Dan Weber writes a sports column for LINK nky. Contact him at dweber3440@aol.com.
They’ll get together Saturday afternoon in Erlanger to say a fond farewell to Rudy Tassini, the retired high school football coach and P.E. teacher who died Friday at the age of 80 after nearly a month in the hospital with complications of COVID-19. No doubt Rudy will be remembered with smiles and stories from his 35-year Northern Kentucky career.
But the headline here is how his former P.E. students at Covington Catholic and Lloyd Memorial will recall the coach/teacher who cared so much for them. “He had so much compassion for kids,” recalls Beechwood football coach Noel Rash, who was an elementary school pupil of Rudy’s in Erlanger. That’s especially true for the ones who weren’t football stars. For whom P.E. didn’t come easy.
“He’d keep records, he’d stop the class,” Rash remembers, when a youngster no one thought could do it . . . did it. “And salute the accomplishment.”
“He had fables he’d tell us,” Rash says, “he’d sit us down and tell us about his pet tarantula that could jump 10 or 12 feet when we were working on two-legged jumps . . . it was all about getting us better. Getting us to do things we didn’t think we could.”
Did Rudy have a pet tarantula? Who knows? But he had kids thinking they could get better. “Kids would want to be a part of his class,” Rash said. Indeed, how many P.E. teachers are there whose former students brag about being in his class?
“He was kind of old school,” says Randy Tomlinson who both played for and coached with Rudy at Lloyd. “He never married, never had a family so the players were his kids. He did so many things for kids who needed it, buying them clothes, giving them money for food. But he never told anybody.”
Like the way he’d have fun kidding about – now this was back in the day, remember – how “soccer was a Commie sport” but never telling anyone that he was an all-state soccer goalkeeper at South Fayette High School in western Pennsylvania. Born in Canonsburg (as were famed singers Perry Como and Bobby Vinton and football coach Marty Schottenheimer), Rudy came to Cincinnati as a U.C. football recruit.
An offensive lineman who would also end up punting, Rudy was a four-year classmate and 60-year best friend there of Hep Cronin, also a CovCath coach before moving back across the river to Cincinnati. Hep, in the kind of story that will be repeated often Saturday from 1 to 5 p.m. at Linnemann Funeral Home in Erlanger (30 Commonwealth Avenue), recalled one of Rudy’s classic moments as an undergrad – and a reminder of how low-tech athlete rehab was then.
“Rudy was playing in the spring game and broke his leg and you could hear the bone crack all over the stadium,” Hep said. “The tibia was sticking out . . . a very ugly compound fracture . . . the trainer told Rudy to bite down on his jersey for the pain and when they got him to the hospital, he had bitten hole in it.
“Now a couple of weeks later, we all hung out a at a place called Art’s Cafe up the street on a hill and his teammates pulled Rudy into Art’s in one of those little red wagons in a full leg cast. After a few adult beverages, they were pushing him back down the hill toward the dorm and decided to let him go. You can imagine Rudy’s language on the way down the hill in that speeding wagon.”
By the time he’d gotten to CovCath in the school’s third year of football and Rudy’s first year as a head coach, he had the best AA team in the state at a time when there were just three classes.
Defending state champion Highlands was the only Northern Kentucky team that would play us (I say “us” because I was an assistant coach on that team) and that was a 35-6 CovCath win. Only loss was by a point to Hamilton, Ohio’s Badin, before falling to unbeaten AAA state champ Louisville St. Xavier in the final game of the season. But without enough Kentucky opponents, that CovCath team did not qualify for the playoffs.
Rudy almost never mentioned it. He’d have been a state champion coach in his first year with a team that incredibly had 11 players go on to college to play football. He had another team at Lloyd that fell one game short of the state title game.
Rudy assisted at CovCath for his former assistant Lynn Ray then took over at Lloyd from 1987 through 1999, leading the Juggernauts to an 11-2 record in 1991 and 12-1 in 1995. In 17 seasons as a head coach, Rudy was 96-91 before retiring in 2000. He spent lots of time traveling and even did some radio DJ work with his love of music.
“Rudy was very much ahead of his time the way he was very much into his players’ lives,” Rash said. “He would always take the time to come to one of my team’s games – or more – and then write me a letter after every season. It meant the world to me – and not just me. He made everybody feel special. When he was talking to you, it was like you were the only person in the room.”
*** NICE WORK, KHSAA COMMISSIONER TACKETT: Courtesy of Danny Weddle’s Maysville Courtside blog, here are the comments of Commissioner Julian Tackett at the KHSAA Board of Control work session last Wednesday to those downstate folks complaining about having to play the 10th Region tourney at Holmes, near the four schools in the 37th District – Scott, Campbell County, Bishop Brossart, and Calvary Christian.
“We have four schools in the, if I remember this right, it’s the 37th District,” Tackett said. “Two of them are located in Kenton County and two of them are not, and they decided to hold the tournament in the biggest gym in Kenton County which is Holmes High School. Holmes doesn’t happen to be in the 10th Region, and some of the other people have objected to that. But it is a big, neutral facility located in Kenton County, and therefore we don’t have anything to keep that from happening. We’ve had people ask us to intercede. They’re the very group that wanted to do it where every year the districts rotated who hosted, who got to pick. And, again, one of those things where you don’t always get what you want. But that’s where the 10th Region is going to be for this year.”
*** SPEAKING OF REGIONAL SITES: Here they are, the updated Boys Regional tournament hosts: 1. Murray State; 2. Hopkinsville; 3. Owensboro Sports Center; 4. Western Kentucky University; 5. Nelson County; 6. Louisville Valley; 7. Louisville Valley; 8. Henry County; 9. Northern Kentucky University; 10. Holmes; 11. Eastern Kentucky University; 12. Pulaski County; 13. Corbin Arena; 14. Breathitt County; 15. U. of Pikeville; 16. Morehead State.
*** BETTER LATE THAN NEVER: Sorry we missed this a couple of weeks back but what Ryle’s Connor Bishop accomplished with the first quadruple-double in the school’s 30 years of basketball is worth noting when the 5-foot-6 senior scored 14 points with 10 rebounds, 10 assists and 10 steals against Fleming County. Think that’s not a big deal? It’s happened just four times in the entire history of the NBA and three of those were by 6-11/7-footers.
–Dan Weber
Photo: Rudy Tassini (via official obituary at Linneman Funeral Homes)