By Dan Weber NKyTribune sports reporter
Even the person who put together the sign at Summit Hills showing the way to the banquet room for the reunion of the Holmes High School 1963 Kentucky state baseball champs couldn’t believe how long ago that was.
“Welcome to the 50th anniversary reunion” the sign said.
Sorry, but it’s been 60 years. And yet, from all the stories and memories, it seems like only yesterday.
Artie Ryan had come in from Florida, Nick Orphan from Atlanta, but mostly Northern Kentucky for the 11 of the 15 living members of that team who made it back. But none are still living in Covington.
“Boone County” . . . or “Independence,” they answered. Edgewood or Ft. Wright.
“But all of our players were from Covington then,” said Tom Haney, who played third base for the 1963 team before a long career as a coach and teacher with stops at Silver Grove and Gallatin County as well as the Cincinnati public schools as a head basketball coach.
One of those players, left-fielder Jim Curry, had the longest history here. His dad, Bill, played on the 1939 World’s champion Nick Carr’s Boosters. And his mother, Louise Bain, at 17, was the youngest player in the All-American Girls Baseball League featured in the movie, A League of Their Own. And his wife, Sandy, was the niece of one of the great Nick Carr’s Boosters’ pitchers, Jim Ramage, hired away to play with the Ft. Wayne Zoellner Pistons by the owner of the original NBA’s Pistons.
Assistant coach Ron Bertsch just retired from umpiring two years ago. “I loved it,” he says of his life in baseball and fastpitch softball.
Each told a story. “Most of them I’d never heard,” said their coach, Jon Draud, then in his first year coaching after a grad assistant’s job at Eastern Kentucky University where the Ludlow native had been an All-OVC catcher. He was 25 then, he’s 85 now and recovering from dramatic neck surgery replacing four vertebrae.
If you recognize the name, Draud, in his 12th year as a Kenton County commissioner after returning to Ludlow as superintendent of schools and for a decade as a state representative and then Kentucky commissioner of education, was just getting started with that team 60 years ago.
What no one realized at the time was that it would be the lone Northern Kentucky state baseball champion in the one-class sport in a 46-year span from Newport Central Catholic in 1956 to Covington Catholic in 2002.
No one has an explanation as to why the drought. To say it was unexpected for Northern Kentucky is an understatement. After all, in the first 16 state baseball tournaments from the first in 1940, Northern Kentucky teams had won six titles – Newport the first two in 1940 and 1941 while NewCath followed with championships in 1946, 1950, 1954 and 1956.
And then, for all those years, nothing except this Holmes team. That they won does not surprise them at all. They had one thing no one else in the state had – Gary Sargent.
All the hard-throwing left-hander with the 92-miles-per-hour fast ball, they guesstimated, and the big “12 to 6” over-the-top curve ball did was win all three games, pitching four innings in the 5-0 opener over McDowell, all eight innings in the extra-inning 5-4 semifinal win over Louisville Flaget and then another shutout in the 3-0 championship win against Lone Oak.
Of course, that would be impossible today with the pitch-count limits but there was none of that then. You went as long as you could. Sargent went all the way, earning a scholarship to Indiana University with his efforts.
There isn’t a great deal of specific information on those games, just the scores on the KHSAA website.
“We can make something up for you,” right-fielder Bill Blackburn said with a grin, “who would know?”
One question for the guys was if they could go back to those days and take something from the present with them, what would it be?
“Fences,” said Curry, noting how all the fields in Northern Kentucky were “wide open.”
“Grass in the infield,” Orphan said of the rock-strewn Meinken Field infield that made an “errorless game” almost impossible there at Holmes’ home field used for softball and Knothole baseball as well.
One stat that Draud recalls for a team that won with defense, pitching and playing smart, mistake-free baseball, was that catcher Ralph Murphy, who hit .250 during the regular season, “hit .778 in the state tournament.”
“We only had three .300 hitters,” Draud said. “But Jon was such a disciplinarian,” said the team’s eighth-grade manager, Randy Marsh, who would spend four decades of his life in Major League baseball as an umpire and supervisor.
“Randy was a big part of that,” Draud says, “he kept our stats and would have them for me the next morning.”
The big stat Draud wanted charted? “Mental errors,” he said. “We started out the season making something like 15 a game and got it down to two or so by the end of the season.”
And while Sargent gave the minors two years, and during college played in the Cape Cod League for the top college players with the likes of Carlton Fisk and Thurman Munson, the only player from that Holmes team who went on to the majors was a freshman pitcher, the late “Charlie “Pee Wee” Taylor who would make it as both a pitcher and front office person for the Houston Astros.
“He grew about six inches,” his teammates recalled, and the former knuckleballer picked up a fast ball in the process.
But it’s not so much the baseball these guys remember about that team. It was “the closeness,” Sargent says, “we were just so close.”
“Everybody just said it was such a good group of guys,” Marsh said of the memories recounted.
“Nine of these kids graduated from college,” Draud noted. But the stories here were those of shortstop Wayne Ferguson, who has three children and 26 great-grand-kids,” Draud said, “great-grand-kids.”
“Life goes fast,” Draud says of his upcoming 60th anniversary with his “wonderful wife,” Beverly, who was there all the way with a life of what he calls “stressful jobs.” But one he welcomed because “I liked doing that stuff.”
But it all started with that 23-3 championship Holmes team in 1963. And then for a night, a chance to go back to those days. And a time for Draud to recall a new favorite quote.
“Anybody can be young,” he said, “but everybody can’t be old.”
On this night, they could be both.
Contact Dan Weber at dweber3440@aol.com. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @dweber3440.