Gene Shell a Winner in Long Career
By TERRELL LESTER
Editor at Large
COACH WITH MENTOR: Gene Shell with his wife Francis at their home. The couple has been married 47 years and she stayed by his side as he endured an illness that caused him to be fitted for a prosthetic limb after he lost part of one of his legs. With her help he began the therapy that would enable him to regain his mobility, and his pride.
TERRELL LESTER for GTR Newspapers
Gene Shell never was a man to give up. To surrender. To quit.
Not in the game of baseball. Not in the game of life. Not in a wartime foxhole.
Gene Shell is a fighter. A scrapper. Always has been.
From his days as a youngster on Tulsa’s west side to his tour of duty in Korea to the College World Series.
The word “quit” was not in Gene Shell’s vocabulary.
Yet there he was, in 2007, bed-ridden, depressed, scared.
Ready to quit.
His right leg had been amputated at the knee.
His weight had dropped from 180 to 120.
A bacterial infection that he called “Clostridium difficile” – or “C. diff” – was ravaging his body.
“I really wanted to die,” Shell said recently from the comfort of his south Tulsa home.
“I had given up.”
There was no fight left in Gene Shell.
He even begged his wife to divorce him, to spare her the torture of his decline.
Then, during the darkest period of Shell’s life, during which he spent some 16 months confined to a hospital and a nursing home, four of his former University of Tulsa baseball players showed up to deliver one of the all-time, game-changing pep talks.
“They had heard that I had given up,” Shell said. “That I wanted to die.”
“But, coach, what are we supposed to do,” was their unified response, Shell recalled.
“What do I care what you do? I want to die,” Shell retorted, defiantly, brusquely.
Shell recounted the comments from the four grown men, combining their words into one voice.
“Coach, that’s not what you taught us. You told us that we were going to face adversity and that things were going to get tough, and that we were going to have to overcome them,” they said.
As he replayed, slowly, the words of his players, Shell stopped momentarily, letting the memory of that day linger.
“I thought, my God, I’ve been teaching these guys all their lives how to be tough,” he said.
“That changed my life, right then and there. I said I am going to get well.”
He did. And how. As quickly as he built a championship-caliber baseball team at TU some four decades earlier, Shell turned things around in his personal life.
He was fitted for a prosthetic limb and began the therapy that would enable him to regain his mobility, and his pride.
His wife, Frances, was at his side the whole distance, with words of encouragement and a shoulder for support.
Shell fought back. Climbed back. Shed the shroud of darkness that once enveloped his very being.
Despite the C.diff having also claimed part of his left foot, Shell now routinely plays golf with old friends once a week and drives to and from an assortment of social engagements.
He has regained much of his lost weight. The smile has returned to his face. His sense of humor is as keen as ever.
He relishes each and every opportunity to turn back the conversational clock to his days of coaching at Webster High School, at the University of Tulsa, to the days when friendships were forged and handshakes mattered.
Shell, at the age of 84, calls himself “the luckiest guy in the entire world.”
Lucky to return from 18 months in the Army during the Korean War, when so many around him did not make it back alive.
Lucky to have worked under such celebrated coaches and mentors as Bill Allen, Glenn Dobbs, F.A. Dry, Jim Sellers.
Lucky that Frances ignored his pleas for divorce from his hospital bed. Lucky that she remained steadfast, to help hold his life and their marriage together for 47 years.
Lucky that his former players still embrace him, making regular telephone calls and showing up for spirited visits.
Lucky that he can look back with pride on a life rich in accomplishment and reward.
Shell was reared in Tulsa, west of downtown. He attended Central High School before transferring to Webster, where he graduated in 1948.
His baseball and basketball skills took him to Northeastern State and to Southwestern State before he pinned his hopes on semipro baseball.
Not long after war broke out in Korea in 1950, Shell enlisted in the army. During his 18-month hitch, half the time spent on the front lines, Shell earned a battlefield promotion to sergeant first class.
“Life expectancy was 21 days for sergeant first class,” said Shell, who served in a field artillery unit.
Following his discharge, Shell returned home and resumed his work in a west Tulsa refinery. At the same time, he enrolled at the University of Tulsa.
Hoping to, in his words, “make my life count for something,”
Shell pursued a career path in education, due in part due to his admiration of his coach at Webster, George Broad.
“Everybody has a coach that he looks up to,” Shell said.
Upon graduation from TU in 1957, Shell was hired at Claremore as high school baseball coach, assisting in basketball and football.
Bill Allen, basketball coach at Webster, offered Shell an assistant’s job in 1959, with the offer of the head baseball position.
Webster was experiencing a phenomenal run of athletic talent at the time, with the arrival of such all-star talent as Alan Axley, Rich Calmus and Carl Morton.
Shell responded by winning back-to-back baseball state championships (1961-62). He was on the bench with Allen when Calmus was selected the 1962 All-State player of the year in basketball.
“That’s where I really learned to coach,” Shell said. “Bill is probably the best coach in the country. He is the best on-the-floor basketball coach in the country.”
Despite his success in baseball, Shell wanted to coach basketball. Allen was in the early stages of a hall-of-fame career that would stretch into the 1980s.
In 1963, Sellers, Edison’s director of athletics, offered Shell that basketball opportunity.
Shell had completed his second year at Edison when Dobbs came calling with a deal that would define his coaching career.
Dobbs had just led TU to victory in the 1964 Bluebonnet Bowl with a passing game that would lead the nation for half of the decade.
Dobbs wanted Shell to assist in football.
“I was pretty up-front with him,” Shell said. “I said: ‘Coach, I don’t know anything about football. I don’t like football. I don’t want to coach football.’
“Coach said, ‘I didn’t ask you whether you liked football, or if you knew anything about it.’ He said, ‘I know everything there is to know about football. What I need is somebody to help me.’
“I said, ‘Well, OK, I’ll come if you’ll let me help coach basketball,’” Shell said.
Joe Swank was the head coach of TU’s basketball program and Ken Hayes was his assistant.
When Shell reported for football practice, Dobbs assigned him to handle the running game.
“We only ran three plays (a game). I mean, what’s to run?” Shell said, a smile turning to a hardy laugh.
Dobbs also placed Shell in charge of program sales and hot dog concessions, along with scattered scouting assignments.
That took care of Shell’s fall duties. He helped Swank in the winter and began building a baseball program in the spring.
He never landed the top basketball job he so coveted, but he ascended to unprecedented heights with the baseball program.
In 1969, Shell and a mostly home-grown baseball team qualified for the College World Series, and eventually finished runner-up to Arizona State.
Two years later, TU and Shell returned to the College World Series, placing third.
In that three-season span, Shell was college baseball’s winningest coach. In 1972, Shell found the Golden Hurricane sitting at No. 1 atop the college baseball poll.
Shell was the toast of the town. Recognition and salutes were commonplace.
Yet in 1980, after winning 478 games, Shell and the baseball program were eliminated by the university.
He tried his hand at various ventures, conducting clinics and working as a sports photographer, before returning to baseball as head coach at Southwestern Louisiana (1984-87).
When Shell finally turned in his coaching gear for the final time, he and Frances cooked up a couple of new and different adventures.
They operated a Dairy Queen in Duncan and a hamburger grill in Tulsa (Coach’s Grill).
At one point, Shell helped Dobbs launch a Tulsa nightspot (The Vault) and a lawn maintenance operation.
It’s been an exhilarating run for Shell, a run he recalls with delight, not disdain, a run he enjoys for the fellowship he encountered along the way.
“I’ve been so lucky,” he said.
“I worked for four of the best guys in the whole world,” he said, citing Bill Allen, Glenn Dobbs, F.A. Dry and Jim Sellers.
“Bill Allen. Nobody can say enough about him. I’d be nothing without him. I’d be nothing without Glenn Dobbs.”
Shell carved out a coaching career that will rival those of his mentors.
He has been inducted into the Webster and Edison athletics halls of fame, the University of Tulsa hall of fame, the Oklahoma Coaches Association hall of fame, and authored a baseball book, “Bottom of the Ninth,” in 1969.
“I was a good coach,” he said. “I made all the right moves. That’s what coaches do. They don’t sit around and plan their strategy here and there. It happens at the moment. And if you’ve got it, you’ve got it, and if you don’t, you lose.”
Gene Shell never had a losing record in 25 years of coaching college baseball.
He calls himself lucky.
Others call him a fighter.
No one calls him a quitter.
Updated 09-15-2014
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