LUDLOW MAKES ITS SPORTS HISTORY COME ALIVE HERE
The odds are against them to bring back another Kentucky Class A football championship like that one in 1975 proudly displayed on a big poster inside Ludlow’s Rigney Stadium. The demographics, as they are for all Northern Kentucky river city schools, are against them.
But if you listen to 90-year-old Jack Aynes, Ludlow Panther Class of ’51 and great all-around athlete, or just watch him on game night here, there’s a lot that towns like Ludlow can do to promote what they do have.
Sure, this year’s football team may dress out just 25 players when those state champs had more than 40 in the photo that’s a centerpiece for the Ludlow High School Sports Hall of Fame.
But what they do have is history. Plenty of it. Going back almost a century in Ludlow’s case, suiting up its first football team way back in 1924. Jack is proud of that since rivals like Bellevue and Dayton, with the state’s most-played rivalry at 148 games now, didn’t get going until 1926.
“They were playing teams like Cincinnati Elder,” Jack says of those early Panther teams. The history is all here, displayed in folders and poster style on the walls from newspapers no longer in existence.
There are uniforms, colorful letter sweaters and jackets, a spectacular girls basketball uniform from way, way before anyone thought of Title IX. And lots of signed balls – baseballs, footballs, basketballs, not to mention helmets. All proudly in red and black.
But it couldn’t happen until the new football building came online, Aynes said after working on this project with his Ludlow compatriots Terry and Wayne Keller, John Gaiser, and Benny Clary, for the better part of the last 12 years. The new building made available the visitors’ locker and shower rooms, part of the 1937 New Deal-constructed stadium.
And with lots of volunteer work and donations, there’s now a great place right off Panther Plaza for Ludlow fans to meet and greet at football games. And almost certainly get to bump elbows with a number of the all-time 227 Hall of Fame members.
Like Danny Caple, with a family name synonymous with Ludlow sports history, who was here Friday. With twin brother Denny, Danny went on to play at Western Kentucky University in the decade after all-stater Jim Lokesak took Ludlow to the promised land in that magical 1975 season.
Two-time mayor Buddy Waite, 91, from the Class of ’50, was remembering games more than seven decades ago. As of course was Clary, a fixture forever in Northern Kentucky sports and just a few years younger than Jack and Buddy. And like them, also a member of the Kentucky Veterans Hall of Fame.
“I wanted to make sure nobody forgot the history here,” Aynes said. “I hope this can happen at those other schools, too, like Bellevue and Dayton. They’ve got a lot of history.”
But it’s not always the big things you’ll hear about here. Jack has this memory of playing football in those days before face masks. And how much his mother warned him to take care of his teeth. And how in that one game to no one’s surprise, he lost two of them. And he can still recall the sympathetic words from his coach, Cliff Lowdenback, when he told Jack how “lucky it was we were wearing our red jerseys.” No bloodstains.
As you check out the Hall of Fame here, as you can on the night of every home football game, you realize how unchanged this place seems to be. On the river side of Rigney, you can still almost kick a football into the Ohio River, where the sound of a tugboat horn is as familiar as that of the nightly freight train heading out on the old Southern Railroad tracks and hitting the horn as it heads up the hill.
But mostly it’s about getting a chance to check out all the photos of Ludlow natives like Owen Hauck, who did much more than coach football in his Hall of Fame career. Or Dr. Robert Reichert, a multiple Hall of Famer and both a surgeon and coroner here. Or maybe even a young Ray Faragher in his Navy uniform before he became the featured model maker for the Behringer-Crawford Museum with his miniature community and all its modes of transportation modeled after the memory of his Ludlow home.
There’s more to it than just the Hall of Fame, however. Aynes has been able to raise enough money through his efforts to award 10 $1,000 college scholarships last year to Ludlow grads — and he’ll do it again next year — thanks to Sunday’s well-supported annual Hall of Fame golf outing. And if you come by the Hall of Fame, you can check out the winners. They’re here in the Hall of Fame too.
COVCATH’S MICHAEL MAYER HAS RECORD-SETTING SATURDAY AT NOTRE DAME
Talk about taking no chances. All Notre Dame junior tight end Michael Mayer did Saturday against Brigham Young was become the pass-catchingest tight end in the long, illustrious football history of Notre Dame. And it wasn’t even close.
Mayer’s 11 catches at Las Vegas’ Allegiant Stadium not only pushed him past the all-time career record of 140 catches with 146, but those 11 catches (for 118 yards and two touchdowns in Notre Dame’s 28-20 win over BYU) were also a single-game tight end record for the Irish. And who held the previous single-game mark of nine catches? None other than one Michael Mayer and two others. Now he’s all by himself in the record books.
LLOYD FOOTBALL HONORS ‘POPEYE’ ESTES
Really nice job by the folks at Lloyd Memorial Friday night to honor a man — Andy “Popeye” Estes — who passed away last December after more than four decades as the equipment manager for Juggernaut football, one of the great passions of his life. Estes’s work, and dedication, will be commemorated with a bronze plaque memorializing the beloved 61-year-old’s service to the school and its athletes.