FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla.-- --The seven-letter word keeps resurfacing in the life and baseball times of Aubrey Huff.
Without.
Huff, the Orioles' new middle-of-the-lineup slugger, graduated from a Texas high school without being drafted and without getting any serious looks from Division I colleges.
In his first seven seasons in the majors, Huff hit 141 homers without fanfare because he played primarily in the obscurity of Tampa Bay, a place without baseball tradition, without a consistent fan base.
Then, there's his most painful without, the one he could never, will never, shake.
Aubrey Huff III grew up without a father.
When he was 6, his dad, Aubrey II, was murdered while trying to stop a domestic dispute as a bystander in Abilene, Texas.
The boy was at his grandparents' house when the phone rang and his grandmother burst into tears. Suddenly, he and his 4-year-old sister, Angela, had no daddy; his mother was a 28-year-old widow.
Without warning. Without reason. Without goodbyes.
Yet this isn't a cautionary tale about a lost boy reeling from the cruelest blow, growing up bitter and angry. It's very much the opposite.
Because, from that tragic moment in December 1983, Fonda Huff dedicated herself to making sure her children never felt the void of a fatherless childhood.
"That was my whole goal in life," Fonda Huff said last week at the home her son bought for her in suburban St. Petersburg. "I guess I spoiled both of them, but they were not going to do without, just because their dad was killed."
That was the impetus behind the now fabled batting cage, where the boy's dream and the mom's promise melded.
While his father was alive, Huff spent many evenings at the softball field where his parents played in a coed league. Maybe that's where his love for baseball took root.
Cage comes to be
That passion blossomed as he grew older and attended the occasional Texas Rangers game in Arlington, roughly a 90-minute drive from the family's home in small-town Mineral Wells, west of Fort Worth.
On one of those trips, when Huff was 10, he asked his mom for a present: a batting cage in his backyard, one just like the big leaguers used.
"I begged her for a batting cage on the way home and she kind of blew it off," said Huff, now a 30-year-old corner infielder/outfielder who signed a three-year, $20 million deal with the Orioles this offseason. "I kept asking, kept asking and I finally got it. That was one of the biggest splurges for us."
With help from her father, a former carpenter, Fonda Huff built the foundation out of galvanized piping purchased from a hardware store. She added a self-loading pitching machine, netting and lights. All told, it cost about $3,000 - a Texas-sized expense for a single mother working in the seafood and meat departments of a Winn-Dixie supermarket.
She charged it to her credit card. Her grocery store co-workers said she was crazy. But it was an investment in her son's future.
"In the long run, I knew it would pay off," Fonda Huff said. "He always said he was going to be a major league baseball player, he always has. At the time, I wasn't thinking about that, I was thinking baseball scholarship."
She also was trying to level life's playing field.
"These other dads were able to pitch their sons to a higher level that I couldn't do," she said. "That's the reason I bought it, because [having no father] was not going to be a handicap for him."
More than 23 years later, the death - and life - of his father has become almost dreamlike for Huff.
"All I remember much is his face. I don't even remember how he sounds. That's how long ago it seems," Huff said. "The one thing that pops out in my mind is the memory of playing Atari with him, that's about it."
He won't forget his grandparents' reaction to that fateful phone call, however, or when his mother returned from Winn-Dixie 30 minutes later "just red-faced, bawling."
"We sat down and they said, 'Your father isn't going to be with us anymore. He is passed on.' And I was like, 'What do you mean?'" Huff said. "I kind of remember being upset, but I was expecting him to be back later. I guess, in a way, the way he got killed, if I was older, my God, I would have been [angry]. I probably would have spent the rest of my life looking for the guy if they didn't catch him.
"But being 6 years old, it wasn't as tough as it would have been if I were older."
'I think it hit me'
The funeral was held the day before Huff's seventh birthday. He faintly recalls looking at his father's casket, noticing "my dad's face just didn't really look right."
"I think it hit me then," he said. "I knew he was dead."
Aubrey Huff II was a 30-year-old electrician at an apartment complex in nearby Abilene. He was in the main office when the recently estranged husband of the buildings' assistant manager barged in, according to Fonda Huff. The man, Travis Ray Hughes, shot his wife and then turned the gun on the female manager, who had previously denied Hughes' requests to talk to his wife on the phone.
Huff's father pushed the manager out of the line of fire, but he was shot in the side. He struggled with Hughes for the gun, but eventually was shot fatally in the head.
Hughes fled, but was quickly apprehended by police. He is serving a life sentence in Texas. There's not much more Huff knows about the incident. The family rarely speaks about it.
"[My mother] kind of buried it and never really told me much about the way my dad used to be or the way it happened," Huff said. "It seemed to be a subject she doesn't want to bring up, which I completely understand. And I don't ever want to ask about it because I don't want to bring up something that's hard for her."
Instead, Fonda Huff, who has never remarried, turned her full attention to providing normality for her kids. She did it with the constant aid of her parents, who lived nearby and babysat the children while she worked.
And she did it by steering the kids toward athletics. A former high school basketball player who once scored 51 points in a game - sheepishly, she said, it was when girls would play only half the court - Fonda Huff coached her daughter, and was always around to watch her son.
"She was working at Winn-Dixie and she would leave on her lunch break and go to our soccer games," said Angela Huff, now 27, with a 3-year-old daughter of her own. "She was at everything."
Back to school
Eventually, Fonda Huff went back to college for her teaching certificate. Now, with a master's degree, she's in her 14th year of teaching.
Before Huff's junior year in high school, his mother landed her first teaching job at a middle school 40 minutes from home. The plan was for her and Angela to commute, while Huff finished out high school in Mineral Wells. But the new district had one of the best prep baseball teams in the area, and Huff decided to transfer.
Better instruction and the daily routine of hitting 100 balls in the backyard batting cage only helped so much. At 6 feet 4, 185 pounds, Huff was better suited to be a low-level small forward than a big-time power hitter. He received a scholarship offer to play basketball at a Division II university in Kansas, but nothing significant in baseball.
So he went to Vernon Regional Junior College, a two-year school in the northern Texas panhandle. That's where everything clicked. He began lifting weights twice a day and eating nonstop at the school cafeteria, gaining 25 pounds. His home run total mushroomed from one in his senior year of high school to 17 in his first year at Vernon.
One day in 1996, Huff received a call on the dorm's communal pay phone from someone claiming to be Turtle Thomas, then a University of Miami baseball assistant. The guy said the Division I powerhouse was interested in Huff, and Huff offered a curt "yeah, OK" and told him to mail him some information - assuming it was one of his buddies at Vernon messing around.
The next day, Huff received an overnight packet from the University of Miami and its baseball program. Embarrassed, Huff called Thomas back and apologized for his attitude. Thomas laughed and set up a visit. Soon, Huff had landed that elusive Division I ride - everything he and his mother had hoped for. At least that's what they thought.
"He was a little out of his element when he got down there," said Philadelphia Phillies outfielder Pat Burrell, a college teammate and friend of Huff's at Miami. "A small-town Texas guy and all of a sudden you are in Miami. I think it was a little bit of a culture shock for him, and I think there were times he was unsure whether he made the right decision to come there."
Strange new world
On his first day of school, Huff got lost going to the campus, tried to ask for directions, but couldn't find anyone who spoke English. He finally arrived 30 minutes late, ran into a parking nightmare and eventually went home, skipping the day's classes.
"I had this huge '88 extended-cab Chevrolet pickup driving around in Miami," Huff said. "If you can imagine a big redneck kid driving around in a big Texas truck trying to park in a parking lot at school with [tiny] parking spaces ... I think I hit two cars trying to park that thing."
His start with Miami's baseball team was nearly as inauspicious. At practice, no one talked to him. He was lonely, homesick. So he called Mom and said, "Come get me."
Fonda Huff flew to Florida and eased her boy's pain.
"Give it two more weeks, give it a chance," Huff remembers her saying. "You have a scholarship, this is always what you wanted to do. Imagine how bad you'd feel if you did give up. Give it two more weeks. If you still want to come home, you can come home."
Within days, he was invited to a baseball party. He bonded with teammates.
"And I never looked back," he said.
Huff excelled on the field at Miami, earning second-team All-America honors and setting the school record for RBIs (95) as a junior. The Tampa Bay Devil Rays selected him in the fifth round in the 1998 draft, and he began his quick ascent to the majors, making his big league debut two years after being drafted.
Perhaps more important, Huff said the Miami experience helped him "come out of my shell." He always had an inner confidence, but his outward shyness eroded.
He considers himself outgoing now, a guy who likes to clown around with friends, teammates and family. And though he'll never be comfortable in the middle of the media spotlight, he likes being the center of attention among buddies.
That's how his wedding-singer career began.
A few years ago, he "had some cocktails" at a friend's wedding and was coaxed into belting out a country karaoke song. A legend was born.
"I just went off with it for the whole two hours," he said. "All the old people loved it."
Now, every time he goes to a wedding, his friends make him sing. He has no formal training, but a voice strong enough to record the John Michael Montgomery tune "Letters from Home" for the 2005 CD Oh Say Can You Sing that featured 10 crooning ballplayers.
And, last month, at his own wedding, Huff serenaded his bride, Baubi, with "Cross My Heart" by his personal favorite, George Strait. "I wasn't really expecting it, but I kind of had a feeling it was going to happen," Baubi Huff said. "I was ecstatic, shocked. It was the best wedding gift he could have given me."
Transfer of duties
Now that Huff is married, his mom is taking a retirement of sorts. She's keeping her job as an honors geometry teacher in the St. Petersburg area, but will no longer be Huff's unofficial accountant, secretary and bill-payer.
"His wife can do all that stuff now," she said jokingly.
She also won't be as visible at her son's home games in Baltimore the way she was in Tampa Bay. She'll visit this summer, but she won't be living there. Not like in 1999, when she risked a move to Florida's West Coast after her daughter decided that's where she wanted to attend college. Mom didn't want to be left behind in Texas.
The decision was made even though there was no guarantee that her son, in Double-A at the time, would make the big leagues. It was the same faith she exhibited years earlier when financing that batting cage.
Within a year, Huff was playing in Tampa Bay and his mom was a ubiquitous presence at Tropicana Field. She was the rarest of creatures, a rabid Devil Rays fan. So rabid that on the day her pregnant daughter went into labor, Fonda Huff told Angela that she wouldn't take her to the hospital until the Rays game on TV was over.
It was already in the fifth inning, she figured, and Angela, as a first-time mother, would surely have a lengthy labor.
"That was so wrong that I had to wait for the game to be over," Angela said with a laugh.
Again, though, Fonda Huff was right. Her granddaughter wasn't born for another 11 hours - well before the next Rays game.
That has been the family's pattern. Trust Mom. And things will work out, through unthinkable tragedy and cross-country moves.
"My mom is a special lady," Huff said. "It took a lot of heart doing what she did, raising us two and being able to raise us like any other normal kid."
Without any regrets.
Without a doubt.
dan.connolly@baltsun.com