Senior Day will be emotional for Purdue's seniors, but their parents, too
Couple weeks ago, Purdue asked Mike and Micki Cline and Greg and Julie Eifert to reflect on their sons' college careers, for video-board content presumably to be shown Saturday during the home finale vs. Ohio State.
The dry run for senior day, though, turned out anything but for the parents of Purdue's two outgoing seniors, Ryan Cline and Grady Eifert.
“That was hard," Micki Cline said. "Grady’s parents had a hard time and we had a hard time, all four of us.”
Both Ryan Cline and Grady Eifert are particularly stoic types, so their chances of holding up emotionally Saturday before, during and after their final games in Mackey Arena are probably better than 50/50.
“But I have a pretty good feeling about what his parents are gonna look like," Mike Cline said, "and it’s not gonna be pretty.”
When Ryan Cline signed with Purdue out of Carmel High School in 2015, Mike Cline, a former team captain at Ohio State, basically put a hold on his loyalties to his alma mater and transferred them to West Lafayette.
For the Eiferts, however, their connection to the school predates the Clines' by a generation, if not more.
Greg Eifert played for Gene Keady in the '80s. He and Julie are both alumni.
So when Grady Eifert is bid farewell to by the Mackey Arena crowd following Saturday's game with Ohio State, things are going to get heavy.
There's simply no way around it.
Julie Eifert remembers the emotions stirred last year when Purdue honored Grady Eifert's friends and former roommates, Dakota Mathias and P.J. Thompson.
“Until it’s your own son," she said, "and it’s their last game in Mackey, you don’t get the full feeling.”
Saturday, they do. They all do.
“I’ll stand there Saturday at the game, take it all in and enjoy it like I hope Grady will," Greg Eifert said, "because it’s a special place.”
But Saturday, Purdue will be playing for much more than just a warm-and-fuzzy ending in Mackey Arena for its two seniors.
It's playing for a Big Ten title, a position even the most unabashed of homers couldn't have credibly expected after the Boilermakers lost a foundational senior class from last year's 30-win team, and certainly not when Purdue was 6-5 in December.
Then, things were trending toward the Bubble, at best, and with it, perhaps an anxious, or altogether muted, senior day.
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Instead, Cline and Eifert will leave with a meaningful legacy following their first and only seasons as full-time starters and carriers of consistently robust minutes and responsibility.
Cline's shot — and played — at an All-Big Ten sort of level this season, a critical cog in the Boilermakers' improbable title run.
As for Eifert, that's another matter, entirely.
A year ago at this time, Purdue said good-bye to Vincent Edwards, Isaac Haas, Thompson and Mathias, as productive and substantive a senior class as the program has perhaps ever had.
Greg and Julie Eifert may not have told their middle son this at the time, but after watching each outgoing senior's highlight montage on Purdue's monolith of a video board, they had to wonder.
"On our way home, we were like, 'What are they going to do for a video for Grady?'" Greg Eifert joked, sort of. "They weren't going to have anything to show."
Grady Eifert hadn't played all that much. The former walk-on played only 28 minutes his freshman season, then 44 as a sophomore. His "highlights" to that point were limited to the occasional layup in the final minute of a win over Chicago State or Western Illinois or some such November/December road apple.
But his minutes spiked as a junior, to an average of 8.3 per game, and meaningful ones at that late in the season after Vincent Edwards' ankle injury thrust Eifert into an important role, perhaps a turning point in his career.
Now, there are no concerns whatsoever over filling Eifert's senior-tribute highlight. It's been a Big Ten season full of them.
As Purdue's trended upward, Eifert's not only been productive, but impactful, with a sort of uncanny serendipity with big moments, all of which he's delivered in, part of the reason, for certain, Purdue's in the position it's in as the season winds down.
After Eifert basically beat Nebraska in Lincoln last weekend with a pair of improbable buzzer-beaters, Mackey Arena audibly responded to him a little differently prior to Wednesday night's Illinois game.
“I don’t think any of us could have imagined this," Julie Eifert said, "but that’s the thing: I think Grady did believe he could make a difference. We did, too, but probably didn’t think it could be like this.”
It's been surreal.
“I told Julie a couple times driving home, ‘Can you just pinch me, so I can make sure this is real?’" Greg Eifert said.
For both Cline and Eifert, that's what will make this senior day that much more meaningful, that their contributions were just that, and they'll be remembered as such.
But while Senior Day is about players being honored as they leave a program, but it may not always be as apparent the extent to which parents are immersed.
Last year, the Clines — along with Dan and Tracy Mathias — were up before dawn to catch a flight to Minneapolis to watch Purdue play at Minnesota. Soon as the two-and-a-half-hour-or-so game ended, they headed back to Minneapolis-St. Paul International and caught their Southwest Airlines flight home same-day.
In between, they've been all over.
The Eiferts, too. They've come from Fort Wayne for most every game in Mackey Arena the past three seasons, many of which prior to this season brought no guarantee their son would even set foot on the floor.
Greg Eifert said he or his wife have been everywhere but Charleston — due to youngest son Griffin's high school football schedule — and Nebraska, because of the incoming weather that prompted a last-second schedule change and marooned Purdue in Lincoln an extra night.
In a few weeks, it all comes to an end, Saturday's farewell being the step along the way Mike Cline says he's been "dreading."
It's as if the parents are departing the program, too.
That's an element to this weekend that will weigh on the Eiferts, given their history with the school and program.
For them, Saturday is really going to be something, just like this whole season has been.
“This has exceeded any of our dreams," Julie Eifert said. "It’s been an amazing for our family.”
There's a good chance four parents on Saturday, as it all comes to an end, are going to be happy messes.
As for the players themselves, Julie Eifert thinks her son will leave Mackey Arena with a sense of "gratitude."
That might be a mutual feeling Saturday, though.
“He’ll have no regrets whatsoever, and as a senior, I think that’s all you can ask, that when you get out of there, people appreciate what you’ve done and you have no regrets," Greg Eifert said. "I felt that way my senior year, that I’d given it everything I had, and I think Grady’s certainly given it everything he’s got, and probably a little more."
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