In many ways, Northern Kentucky was the best place to grow up in sports.
You could be both Kentucky and Ohio, the top of SEC Country and the bottom of the Big Ten – back in the day when college conferences were still geographically aligned.
Someone like me could grow up in Ludlow and Ft. Mitchell, play Knothole baseball on both sides of the Ohio River, go to high school in Cincinnati at St. Xavier when Kentucky kids were still allowed to play sports in Ohio – thanks, Bob Arnzen for showing up the top Ohio players and Gerry Faust for recruiting the best Villa Hills Spartans – and live a double life in sports.
You could follow Newport Catholic and CovCath, Highlands, Dixie Heights and Holmes and the GCL schools like Elder, Purcell and Roger Bacon.
And root for UK in the SEC and head to Lexington for those October night games against LSU, Georgia and Florida. But also head up to Columbus and Ohio State or South Bend and Notre Dame in the fall as well. Where else could you do that?
But it didn’t end with football. You could root for a UC Bearcat team that was a buzzer-beater away from winning three straight NCAA basketball titles in the 1960s, beating No. 1 Ohio State to get there. Or maybe Indiana with Bobby Knight was more your taste over in Bloomington.
And of course, there was Kentucky, transitioning from the Rupp Era and Memorial Coliseum, where you could get in for $3 standing room to watch Pete Maravich score 50-something against Issel, Pratt and Casey to Rupp Arena and Joe B. Hall, Tubby Smith, Rick Pitino and John Calipari.
The Boys’ Sweet 16 was probably a bigger deal back then, but with the Girls’ Sweet 16 coming along, you now have two weeks to head to Lexington – and more Northern Kentucky teams to root for with the current regional setup.
As someone who’s covered sports in the three major media/sports markets from Coast to Coast, we can say Northern Kentucky still has a singular place in the national scheme of things when spring arrives. As the former high school baseball coach in me hopes it will in this year when it’s 81 one week and 27 the next.
And yeah, getting to cover the Yankees in the original Yankee Stadium had its one-of-a-kind charm, as did covering the Eagles and the Phillies and their louder-than-life fans. And getting to be there with the last Michael Jordan Bulls team in Chicago or the Cubs at Wrigley was special. As it was up close with the Lakers with Kobe and Shaq in LA, or the Dodgers, Angels and Padres in Southern California not to mention USC football and all those Rose Bowls or UCLA basketball and Final Fours.
But nowhere did they have the prospect of spring the way we have here. Start with the Reds, the team that started professional sports – not just baseball – in America way back in 1869 playing in venues that, including the final three at Crosley Field, Riverfront Stadium and the Great American Ball Park, were all within walking distance across a bridge for us Northern Kentuckians.
And if baseball wasn’t the true indicator that spring was here, what came next surely was. Start with a bright sunny day at Keeneland as Kentucky’s racing calendar shifted downstate from then Latonia and now Turfway Park to the first Saturday in May when Louisville, another of those 100-miles-away special places where the greatest horse race in the world takes place every year at Churchill Downs, as it has for the last 150 years now.
Had a streak of 12 straight years at the Derby once. Loved every minute of it despite the crowds. Or because of them. You couldn’t beat the people watching under the Twin Spires. Which if truth were told, may have been as much a draw for me in a lifetime of watching sports as the games or the competitions themselves. They were all different. Unique in their own ways. It didn’t get more interesting than watching Covington ticket scalper Baldy Koors work a crowd or maybe basketball handicapper Jimmy Briede.
Which gets us to – just a month later – the Indianapolis 500. My dad, a busy solo practitioner family physician in Ludlow, had this as one of two must-see sports events every year along with his trip with fellow Northern Kentucky docs to Reds’ Opening Day. There was a Ludlow crew that always went to Indy. It was something of a tradition since the time that the physician whose practice my dad took over competed in the 500 as a riding mechanic in those days when you had to have two people – a driver and a mechanic – to keep the cars going for 500 miles.
From baseball to horses to racecars, no better place than right here, where we’re still in the middle of it.
Saying so long to a special sports family
With Dave Faust, Northern Kentucky’s winningest high school basketball coach announcing his retirement Monday at a young 66 with 482 career wins to his credit – all in his 33 seasons at St. Henry – it’s hard not to wish the classy, gentlemanly, in-it-for-the-right-reasons and doing-it-the-right-way guy nothing but the best. We’ll miss him – on the sidelines coaching and after the game interviewing. But just as much as we’ve missed his wonderful parents – Tom and Millie, who were so much a part of Northern Kentucky’s behind the sports scene – and for Notre Dame football fan Tom, an Irish football insider like no other. Well done, Faust family, you’ve made our sports here such a better place.
NKSHOF quartet for April
Four new inductees into the Northern Kentucky Sports Hall of Fame are scheduled for Wednesday, April 16, at 1 p.m. at The Arbors in Park Hills. They are: Ludlow’s Wendell Alder, an all-star baseball-basketball player for the Panthers; Dave Macke, Covington Catholic, as a basketball-golf star who went on to amateur success on the links here; Dixie Heights’ Dr. Brett Coldiron, who led the Colonels, and then Wabash College, as an offensive lineman; and finally, Shane Popham, a record-breaking kicker and punter at CovCath who went on to star at Wake Forest. This event is open to the public, no charge.
Contact Dan Weber at dweber3440@aol.com. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @dweber3440.