Local legends honored at fundraising event

Everybody won as Petaluma’s Athletic Edge served up its 2019 Hall of Fame dinner in the Community Center at Luchessi Park on Saturday night.

The event honored three local legends, entertained a hall full of youth baseball supporters and, most importantly, earned big bucks to help send the Athletic Edge 13-under baseball team to the National Youth Baseball Tournament in New York.

For the fifth year, three community members were inducted into the Athletic Edge Hall of Fame.

“The Hall of Fame is our way of saying thank you to people who have given so much to the community,” explained Athletic Edge owner Jeff Inglin.

This year’s inductees - Al Endriss, Nolan Fonseca and Bob Padecky - each in his own way, have become community legends.

Endriss spent more than a quarter of a century coaching high school football and baseball, with the bulk of that time spent coaching baseball at Redwood High School where he was chosen National High School Baseball Coach of the Year in 1974 and led his team to the National High School Championship in 1976.

He later coached at College of Marin, leading the junior college team to 465 wins and transferring numerous players to Division I and Division II schools.

Before turning to coaching, Endriss was an excellent athlete in his own right. He played pro baseball in the Brooklyn (that’s right, Brooklyn, now Los Angeles) Dodgers organization and also played a season of football with the San Francisco 49ers and with Calgary in the Canadian Football League.

Now 92 years old, Endriss is an articulate speaker and story teller.

During his brief induction speech, he told a story about his former player, Inglin, at College of Marin.

He explained that the baseball coach at USC, who was considering giving the COM player a scholarship, called for an evaluation of the player.

“I told him: ‘If he doesn’t hit for you, I’ll pay for his scholarship,’?” Endriss said.

Endriss never had to reach into his bank account. In his first game at USC, Inglin hit three home runs.

“You are very, very lucky to have someone like Jeff in your community,” Endriss said.

Fonseca is, in many ways, the gold standard for Petaluma youth coaches.

After a pro career in the Los Angeles Angels organization and 10 years of semi-pro baseball, Fonseca turned to coaching.

He coached Little Leaguers in the Petaluma Valley Major League and also coached Senior League, Joe DiMaggio and travel teams. His Valley Little League teams won two District 35 Tournament of Champions titles in a row.

Most important, hundreds of Petaluma youngsters learned how to play baseball the right way under his guidance.

“A coach is more a teacher than a coach,” he said. “A coach helps his players know about life.”

Before he retired from full-time writing in 2013, Padecky established a reputation as one of the nation’s best sports writers.

During his career he received more than 50 local, state and national awards. He covered 23 Super Bowls, 19 world Series, four Olympic Games, four NBA finals, four NCAA Final Fours and countless other events.

He has interviewed many of the major sports celebrities of his time, including Barry Bonds and Muhammad Ali.

Writing for The Santa Rosa Press Democrat, he has also spotlight many of the Redwood Empire’s local sports figures. A great many of his stories have featured athletes, coaches and friends from Petaluma where he now lives. He still writes an occasional column for the newspaper.

He enthralled the audience with a story about his run-in with former Oakland Raiders quarterback Ken Stabler - an incident that led to the planting of cocaine in his rented vehicle, an arrest and a police escort out of Gulf Shores, Alabama after Stabler took exception to one of his columns.

The evening included both a live and silent auction to raise funds for the AE team’s trip to New York, helping the young players add to Petaluma’s ever-growing baseball lore.