No wonder Rob Butcher, winner Wednesday of one of the two new awards at the annual Summer Reunion of the Northern Kentucky Sports Hall of Fame, said he “felt a little out of place,” in accepting his special recognition trophy for “running around the world” by totaling 24,901 miles of piling up distance mileage the past 18 years.
“I’ve only lived here 30 years,” the Park Hills resident and retired Reds vice-president for media relations said after hearing most of the stories of those who came before him. The University of Dayton grad and Wilmington, Ohio native arrived here after making it for three crazy years working for the Yankees and George Steinbrenner.
“I can’t compare to the leadership and perseverance of those who came before me,” Butcher said of the NKSHOF winners although the amount of perseverance it takes to run around the world (figure on running five miles a day for five days a week for 20 years).
But as a guy who estimates he’s done about half those miles in Devou Park, “there isn’t a better place to live,” he says of Northern Kentucky after spending 36 years of his life in Major League Baseball working 22 All-Star Games and 21 World Series.
He got started when a friend asked him if he was expecting as he looked down at the bit of a paunch on his slim frame. So Rob started running. And four years ago, he realized he’d reached 20,000 miles. “How far is that?” he asked himself. And then he found he wasn’t that far from reaching the circumference of the earth at the equator. So he kept on running. And on June 8, he made it.
Although the problem with running around the world is that by the time you get where you’re going, you’re right back at the place you started. “I hadn’t thought of that,” Rob says. Although in his case, that’s not a bad thing.
He’d be back in Northern Kentucky, a place he loves.
And on this night, this was a place where the lineup of nine winners was announced by another Reds’ employee from Northern Kentucky, Joe Zerhusen, the rich, familiar voice of Great American Ball Park for the last 23 years with a sound that was so recognizable.
And the challenge was to follow the first winner named – Brad Fritz, who was awarded the Derrick Rhoden Perseverance Award.
“Possibly one of the best known persons in Northern Kentucky,” presenter Dick Maile said of Brad, now 41, who is working his way back from recently having been seriously injured when an auto hit him on Turkeyfoot Road where he waves to greet passers-by as an extension of his commitment to turn the accident that put him in a wheelchair for life when he was just 15. He communicates with a computer-generated program telling his story in an outreach program speaking to school and community groups across the nation.
Bryan Flaugher, who has kept the scorebook at Augusta High School for the last 45 years and seems to know everyone as a result, has overcome life on crutches and may well know more people in Augusta than anyone ever, won the Thomas John Fricke Service Award for his commitment to his school and community.
But he was more thrilled with getting to be one of the few who have represented the historic river community here. “We don’t have many,” he said of Augusta Hall of Famers.
Ludlow’s Jack Aynes was only the second-oldest Panther in the room behind senior softball national standout Jack Hatter, going strong at 95 and here to see his schoolmate and teammate.
But Aynes, from the Ludlow High Class of 1951 who won 15 letters in high school before picking it up even more as one of the early founders of the NKSHOF, a creator of the scholarship program and the golf tourney that raises the money for it as well as the man behind the Ludlow Sports Hall of Fame, won the Joe Brennan Leadership Award named for the 23-year president of the organization who oversaw the organization’s growth to where it is today.
And Jack won the award for the shortest speech.
“Tonight, here we are,” Jack said. “Tomorrow, there we were.”
Jim Claypool would present the award named after himself, the original NKU Dean of Students, to one of his own – longtime NKU coach and Athletic Director Jane Meier, whose tenure from 1988 to 2009 saw the NKU athletic budget go from $800,000 a year to $5 million in a program that led the nation in giving equal opportunities to women in sports. No wonder her resume is “four pages long,” Claypool said of Meier, who came along before Title IX had made any impact and could only play slow-pitch softball growing up at St. Pius X Grade School before coaching three sports at NKU.
Northern would make her just the 57th woman ever to become a college AD and the first in Kentucky. “It was a profession not that open to women,” Jane said, praising so many opportunities that came her way thanks to her own family – “We were given so much by our families” — and her NKU family, where she spent 31 years and met her husband, Steve, a former NKU basketball player, who has spent 43 years working at his alma mater.
Linda Moore, winner of the Pat Scott Lifetime Achievement Award named for the Northern Kentuckian whose pitching exploits for the Ft. Wayne Daisies were featured in the movie, “A League of Their Own,” and who is in the Baseball Hall of Fame with her All-American Girls League mates, also came along too early to play sports in school. But the Scott High coach from 1978 to 1999, found a way to prepare herself by playing AAU basketball in Ohio and learning the game.
“I got to live my dream every day,” she said, adding that “I miss it every day.” And talking about how lucky she was to work in the Kenton County system where she had nothing but “great kids” to work with.
When they came to offer Joe “Bones” Egan the job of director of operations for Bellevue High football, the longtime Tiger booster who played in the last game at the old gym and the first game at the school’s Ben Flora Gym, told them he “didn’t know that much about football.” No problem, they said, “you know Bellevue.”
And Bellevue knows Joe, the man who will take all the program’s football uniforms home with him and wash them up for the next game. When they asked “Bones” on retiring from the University of Cincinnati what he planned to do, he told them “I’m going to my dream job – a full-time Bellevue Tiger.” No surprise then that Joe is the winner of the James “Tiny” Steffen Humanitarian Award for the message he lives and communicates that “high school sports aren’t about wins and losses,” but about relationships you make and how Joe “will be your friend for life.”
Through multiple heart surgeries, former Thomas More basketball great John Wenderfer has been the driving force behind the NKSHOF’s annual golf tournament, the major fund-raiser for scholarships. He sells the hole sponsorships, gets the sponsor signs made up and displayed, makes sure all the food is there for the day and the food prep handled.
But it’s not that John, winner of the Bill Cappel Community Contribution Award named for the NKSHOF founder who may have done more for sports in Northern Kentucky than anyone who ever lived, is doing all this alone.
“Thank my family and friends,” he says. “When I volunteer, they volunteer.”
Recently retired St. Henry boys’ basketball coach Dave Faust, the winningest all-time basketball coach in Northern Kentucky history, didn’t think he’d be doing many more of these speaking gigs now that he’s retired after 33 years at St. Henry and on the day before his 43rd anniversary. Although he was pretty sure that getting the final slot on a full nine-deep lineup card was maybe not the best place to be as he accepted his Lifetime Achievement in Coaching Award.
“I’m sure you’re all ready to go,” the former St. Anthony, Newport Central Catholic and Thomas More guard said as he thanked the coaches – Jim Connor, John Gross, Gary Schulte and Bob Schneider — who mattered so much in his life. But they weren’t ready to roll out as dozens of attendees hung around catching up with one another afterward.
Contact Dan Weber at dweber3440@aol.com. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @dweber3440.