The judge was only the first of many who have provided Tad Cockerill a second chance. Another was Darrell Garrett, owner of Red Hot Interiors in Bend, who hired Cockerill just days after his return from Alaska.

“I didn’t know Tad at all,” says Garrett. “I’d heard he had been arrested for meth. But he hadn’t done me wrong, and I hadn’t walked in his shoes. He was sincere about wanting the job, and anyone who’s willing to try, you have to give ’em a chance.”

Garrett gave Cockerill more than a chance. During the time Cockerill was incarcerated, Garrett gave him a ride from jail to the shop and back as part of a work-release arrangement.

Garrett feels he made a wise investment of faith in Cockerill, who has been a loyal employee for 13 years.

“Tad is the lead man here when I’m not around,” says Garrett. “He’s never done anything that would make me distrust him. He’s a go-getter, and he’s a hell of an upholsterer. And he has showed nothing but remorse for what he has put his kids and his family through.”

Garrett also has been accommodating with Cockerill’s work schedule, allowing him time off to umpire multiple days a week and sometimes on short notice.

“I wish I had something I loved as much as Tad loves umpiring baseball,” says Garrett. “I could never take that away from him.”

Cockerill is grateful to his boss for helping him straighten out his life. But Garrett says the credit goes to Cockerill.

“All I did was open a door for him,” says Garrett. “Tad walked through it.”

•••

The door leading back to umpiring proved more difficult for Cockerill to enter.

“Boy, Tad,” says Bob Reichert, “he had really crashed and burned.”

Reichert is the longtime head of the baseball and softball umpires association in Central Oregon, and Cockerill checked in with him after his return from Alaska.

“I said, ‘Bob, I want to umpire again,’” Cockerill recalls. “I’m clean, and I need your help.”

Reichert arranged for Cockerill to meet with the local association’s board of directors and appeal for reinstatement.

“They let me back,” Cockerill says. “I was back — on probation — but I was glad to be back.”

Starting in 1997 he returned to the circuit, and over seven seasons he built a reputation as one of the area’s finest umpires.

Then, in December 2003, Reichert called with some stunning news: “He told me, ‘Tad, you’ve been suspended by the state,’” Cockerill recounts.

“How could they suspend me now, after seven years?” he remembers asking. “I had already worked a state baseball and a state softball championship game.”

But a background check on officials — conducted by the Oregon School Activities Association, which governs high school sports in Oregon — revealed an incriminating truth about Cockerill.

“I had a Class B felony on my record,” he says. “So I was suspended. And I was scared that I would never umpire another game in the state of Oregon.”

Reichert, who has a long history of involvement with the OSAA, came to Cockerill’s defense. So did a number of other important figures in Central Oregon sports — including Jim Richards, owner of the Bend Elks summer collegiate baseball team, for whom Cockerill had umpired dozens of games over the years.

“He was devastated (by the suspension),” recalls Richards, who made a phone call on Cockerill’s behalf to Tom Welter, executive director of the OSAA.

“I knew Tad had somewhat of a past,” says Richards. “But I felt, here’s a guy who obviously paid the dues he owed — did jail time, even. And he had clearly gotten his act together.

“And,” Richards continues, “Tad NEEDED umpiring. That was his life. It was a diversion from his past. I felt if that was taken away from him, I could see him falling back to the lifestyle he had led before.”

The list of Cockerill’s backers went on. “Coaches wrote letters of support for me to be reinstated,” he says. “A lot of people went to bat for me.”

None more purposefully than Reichert, who on a winter weekend in early 2004 personally drove Cockerill to appear before the OSAA executive board at OSAA headquarters in Wilsonville.

“I kind of laid my butt on the line for Tad,” Reichert says. “But we all learn from our experiences and our mistakes. I’m pretty adamant about standards for our umpires, but I had faith in Tad. He’s been a good student of the game, a real good umpire, and I felt he was someone worth standing by.”

Reichert stood by Cockerill that day at the OSAA offices, as Cockerill spilled his emotions in an appeal for reinstatement.

“He broke down and cried,” Reichert recalls.

Cockerill was emotional again early the next morning, when he received a call from OSAA top man Welter, informing him that he would be reinstated, albeit on probation.

“That meant I could umpire again,” Cockerill remembers excitedly. “All I asked for was a second chance. And they gave it to me.

“But I know this,” he continues. “The only reason I’m umpiring today is because of Bob Reichert and Jim Richards. I had to have their support. And I thank them for that.”

Just three years later, in 2007, Cockerill was awarded home-plate duties for the Class 5A state championship baseball game at Volcanoes Stadium in Keizer — a prized assignment coveted by umpires across Oregon.

“When I found out I was getting the dish (home plate) for the state championship game, I just went nuts,” Cockerill recalls. “That’s when I knew: I was all the way back.”

In recognition of his championship assignment, Cockerill received a medal that he hangs from the rear-view mirror of his car, something to look at while driving to his next umpiring job.

“It reminds me how far I’ve come,” he says. “It helps me realize that the work I put in getting straight was well worth it.”

•••

No umpire has worked more games with Cockerill than Terry Brown.

“We’ve worked so much together,” says Brown, “we can even tell if the other guy thinks he missed a pitch or blew a call.”

Brown joined the Central Oregon umpires association in 1995, a few months before Cockerill was busted for drugs and apparently out of umpiring for good.

Cockerill says the friendship he forged with Brown was “huge” when he was accepted back into the association and began working to regain the respect of coaches, players and fellow umpires.

“I didn’t view Tad as a bad guy,” says Brown, 54. “He was just trying to turn things around — and he did.”

Cockerill’s unbridled enthusiasm for umpiring has been an inspiration, says Brown.

“He has a love for the game, for umpiring,” says Brown. “He’s had problems with his knees and problems with his hips, but you roll out a baseball or a softball and Tad will be there. And he’s not in it just for the money. He just loves to be involved.”

Brown notes that Cockerill often attends instructional umpire camps to improve his knowledge of the craft.

“And he’ll bring things back to our association to help make our younger guys better,” says Brown. “He always wants to make himself better, and he’s given me a lot of drive to be a better umpire.”

Brown recalls how over the years, during trips the two have made to clinics or out-of-town umpiring assignments, Cockerill has shared his innermost feelings about his troubled history.

“He’s talked about how it affected his family, and how bad he feels about all that,” says Brown. “He’s been more than accountable for what he did back then. And everybody who knows this guy knows he’s not going back there.”

•••

Though his issues with the law and with drugs are years behind him, Cockerill understands that he may never entirely escape his past. He knows he’s in a fishbowl out on the diamond, and that the bad calls he made off the field years ago are fodder for grandstand hecklers today.

“I’ve heard ‘druggie’ a couple times,” Cockerill says. “Or when I’d miss a pitch, I’ve heard someone say, ‘Yeah, he’s probably whacked.’”

That doesn’t make it especially inviting for his wife, Diana, to go watch her husband in action at the ballpark.

“It used to bother me that he used to not acknowledge me when he was umpiring,” she says. “But then I realized that he didn’t think I’d want everybody knowing that I was the girlfriend or wife of the umpire.”

Recently, though, Cockerill made a poignant exception. Between innings of an Elks game in which Cockerill was umpiring on the bases, the public-address announcer at Genna Stadium recognized the first anniversary of Tad and Diana’s wedding – which had taken place right there at the stadium.

Even the die-hard umpire saw fit to acknowledge the announcement. He hustled to the backstop, where he greeted his wife with a kiss through the screen.

It was the least he could do.

“I don’t know if I’ve ever thanked her enough,” Cockerill concedes, reflecting on the rough times through which Diana stood by him and helped hold their family together.

“I was able to go to Alaska and get myself clean,” Cockerill continues. “She got left with everything at home — the kids … she was a single mom with nobody there for her. I don’t know how she was strong enough to get through it.

“And she was still on the stuff (meth). She had her own demons, her own battles to deal with.”

Diana says she has now been clean for seven years. And she got clean without conventional drug rehabilitation.

“I had a lot harder time getting off it than Tad did,” she says. For the sake of her husband and her daughters, though, she fought off meth — and eventually, she won.

“We were daily (meth) users for all those years,” she recalls. “It’s a devastating drug. I would never go back to that — it would be too hard to get over again. And I would never let my family down.

“Or Tad.”

•••

Like his new wife, Cockerill is determined not to disappoint his family, which includes Sydney, a 23-year-old daughter from a previous marriage; Jessica, also 23, who is Diana’s daughter but whom Cockerill has helped raise since she was 1; and their younger daughters Ariel, 17, and Kacey, 14.

He also feels mightily obligated to those who have stood by him, people without whom he is convinced he would not be the man, the husband, the father, the breadwinner — and, yes, the umpire — he is today.

Next spring, Cockerill will enter his 17th year of umpiring high school ball with the Central Oregon Baseball Officials Association, for which he has served as president and vice president. He also has become a certified small-college ump and just completed his first season officiating in the NCAA Division III Northwest Conference.

And, he just concluded his 19th season as an ASA (Amateur Softball Association of America) umpire. Fast pitch and recreational slow pitch combined, he figures he worked nearly 200 softball games this summer alone.

Cockerill also is active in officiating and coordinating officials for local youth basketball leagues. But before that season kicks in, he has at least one more baseball game to umpire this year: On Oct. 4, he is expected to work the Oregon State Beavers’ annual Central Oregon intrasquad game — a showcase event at Vince Genna Stadium.

“A lot of special people are responsible for helping me get to where I am right now,” Cockerill admits, his voice breaking with emotion. “Call them guardian angels, or whatever, but they’re people who for some reason believed in me, who saw things in Tad Cockerill — and I don’t know to this day what they saw.

“But those people,” he says with resolve, “I can’t let those people down.”