Jim Tiggas should be as dead as spring training baseball in Tucson. It wasn’t just the heart attack, the quadruple bypass or the 13-day coma. That was just the beginning.
A few months after the heart surgery and the coma came the “we found a large mass of cancer in your chest” news. Then came the stem-cell transplant and two years of high-dose chemo treatments to fight lymphoma.
During this period, Tiggas’ mother and his brother died on the same day, an hour apart. “At one point, I told the doctors, ‘I don’t have time for this; I’ve got some work to do,’” Tiggas says now. “They looked at me like they would look at a dead man.”
He was told it was 50-50 he would live to see 50. Now, at 55, Tiggas has some work to do. If the departure of the White Sox, Rockies and Diamondbacks was the death knell for Tucson spring training, it was the signal for Jim Tiggas to start living.
You might not know the name or the face, but every spring you can see the impact of Tiggas’ work in hotel lobbies, at car rental counters and in a restaurant near you. In the Tucson sports community, Jim Tiggas has filled a significant void. He has become Mr. March.
“Our college softball, baseball and golf teams rented more than 9,000 Tucson hotel rooms last month,” he says. “By 2013, we believe we’ll expand that total to 25,000 hotel rooms. This is full speed ahead.”
Tiggas grew up a baseball nut in the Minneapolis area. His family made and sold sandwiches at Vikings and Twins home games, and Tiggas stayed in the food-service business until retiring to Tucson about 15 years ago.
The business is called Tucson Invitational Games. Get it? TIG? Short for Tiggas. It is one and the same. Every March, Tiggas and his son, Matt, and daughter-in-law, Kandace, play host to about 120 small-college softball, golf and baseball teams. Most of them stay for a week.
They stay in Tucson hotels, use the Tucson airport, rent Tucson vehicles and use their per diem to eat Tucson food and frequent Tucson movies, ballgames and tourist destinations.
“It spreads by word of mouth and by the quality of work we do,” says former UA baseball coach Jerry Stitt, who helps coordinate this year’s newest venture to the TIG family: college baseball.
“We had baseball teams here this year from Connecticut, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Washington and other cold-weather sites. They told us they’re coming back next year, and they’re going to bring more teams with them.”
No, you will not see Justin Upton or Troy Tulowitzki on the field, but that’s not the point.
When Hamline University of St. Paul, Minn., brought both its baseball and softball teams to Tucson, March 18-26, it rented five vans and an automobile. It required roughly 200 hotel nights to lodge players and coaches, and that doesn’t include the parents who accompanied both teams.
During March, about 25 softball teams and their entourages paid for tickets to watch nationally prominent Arizona play at Hillenbrand Stadium. The interest from visiting softball players was such that a chilly Wednesday night game against Creighton drew a capacity crowd of 2,817.
Tiggas launched the TIG in 2002. The first team he successfully wooed to Tucson was the Minot State softball team from North Dakota. The Beavers liked it so much they have been back to Tucson eight times.
This year Minot State was joined by, among others, the varsity and JV of William Penn University of Iowa; Robert Morris University of Pennsylvania; Augsburg College of Minnesota; and Rutgers-Newark of New Jersey.
“I got the idea when I went to Fort Myers, Fla., 15 years ago to watch my son Matt’s baseball team, Southwest State of Minnesota, play with a collection of other small-college baseball teams,” says Tiggas. “But it rained a lot. I was thinking, ‘It’s not raining in Tucson.’ I knew we could do better.”
And so the softball teams come, March after March after March. Dordt College of Iowa; Aquinas College of Michigan; the University of British Columbia and the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. NAIA teams. Division III teams. Teams looking to get out of the snow.
This is win-win for Tucson.
The Big 12 and Big 10 conferences have had discussions about bringing a 16-team spring baseball/softball tournament to the Tucson Invitational Games. It can work because there are 19 oft-vacant major-league baseball fields at Kino Sports Complex and Hi Corbett Field. Tiggas and Stitt hope to expand next year’s baseball field to 50 or more.
It won’t replace spring training in visibility and civic pride, but it keeps the tourism industry pumping. “The old spring training marketing theme here was ‘30 games in 30 days,’” says Tiggas. “Last month, we had 400 softball games in 30 days.”
Spring training in Tucson? It’s not dead yet.
SOURCE: http://azstarnet.com/sports/47337db3-7c62-52df-9919-3f10b85d9c21.html
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