Jim Noll was always a bit of an outlier.
In the large Noll family growing up on what was then farmland next to Villa Madonna Academy, Jim was the brother who didn’t play football. Bob and Mick had both played at Cincinnati St. Xavier, Tony at Covington Catholic.
“We had cows and pigs,” Jim says. “I wanted to be a farmer.”
But while Bob (“Biggie”) spent more than half a century as a general manager and then owner of Suburban Chevrolet in Florence, and Mick was “Mr. Oktober” as a Main Strasse restauranteur and Tony became a man about Covington, Jim went in a different direction.
As was often the case in the Catholic grade schools in Northern Kentucky, Jim was one of those sixth graders the nuns identified as a prospect for Covington Latin’s accelerated program. Go there as a seventh-grade freshman and four years later, you’re a high school grad and headed to college two years earlier than if you’d stayed in grade school.
When his teachers at St. Joseph’s in Crescent Springs identified Jim as a candidate for fast-tracking to college, he said OK. And while the Latin School program helps develop academics, it doesn’t do that much for varsity athletics. Not when seniors are really sophomores.
No wonder the one story everyone knows about Covington Latin athletics is that alum David Justice, who went on to star in basketball at Thomas More and then became best known for earning rookie of the year honors in the National League on his way to a 14-year major league baseball career as a slugging star for the Atlanta Braves, Yankees, Indians and A’s. But as part of the story, it’s always mentioned that Justice “went to a high school that didn’t have a baseball team.”
That didn’t bother Jim Noll. He was there for the classwork, something that was obvious when he finished first in his class after four years. And “I wasn’t good at team sports,” he says.
But Jim knew he could handle the studies. What he didn’t know was that there would be a sport for him, a tall, gangly guy but not a basketball player, awaiting down in the Latin School basement.
As Jim and his buds were exploring, there it was, tucked away in storage, long forgotten, a boxing ring and all this equipment from years earlier when boxing had been more of a respectable sport and the Catholic schools had teams.
Somehow it clicked with Jim. “I didn’t work at it real hard,” he says, “I wasn’t going to be a professional. One or two times a week, we’d box.” And then Jim moved on to Thomas More – Villa Madonna as it was known in those days, right next door in downtown Covington.
“You’d walk out the back door at Latin School and into the front door at Villa Madonna,” Jim says. And what a deal. “It was $8 to $12 a credit hour.”
Jim would also find himself moving on as well “to box in the Silver Gloves in old torn-down church in the West End of Cincinnati.”
By then, if the 6-foot-1 Jim put rocks in his pockets, he could make it to 175 pounds and just into the-heavyweight class where there wasn’t as much competition in Cincinnati.
Although in 1958, in the one time that the Kentucky Golden Gloves were fought in Northern Kentucky, at the Covington Catholic gym, Jim found himself on the same card as a young Kentucky light-heavyweight from Louisville Central High School by the name of Cassius Clay before he was known as Muhammad Ali. “I didn’t have to fight him,” Jim says with a grin and a shake of his head.
But he did get to move on to the National Golden Gloves championships in Chicago, fighting for Cincinnati’s Fenwick Club, where many of the fighters told Jim that “you look like a college boy.” Which he did – and was.
A college boy who got both a knockout and knocked out in Chicago with the newspaper account of his knockout telling the story of a bloody slugfest in just two rounds that Jim won.
Getting knocked out, Jim says, was not a problem, really, except for not remembering all that much for a while. “That’s the thing about knockouts,” says Jim, who scored some and suffered some in his short career.
Although that might have prepared Jim for the day in college when he was working a summer job at the Greater Cincinnati Airport and got electrocuted, something that had him not remembering for a couple of days with the three-month rehab extending his time in college to five years.
Then Jim was on his way to the Navy and Officer Candidate School, finishing first in his class again, before assignments in Japan, Norfolk, Va. And Newport, R.I. Then it was on to Auburn Veterinary School, where Kentuckians, with no vet school in state, are slotted. And a career in research and then private practice, finishing up in Florence.
Now 86 and a daily Mass-goer at the Thomas More chapel, Jim looks back at his boxing career and as he tells the story, it’s almost as if Dr. Jim, the veterinarian with the sterling academics, is talking about someone else.
A boxer from Covington Latin? No way.
Contact Dan Weber at dweber3440@aol.com. Follow him on X @dweber3440.