Everybody called him Elzy.

Bobby Elzemeyer was a fixture for decades at Ladue Horton Watkins High School sporting events. He was a superfan, an all-knowing sports savant who could summon up details of games from years past. He remembered players’ birthdays and would call to wish them well. Coaches, parents, and Ladue sports fans were struck by one thing: Elzemeyer’s unwavering support of young athletes.

Last weekend, Elzemeyer died of complications from COVID-19 at the age of 64. News of his death spread quickly through the Ladue sports community. Elzemeyer was not Jewish, but he had a positive impact on many Jewish athletes and coaches over the past 40-plus years.

Elzy loved all sports at every level. He could be found at Mizzou and SLU basketball matches, NCAA championship games and the Super Bowl. Mostly, though, he was a constant presence at Ladue high games. His arrival was often accompanied by a chant from the crowd: “Bobby! Bobby! Bobby!”

Ron Zetcher, a retired Ladue football coach, considered Elzemeyer a good friend. Their camaraderie began when Elzy was a member of his class.

“Bobby was a student of mine when he was a freshman at East Ladue Junior High, so I’ve known him for 50 years,” said Zetcher, 80. “He had an insatiable appetite for sports from the time he was young. I’ve talked to a number of coaches this week, and they all said it’s not going to be the same walking on the sidelines or on the bench or the dugout. It’s not going to be the same without him.”

Zetcher was among the Jewish parents, alumni, players and coaches who shared their memories of Elzy.

James Baer, 76, said: “Bobby didn’t show any favorites. He showed up for basketball, football, whatever season it was. He showed up at soccer games, too. He did everything in Ladue. He’d show up at a National Honors Society awards presentation. He’d put on a suit and go to dressier affairs.

“He was friends with my son Andrew and for years, he’d asked about him after he graduated from Indiana University at Bloomington. ‘How’s Andy doing?’ he’d always ask me.

Bobby was always wired to his headphones, reporting college scores long before we had smartphones.”

It was common to see Elzemeyer in the stands of a Ladue game holding a transistor radio up to his ear, balancing a portable TV set on his lap. He didn’t want to miss a score or outcome of any contest. And he committed the results to memory, Zetcher said.

“I always used to say if you ever get into a trivia contest and wanted to make some money in a bar, just sit down with Bobby and start talking about a sports event that occurred 10 years ago and then make a bet, and you’ll win every time,” he said. “You could say, ‘Hey Bobby, Brett Hull scored the winning goal for the Blues in such-and-such a year and he was like, ‘Oh, I know that.’ ”

Elzemeyer was a rabid sports fan and a diehard Ladue Rams supporter, but he also cared about the kids who played sports, said David Aronberg, soccer coach at Ladue.

“He touched thousands of student athletes’ lives at Ladue,” said Aronberg, 39. “He started out as a superfan, but he became part of our sports program, he was an institution at Ladue. The real tragedy here is that under normal circumstances, you would have over 1,000 people at the funeral.”

Elzemeyer’s funeral Dec. 23 had a capacity of 20 people, a restriction caused by the same virus that took his life. Elzemeyer never married or had children. He worked as a courier, driving packages around town. He didn’t have much of a social life in high school beyond sports, according to another Class of ’76 graduate, Rick Powers Prywitch, now Fox Sports Midwest program director.

“I think sports was his social life,” said Prywitch, 63. “He’d hang around the teams and practices, but he was sort of a loner, and that’s how he connected to the rest of the kids in the class. He didn’t play sports, but he watched them. And I remember going to Cardinals games and Spirits game, and there he would be. My son went to Mizzou, and I went to a game in Columbia with him, and there was Bobby Elzemeyer. He would show up anywhere.”

Zetcher said Elzemeyer thought nothing of driving hundreds of miles to attend a college game.

“He drove to dozens of final fours in basketball,” Zetcher said. “Dr. Chuck McKenna was the superintendent of schools at Ladue, and he would go to [NCAA] Final Fours with Ladue coaches and he once said, ‘I don’t care if we were sitting in the 30th row or the first row or the worst row, Bobby would find us.’ He would go to big college games in Pontiac, Michigan, or Indianapolis and drive up and back home. Since he was a courier, I used to joke with him and ask, ‘What if they have you deliver a package at 4 p.m. and we have a freshman football game starting then?’ He said, ‘They’ll be late getting the package.’ ”

Ladue varsity coaches generally forbade parents from hanging too close to the bench. Not so for Elzemeyer.

“Bobby had the run of the dugout, and they didn’t allow parents there,” Zetcher said. “He could question the coaches and ask, ‘Why are you putting this or that player in?’

“So that was Bobby. I was a college basketball official, and I flew on a private aircraft to a number of games on a one-engine plane, and Bobby went with me to some games. He was able to meet Norm Stewart down at Missouri and coach Johnny Orr at Iowa State and talked to them extensively. He just loved sports, and I was fortunate enough to take him with me and introduce him to those people, and he enjoyed meeting them, and he had a lot to tell them.”

Elzemeyer’s infectious personality and love of sports made him something of an honorary team member, an accepted and welcome one.

“He was into team bonding, out of town trips, everything,” Aronberg said. “He’d be on the sideline with us for every game. Alumni and kids who are currently in high school alike, they’re legitimately crushed.”

One recent alum who remembers Elzemeyer fondly is Jordan Stern, a senior at the University of Missouri-Columbia.

“My dad was a Ladue graduate as well,” said Stern, 22. “Bobby used to take my dad and his buddies to hockey games. So once I got into athletics at Ladue, he already knew my dad and would embrace me the same way he embraced my dad back when he was in high school. He came to our Thanksgiving dinner every year and our turkey bowl game.

“He was an all-around great person. He wasn’t a Jewish guy, but he showed our young Jewish athletes in the Ladue community how to embrace everyone and what the real meaning of friendship is, that age doesn’t matter.”

Another recent alum and varsity hockey player, Josh Horowitz, also recalls that Elzemeyer was a staple at Ladue.

“It was always so great to have him there,” said Horowitz, 20, a sophomore at Indiana University in Bloomington. “He would sometimes sit with the students, and they were super happy to have him there. He just brought up the energy level. He came to every single Sunday afternoon practice like clockwork. He would come into the Creve Coeur ice rink where we practiced, and he would talk to everyone. He was a big sports fanatic about football, and he knew about everybody’s fantasy football team. He would let us know about how our fantasy players were going.”

When a young Jewish athlete in Ladue moved to the varsity level, he often learned about the legend of Elzy from a parent, said Steve Brown, Ladue Class of ’85.

“The interesting thing about Bobby, it was almost like he was handed down from generation to generation,” Brown said. “He used to call me and talk about the teams from a certain class, and he did the same with my brother, who’s a couple of years older than me.”

After graduating and eventually starting his own family, Brown took his son out to the western edge of St. Charles to a baseball complex for an early Sunday morning game. Who did he run into but Elzemeyer.

“I said, ‘Elzy what are you doing way out here?’ ” Brown said. “It turned out he drove out on a weekend morning to watch the 11-year-old son of a graduate play ball. The level of commitment and devotion he had to all things Ladue is just amazing.”

Elzemeyer also had an impact on Jewish players who made sports a career, such as Jeremy Growe, assistant basketball coach at Furman University in South Carolina.

“My dad went to Ladue, and I used to help out as a ballboy for the football team,” said Growe, 33. “I would be on the field when I was in middle school, and my dad knew Bobby, too, and I just sort of struck up a relationship with him. In high school, my first two years playing basketball, he was always around our team. I can count on one hand the number of games he missed.

“He was really great at keeping in contact, and I was still in touch with him up until now. I don’t think he ever missed my birthday. I could always count on him to call. He would travel around the country and see as many games as he could. I used to be at Xavier, and we played a couple of games against Wisconsin, and at one big game, he was there.”

Elzemeyer was there for the good times and bad, Growe said.

“I was on great teams at Ladue and bad teams, and he supported each team the same,” he said. “My junior year at Ladue, our basketball team was horrible, and he was there every game and in the locker room after the game, it didn’t matter, he was just there to support everybody. He was one of a kind. He would pick a Ladue basketball game over a Missouri-Kansas game.”

The Ladue Horton Watkins High School Athletics and Activities Department is considering a commemorative event to honor Elzemeyer. If you would like to share a memory about him, please do so in the comments section below.