Dan Weber is a sports columnist for The River City News. This is his first column here.
It’s good to be home. Back in Ludlow. Surrounded by many of the people who have made sports so special in Northern Kentucky. For those not here in person, many were here in spirit.
The annual Northern Kentucky Sports Hall of Fame awards get-together drew another capacity crowd to the Ludlow Vets Thursday evening to honor the retirement of Major League Baseball umpire Randy Marsh on his 40 years in the game.
Lots of elected officials were reading proclamations so you know this matters to those of us in this place that 400,000 people call home – and that’s just in Boone, Campbell, and Kenton counties. That’s more than the population of the cities of St. Louis, Pittsburgh, New Orleans, and Cincinnati.
The NKSHOF honor roll has 1,400 names on an 11-foot vinyl banner of the all-time inductees, put together for a display at the Behringer-Crawford Museum in Devou Park. Name after name, story after story. Just pick a column and you’re blown away by how many of those special stories you’ve known for much of your life. You grew up with these folks.
What you realize is that Northern Kentucky’s population may be big-town but its shared stories are as small-town as it gets. We’re talking family here.
Which is what Covington native Randy did, thanking his dad, the late Bob Marsh who oversaw the Kenton County Knothole Leagues for so many years, who made sure his son was able to get to umpires school.
“You don’t get to the big leagues without help,” Randy said, after putting in 13 years in the minor leagues working for his chance for what would be a 28-year major league career. But that only came years after he served as manager for the 1963 Holmes High state championship baseball team coached by a 22-year-old Jon Draud, now a Kenton County commissioner who was one of the politicos here with good words for Randy echoed by a half-dozen of the members of that Bulldog team.
Here’s how Covington Mayor Joe Meyer put it for Marsh, now an Edgewood resident. “So many of us have our roots in Covington,’’ Meyer said after reading a detailed listing of Randy’s accomplishments – the five World Series with three as crew chief (something only 10 men have ever done), the five division series, the four all-star games. “You can take people out of Covington but you can’t take Covington out of people,” the Mayor said.
The Friday night in 1982 when Randy finally got the call-up – surprisingly to Riverfront Stadium for a Reds-Dodgers game although MLB would rather not start a rookie umpire at home: “Half of Covington was there,” Randy said. “I still had Covington in me . . . I’ll always have Covington in me.”
As the evening went on, a number of prizes were given to the crowd – many of them autographed plaques and photos with the signatures of perfect-game pitchers Jim Bunning and Tom Browning. In more than a century, only three perfect games had ever been pitched in National League baseball. When Browning threw his perfect game in 1988, he was just following in the footsteps of his then-Congressman who had thrown one in 1964.
“I’m in awe of the sports tradition here,” Jason French was saying as the Behringer-Crawford special collections curator was asking for inductees to sign next to their names on the banner.
You didn’t have to look far. There was Kenney Shields who helped put Northern Kentucky University basketball on the map with back-to-back trips to the NCAA Division II national championship game. All Kenney, who is often called to speak att these affairs, has done is rack up a best-in-Greater-Cincinnati-at-any-level 766 wins at St. Thomas and Highlands High Schools and NKU.
Or next to him, there was Dick Maile, the scion of a multi-generational athletic family that the former CovCath basketball player who finished college as the third-leading scorer in LSU history before turning things over to grandsons like Luke Maile, a catcher with the Milwaukee Brewers and Michael Mayer, another CovCath product who could easily make a number of All-American teams this season as a sophomore at Notre Dame.
Then there were the awards – and the names on them. The Bill Cappel Volunteer Award honors a saintly man whose 50 years of promoting sports in Northern Kentucky started with his playing days with the 1939 World Champions Nick Carr’s Boosters fast-pitch softball team to all those years tending Covington Ball Park while promoting girls and women’s sports ahead of most everybody in the nation. Honoree Bill Brauns served a half-century with the Bellevue Vets and helped raise more than a million dollars in 30 years for food and cash for those in Campbell County who needed it.
The first Kentucky Miss Basketball, Newport High’s Donna Murphy, won the Pat Scott Achievement Award named for a member of the Ft. Wayne Daisies of the All-American Baseball League who consulted on the movie A League of Their Own. Donna, recuperating from organ transplant surgery could not make it Thursday but has promised she will get back home from her college teaching gig in Lexington as soon as she’s healthy enough to do so.
Longtime NKSHOF volunteers Carrie Judd, Dylan Judd and Laura Steffen won the James “Tiny” Steffen Humanitarian Award for their quarter-of-a-century work for the Hall of Fame, much as Tiny had done.
But then there were the less obvious athletic attendees here. Two Centre college products come to mind with Dr. James Claypool, best known as a historian and NKU’s first Dean of Students but also, he will tell you, the second Beechwood alum to go on to play college football. Another Centre alum, Covington lawyer Phil Taliaferro, who likewise played college football despite a physique his Navy doc said should not have ever allowed him to do so.
But Northern Kentucky sports are not all history as this opening high school football weekend makes clear. We’ll be there for the River City News when a new-look Covington Catholic heads to GCL big boy Elder’s legendary Pit Friday night.
And defending state 2A champ Beechwood will be at unbeaten-last-year Louisville Fairdale Saturday with super-senior Tiger Cameron Hergott, Kentucky’s returning Mr. Football, debuting a post-graduate season thanks to a unique-to-Kentucky Covid-19 law allowing for an additional year of eligibility.
Join us here to catch up on those stories of the next generation of Northern Kentucky Sports Hall of Famers.
-Dan Weber
Photo: Randy Marsh calls a game in 2008 (via/Wiki Commons)