By Dan Weber NKyTribune sports reporter
The largest crowd of the year turned out for this week’s final Northern Kentucky Sports Hall of Fame induction before the summer break.
They were rewarded with interesting tales of human emotion and connectedness, which is the watchword of sports in Northern Kentucky.
On this day, for these seven inductees, it came in the way, often two by two, they played off one another.
Golfer Denny Hurley, back from New Orleans, and diver Jim Finn, from Dallas, were part of the greatest single high school sports class – ever – around here. No other even close. Nor will one be.
They were both from the 1970 Class at Covington Catholic, where the Colonels won every single regional championship in every single team sport – football, basketball, baseball, cross country, swimming and diving, golf and tennis. Those were the days when CovCath had 800 boys, not the 450 of today.
DENNY HURLEY MAKES HIS MARK
But Hurley, a legend almost before he left St. Agnes Grade School or had his photo posted in Sports Illustrated’s Faces in the Crowd section when he won his first of a record five straight regional championships, was not back home just for the induction. The company he founded and is now president of after graduating from LSU in 1984, Turf Drainage Company of America, could play a big part in this weekend’s PGA Championship at Louisville’s Valhalla Golf Course the way it did in a 2014 Sunday downpour there by saving the tournament from imminent flooding and postponement. Hurley was headed there for the rest of the weekend.
But first, Denny honored another LSU great in the room, NKSHOF Director Dick Maile, who left LSU as one of the school’s all-time great basketball scorers. “He left quite a legacy there,” Hurley said of a CovCath connection who came before him in Baton Rouge. With installations at hundreds of the nation’s top courses, from TPC Scottsdale to Eastlake in Atlanta to Olympic Club in San Francisco to Coldstream locally, and the five patented products including the Turf Drain Syphon System his company has introduced, Dennis Hurley – as he’s referred to in the company’s literature – may have made more of an impact off the course than on it.
At age 15, he won the prestigious Cincinnati Met, youngest by far to win the Cincinnati men’s championship. But what Denny wanted to talk about was his family. How his older brother, Dan, put up with him on their daily trips to play Devou when he was just six, along with their German Shepherd Fritz. How his sister, Debby, has gone on from watching her brother to play to “giving thousands of hours” to Special Olympics where she has become a head coach of the Kentucky and U.S. teams.
And how his father, “my hero,” taught him how to play out of a book and “encouraged me and gave me every opportunity to play.” He’s repaying that now with the publication of his father’s letters to his mother at the end of WWII about liberating Germany and the Holocaust camps. Denny has been married 49 years now to his LSU sweetheart and they have three daughters. And he’s grateful for his best buddy at CovCath, Barry Dyas, the Colonels’ No. 1 tennis player, for nominating him. And for another Colonel, basketball player Doug Overman, for caddying for him. And another classmate, Tommy Leonard, for playing with him.
JIM FINN BACK HOME
The plan, Jim Finn said after getting his bachelor’s and master’s while on a diving scholarship at Western Kentucky University, was to take the job in Dallas, stay maybe six months, and come back home. But he found the Texas girl he would marry there and he’s still in Texas 48 years later. And yet he couldn’t be more at home back at the legendary Greyhound Grill in Ft. Mitchell that his parents owned and operated.
And how diving was “a big part of my life,” from starting at Beechwood Swim Club to those days with “our coach at CovCath, Father Mac (the Rev. John McDermott),” driving that creaky, drafty old bus every day to practice at Brookwood Swim Club, unsure whether it would make it up the final hill.
“I am so flattered and thinking I’m undeserved,” said Jim, who was the Kentucky college diving champion during his time at WKU. “My two siblings are gone but they’d be so proud of this.” Jim’s twin, Tim, a high school football coach and teacher in Greater Cincinnati for more than three decades, certainly would. Jim’s only problem on his return visits to Northern Kentucky, he says, is “getting my wife to like Skyline Chili and White Castle . . . although she does like Graeter’s.”
THREE-SPORT BROTHERS GREG, DUSTIN MENETRY GO IN TOGETHER
From his grandparents and parents to his wife, Tracy, and two daughters, Greg Menetry Jr. saluted a strongly supportive family – and a trio of coaches at Campbell County High School – who helped him get here after starring in football, baseball and wrestling for the Camels. “Iron sharpens iron, one man sharpens another,” he said of baseball coach Tom Mohr, wrestling coach Mike Bankemper and football coach Mark Goetz.
“They led by example, and not just about sports but about life.” He had a great story about how in the big game against Boone County and All-American and All-Pro running back Shaun Alexander that Alexander played just one play on defense but it came on a middle screen for the Camels that Alexander intercepted for a touchdown. “We’re known for that,” Greg said with a shake of the head.
The Menetry family will also be known for Greg’s 10-years-junior brother Dustin Menetry, who played football, baseball and golf at Beechwood and was a three-year football starter on both sides of the ball at Georgetown College, where his brother preceded him as a four-year starter and captain. Dustin thanked the committee for having him go in at the same time as his brother, to whom he paid an emotional tribute, and his family, “without whom none of this is possible.”
“I grew up idolizing him,” Dustin said of Greg, “I wanted to act like him, to speak like him and most especially, play like him.” Dustin joined another May Hall of Famer here, Denny Hurley, in earning a coveted spot in Sports Illustrated’s Faces in the Crowd section of the magazine.
BOB HEIMBROCK STILL SWIMMING ALONG
It’s not often you’re talking about an athlete, especially a swimmer, who graduated from high school in 1975 – as Northern Kentuckian Bob Heimbrock did from Cincinnati St. Xavier – and his current highlights. Heimbrock, a top 20 world’s breast-stroke specialist in college is still setting records 49 years later as a Kentucky and national masters record-holder. “Why keep swimming,” he anticipated the question: “Because I’m trying to stay under 400 pounds.”
After skipping a year in high school, something he doesn’t recommend, he ended up as a scholarship swimmer at UK. And good thing, he says. Had he spent four years in high school, he’d “have gone to Stanford” and probably stayed in California. He knew he was going to be a swimmer when at the age of three, he could swim across the pool at Brookwood underwater. The great good luck of growing up at Brookwood was that the coach there, Frank Busch, would go on to be the head coach at the University of Arizona and of the U.S, National Team.
One of his best stories was how Heimbrock had once been told that there was a plaque at the WKU pool noting that he still owned the pool record in an event there and one time in Bowling Green, having decided to check it out, he was driving up to the site of the old pool at the exact same time a wrecking ball was taking it down. So much for records and recognition.
BENNY DEATON COACHING BY THE NUMBERS
It’s hard to know which numbers are higher – the championship athletes he’s coached in a career overseeing cross country and track and field at Ryle, Conner, Cooper, St. Henry, Newport Central Catholic and now at Mt. St. Joseph College – or the number of family Benny had show up to join in the celebration. That would include, he said, his wife, brothers and sisters, daughter and grandkids.
He also thanked his first coach at Lloyd High, track coach – and NKSHOF webmaster – Buddy Dittus, for mentoring him in the coaching and officiating world. Benny mentioned how he’d detail to Dittus the issues some of his athletes were giving him as a young coach and all Dittus had to say was this calming, quieting response: “Not worse than you were,” he’d say to a coach who’s now had one state champion team, five individual state champs in high school and a No. 4 and No. 5 triple jumper in the NCAA’s Division III and a No. 6 long jumper in his three years at Mt. St. Joe.
THE LATE JASON COMBS SALUTED
From his days as a swimmer at Triple E Swim Club to his baseball days at Lloyd High School, Midland Guardian’s national team and Eastern Kentucky University as well as his basketball days of scoring 30 points against Newport Central Catholic, for example, the late Jason Combs was eulogized by his longtime friend, KC Hensley, who said that “the Northern Kentucky Sports Hall of Fame can’t be a sports hall of fame without Jason . . . he had every record at Lloyd – from home runs to strikeouts.”
NKSHOF UPDATE
Vice-president Kenney Shields, the all-time winningest basketball coach in Northern Kentucky history at NKU, Highlands and St. Thomas, is out of intensive care but still in the hospital, said NKSHOF president Randy Marsh, explaining Shields’ absence. Then added to the newcomers at this week’s induction ceremonies: “If you don’t know Kenney, Kenney knows you.” . . . a feature of the ceremonies was the presentation of scholarships to high school winners with this year’s recipients chosen from a record 18 applicants.
Contact Dan Weber at dweber3440@aol.com. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @dweber3440.