They call it a “reunion.” And it is one, a family reunion, this annual end-of-summer get-together for the Northern Kentucky Sports Hall of Fame.
But it’s more than that. As Dick Maile, basketball star at LSU after Covington Catholic and grand-dad to Reds catcher Luke Maile and Raiders’ tight end Michael Maher, called it — proof of how “this is the best place in the world to live.”
Not just because of Northern Kentuckians, who Dick submits are the best folks you’re going to find anywhere, but how so many here are connected to one another through sports. And seem to always have been.
Which Dick immediately proves when he steps up to hand out the Bill Cappel Volunteerism Award, in honor of the most revered man in the history of Northern Kentucky sports. The man who captained the legendary Nick Carr Boosters’ 1939 World Champion Fastpitch softball team from Covington, a title they won over a powerful California team at Chicago’s Soldier Field.
Bill would go on to take care of Covington Ball Park, from personally dragging the field to umpiring the games to manning the concession stands. He would survive WWII in Europe, come back to manage three World Champion women’s softball teams and earn innumerable hall of fame honors before co-founding the NKSHOF. If the Vatican is looking for an everyman saint from America, it would be hard to find a better candidate than this man who spent his 91 years as joyfully working with and for others as Bill Cappel did.
Or as Dick Maile would call him, “my Uncle Bill.”
That’s how it was this week at the Gardens of Park Hills, where you could run into someone you played Knothole baseball with seven decades ago and feel like you hadn’t missed a beat. Or check out the memorabilia that is preserved at the Behringer-Crawford Museum.
That autographed photo of Hall of Fame trainer Ron McAnally, who left the Covington Protestant Orphans Home in a box car full of horses headed to the West Coast as a teenager and came back one of the all-time great trainers in thoroughbred racing history with three homes in Southern California, one near each racetrack there. Or maybe it’s the signed Jim Bunning photo, Baseball Hall of Fame pitcher and, oh yeah, congressman and senator.
Plenty of things to see here on a night when the NKSHOF raises money to add to the 40 college scholarships the group has awarded in recent years.
But there was serious business here, as well, among the Skyline Chili and LaRosa’s Pizza with the live music courtesy of Reds’ Hall of Fame pitcher Bronson Arroyo, now a Villa Hills guy and just a neighbor on this night playing some of his songs in a career he’s been concentrating on since retiring from baseball seven years ago after 15 years in the major leagues.
Like so many of the honorees, Bronson sang his praise for the person who helped him get here. “I want you to know,” was the song he wrote honoring his father, dying when Bronson was inducted into the Reds’ HOF in 2023, for making it possible for him to do what he did in sports. Lanky and loose, Bronson started lifting weights with his dad at the age of five. “I could squat 255 pounds at the age of eight,” he says as a 60-pounder handling four times his own weight. “You showed me the way,” is one of the lines Bronson sings for his dad. And for his neighbors now.
As the ceremonies go on, revolving photos and bios of Hall of Famers are displayed on a large screen. Legendary broadcaster Dale McMillen’s brings a smile – and a tear, maybe. Northern Kentuckians don’t come better than Dale and “Uncle Bill.”
• DENNY BOWMAN: But thelineup had a half-dozen who were right there. Start with Denny Bowman, former Covington mayor and commissioner and do-everything guy for the community and NKSHOF, including setting up the chairs and tables for this night. He was awarded the Volunteerism Award named for Bill Cappel. “Best award I’ve ever gotten,” Denny called it, “he (Bill) cared so much about this area, so much about women’s softball.”
• DERRICK RHODEN: The Tom Fricke Service Award went in a different direction, to the late Derrick Rhoden, who was struck with Schizoaffective Disorder as a 16-year-old at Bishop Brossart who fought through his mental illness to finish his four years of high school basketball but later in life, at the age of 38, the health consequences were too much for the seven-footer who continually was rescued by police when he suffered medical setbacks. His brother, Nick, an Alexandria policeman, and mother, Martie Rhoden Bessler, accepted for Derrick in the campaign they’re pursuing in Derrick’s name to educate people about mental illness and speak to police groups and raise money to get the message out. “The only thing I can do,” Nick says, “is to tell my brother’s story.”
• PAM KORDENBROCK HART: How cool must it be to get the Pat Scott Lifetime Achievement Award, named for a Northern Kentucky woman whose athletic achievements were part of the inspiration for the movie, “A League of Their Own,” from the St. Henry High School alum’s WWII days pitching for the Ft. Wayne Daisies. Kordenbrock Hart, whose high school years saw her average better than 30 points a game before a hall of fame career at Western Kentucky University, earned almost every honor you could win as a player.
Although she did wonder “on deep reflection” about “receiving a lifetime achievement award: Do they know something I don’t know? . . . I hope I have some productive years left.” But she also reflected how she’s a perfect example about how sports here tend “to come full circle,” and not just because her middle school coaches were Hall of Famers like her presenter, Linda Moore, or golf legend Margaret Jones. “I played softball for Marsh’s Markets,” she said of those years at the Bill Cappel Fields where her team’s sponsor was the market of the family of NKSHOF Pres. Randy Marsh, the longtime major league umpire.
• KENNY GOODHEW: Named for his and most everyone here’s good friend at the NKSHOF, the late Tiny Steffen, the Humanitarian Award went to Kenny Goodhew, a Holmes High alum – “Kenny will always be a Bulldog,” said his presenter and good friend Kenney Shields. “Keep it short,” Kenny told Kenney, who did not, in telling prankster Tiny Steffen stories as background for the award. But Kenny Goodhew did, in his thanks, laughing as he noted that “my friends told me to keep it short . . . I had a lot of things to say but Kenney took too much of my time.”
• DR. RAY HEBERT: As he arrived, the Thomas More history professor with too many job titles and honors to list here from his 49 years at TMU was hoping the man for whom his award was named – the James Claypool Award – would be here to give it to him. And no sooner had he said it, in walked Dr. Claypool, a colleague, friend and fellow history professor who would later say of Hebert: “. . . a tornado in the classroom, Ray never met a blackboard he couldn’t fill,” Claypool said, “that is until that day when one of the Villa Madonna nuns, tapping a ruler in her hands,” reminded Dr. Hebert that he “needed blackboard discipline.” His history as a multi-sport athlete back home in New Hampshire helped him get the job, Hebert says, when asked at the end of the interview if he played softball. “Shortstop,” he said. The correct answer, he says, obviously.
• JOE BRENNAN: How appropriate that the first-ever Joe Brennan Leadership Award would go to none other than Joe Brennan, who this past year – after 20 years as president of the NKSHOF – turned the job over to Randy Marsh. But not before he saw the first woman – Pat Scott, and first minority – Tom Thacker, brought into the Hall of Fame. Not before he came up with the awards and the scholarships and the first website. All the while, the lifelong railroader who’s been married for 56 years, he said . . . uh oh, “63 years,” his wife noted . . . “I can only remember 56 of them,” was Joe’s grinning comeback.
He’d also been a Covington commissioner who helped push through Main Strasse, the new police headquarters, the Behringer-Crawford Museum and the floodwall murals. Just Tuesday, he acquired the newest piece of memorabilia for the museum collection – a Nick Carr’s Boosters’ team jacket from player William Vetter’s daughter Joyce Murphy – that was on display. As Joe was finishing up, he handed the microphone over: “I’ve turned this over to Randy Marsh before and I’ll do it again.”
Contact Dan Weber at dweber3440@aol.com. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @dweber3440.