the greatest sport.”
