Piedmont College alumni Marvin Hudson, left, and Dock Sisk reminisce about how one simple question launched Hudson’s major league career.
The 2016 World Series between Chicago and Cleveland was over, and umpire Marvin Hudson sat in the locker room reflecting on the past week and half of baseball. As part of the six-man crew calling the Series, Hudson had worked behind home plate for Game 4, which Cleveland won, putting them just one game away from the title. But Chicago took the final three games and shocked the world with their first World Series trophy since 1908.
At Piedmont College on Feb. 11, Hudson reflected on that day in early November and his feelings immediately after the game. He was at Piedmont not only as the guest speaker but also as one of three former Piedmont athletes being inducted into the college’s Sports Hall of Fame.
“It will be remembered in history as one of the best,” Hudson said. “It was an epic Series. You had the Cubs, and you had Cleveland, with 150 years between them that they hadn’t won a Series—and it goes seven games. For me to stand here today and say I was part of that history means a lot, but I wasn’t the only one … I have my family, I have my friends, and I’ll tell you why in a second.”
Hudson explained that it was a seemingly offhand remark 30 years earlier that had resulted in his call to work the World Series. While playing baseball at Piedmont in 1986, one of the umpires, Piedmont alumnus Dock Sisk (’72), asked him, “Would you like to officiate?”
Hudson said he thought about it, and said “Yes,” and soon he was wearing the striped shirt, refereeing local high school football and basketball games. His career progressed to AAA baseball, and in 1999 he was umpiring in the Dominican Republic when he “got the call that every triple-A umpire looks for,” a call to begin working his first season in the National League, with his first assignment a regular season series between the Dodgers and the Phillies.
Throughout his time as a minor-league umpire and right up to today, Hudson said that it was his wife, Sherry, whom he met at Piedmont, who has kept him going. He recalled times when he was on the road and their child was sick, and he wanted to change careers. “She’d say, ‘Well, just wait till the end of the season, and you can decide then,” he said.
Since 1999, Hudson has spent much of his time on the road, working ballgames in all the major-league towns. Umpires don’t get a lot of press, which Hudson said is the way they like it. But occasionally he has found himself on the front page of the sports section, such as the time last season when he tossed Bryce Harper of the Washington Nationals from a game, which lit up the Twitterverse.
He has called several division playoffs and championship series, but 2016 was his first World Series. Hudson said the umpires and the players get just as caught up in the excitement of the event, but once play begins, “You just do your job and call ‘em one pitch at a time.”
But after that Series, Hudson said he thought back on what it had taken to get there. “I looked back at how just a few words could mold somebody into what they are. And it all tracks back to here, where one Piedmont alumni said to a future Piedmont alumni, ‘Would you like to officiate?’ It started right here, and I thank you.”
