To say golf was his game isn’t quite accurate. Golf was one of Pat Odlaug’s games. It wasn’t his passion.
Baseball, that was his true love.
When the Mukilteo teacher and coach died of cancer in 2004, he left a legacy of looking out for kids. He left a devoted family and good friends. For years, those friends joined him on trips to major league ballparks all over the country.
“We started doing it in 1979,” Lloyd Stevens said. Retired from teaching at Bishop Blanchet High School in Seattle, Stevens is just back from another baseball trip, this time to Florida.
He misses Odlaug, his fellow traveler, who taught history and coached baseball and golf at Blanchet for 15 years before coming to the Mukilteo School District. “It was always a guy trip,” Stevens said. “We had a good time.”
Stevens won’t play in the second annual Pat Odlaug Memorial Golf Tournament Aug. 6 at Harbour Pointe Golf Club. He’s no golfer, but he did find a way to help. A fundraiser for the Mukilteo Boys &Girls Club, the tournament includes an auction. “I contributed baseball tickets,” Stevens said.
“He was an avid sports fan,” said Odlaug’s stepdaughter, Sharise Deline of Stanwood. Odlaug and her mother, Selma Odlaug of Mukilteo, were married in the mid-1980s.
“He had a way of making every person feel they were the most important person. He could talk to anybody and find the good in them,” Deline said.
Odlaug was 59 when he died Feb. 7, 2004. Cancer that started in his esophagus spread to his liver and brain.
After years at Blanchet, Odlaug taught at ACES, an alternative high school in the Mukilteo School District, where he launched an athletic program in 1987.
“I think he found his niche at ACES,” Stevens said. “He had a lot of respect for those kids. A lot of us tend to write them off.”
Odlaug also coached baseball at Mariner High School, taught driver’s education and taught a year at Kamiak High School.
Tiffany Turner, a friend of Deline’s since their days at Olympic View Junior High School, organized the golf tournament. In its first year, the event raised about $10,000 for the Boys &Girls Club.
“Pat had a huge heart,” said Turner, who lives in Texas, near Austin. “He helped so many kids at the alternative school. Two of them stood up at his memorial service and broke down in tears.”
Turner played golf at Mariner, and she and Deline were best friends in school.
“He was just a great man. He was a second dad to me,” said Turner, a 1989 Mariner graduate.
“Everywhere Pat went, he called it an ‘outing,’ whether it was to Husky Stadium, Safeco Field or Dick’s Drive-in, his favorite place,” Turner said. She dubbed the golf tournament “Odlaug’s Outing.”
Even though he coached golf, Turner said he wasn’t much of a golfer until the last few years of his life. “He taught driver’s ed, too, and we always joked that he was a terrible driver,” she said.
Last year’s golf tournament drew many of Odlaug’s family members and friends.
“The money was much welcomed, it all goes back into our club,” said Greg Garka, athletic program director of the Mukilteo Boys &Girls Club. The club serves about 1,700 kids, Garka said.
It was a cause close to Odlaug’s heart, his stepdaughter said.
“His parents died when he was 14,” Deline said. He was taken in by an aunt and raised in Seattle’s Green Lake area. He also was involved with a Boys &Girls Club there.
“He said it was a place that kept him out of trouble. He learned his sports ethics there. It was a place where he felt safest,” Deline said.
Deline’s 9-year-old daughter, Taylor, was Odlaug’s baseball buddy. She had hoped to go with her grandfather on a trip to see the Boston Red Sox when she turned 10. Selma Odlaug plans to take Taylor on the trip next summer.
She’ll never forget the man who’ll be missing on that trip. It still will be Odlaug’s outing.
Columnist Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460 or muhlsteinjulie@heraldnet.com.
Memorial golf tournament
The second annual Pat Odlaug Memorial Golf Tournament will be Aug. 6 at Harbour Pointe Golf Club in Mukilteo. Cost is $125 per player or $500 per team. Proceeds benefit the Mukilteo Boys &Girls Club. Registration starts at 6:30 a.m. Play starts at 7:30 a.m.
For more information, call Sharise Deline, 360-652-6589; Tiffany Turner, 512-569-4440; or the Mukilteo Boys &Girls Club, 425-355-2773.
Pat Odlaug and granddaughter Taylor Deline
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