Dan Weber’s Just Sayin’: So many sports heroes for NKY to celebrate, too many to count here

The idea was to scope out the all-time best of the best in Northern Kentucky sports. Shouldn’t be all that hard to do, right?

Wrong.

Sure, we knew it wouldn’t be a Mount Rushmore moment, but maybe a Top 10. Or Top 25. Something like that. And then we started to do it. And realized how limiting it to an arbitrary number would not be the way to go. And in this week of the papal enclave, we ended up with something whose numbers look more like the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

So here was our decision. Not only must they have had a major impact on their sport in Northern Kentucky but have taken it further – to the rest of Kentucky or the nation, even the world. And still, there are so many we feel guilty about leaving out.

You’ll be surprised, as I was, at how many are on the list. And how many more should, or could, have been. Here’s a quick paragraph on each, in no particular order, pretty much as they came to us.

SEN. JIM BUNNING: A Baseball Hall of Fame pitcher for the Tigers and with a flair for the dramatic like pitching a no-hitter (only man to do so in both leagues) on Father’s Day against the Mets in New York, this Southgate native and Ft. Thomas resident, St. X High grad and Xavier U. alum, loved to compete as he went on to become a U.S. congressman and senator from Kentucky and father of nine in a life jam-packed with accomplishments.

DAVE COWENS: All the 6-foot-9 redhead from Bellevue and Newport Central Catholic did was get better at every step along the way to a Naismith Memorial Hall of Fame career from Florida State to the Boston Celtics, where he won Rookie of the Year (1971) and MVP (1973) honors as well as two NBA championships with the Celtics while averaging a double-double for his entire career (17.8 points, 13.6 rebounds) before becoming an NBA and WNBA head coach.

TOM THACKER: No one else will ever match the cool Covington Grant product as a defender and team guy with skills ahead of his time who led his Cincinnati Bearcats to back-to-back national titles as a two-time consensus All-American while barely missing a third and then going on to win both an ABA title in Indianapolis and an NBA title in Boston, the only man to win all three national titles.

ARNIE RISEN: When Eastern Kentucky dropped basketball in WWII, the 6-foot-9, 200-pounder they called “Stilts” transferred to Ohio State where he led the Buckeyes to a pair of NCAA Final Four appearances before a Hall of Fame 13-year NBA career that saw him win titles with the Rochester Royals and Boston Celtics while averaging double-doubles from 1950 through 1955.

PAT SCOTT: What a legacy for the all-around athlete and medical technologist from Walton, St. Henry High School and UK who learned to play baseball on her family farm’s ballfield and then won a spot as a 17-year-old in the All-American Girls Baseball League at those Wrigley Field tryouts recounted in the movie “A League of Their Own”) before eventually starring as the pitcher for the Ft. Wayne Daisies team portrayed in that movie for which she became a technical advisor and eventually, with that team, a part of a featured display in the Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown.

MOTE HILS: After an unparalleled winning streak with five straight regional basketball titles at CovCath, Hils moved on to then Northern Kentucky State College as its first basketball coach and athletics director in 1971 as the school built an identity, a basketball program, its first arena in Regents Hall and acquired its first dorm for scholarship athletes under Hils, who challenged his undersized and all-local teams with a competitive schedule that had the Norsemen going against top NAIA and NCAA Division II teams from New Orleans to Pittsburgh, from Kentucky Wesleyan, UT Chattanooga, Steubenville and Georgetown to Division I Xavier, as they carried the Northern Kentucky name around the nation.

EDDIE ARCARO: Born in Cincinnati but raised in Newport and Covington, the 5-foot-2 Arcaro would start his racing career here (illegally) as a young teenager before moving to Mexico where he could race legally at his age and then on to a Hall of Fame career as the first Triple Crown-winning jockey and only man to win two (first with Whirlaway in 1941 and then Citation in 1948) while winning 17 Triple Crown races, the most of all-time, and becoming a corporate spokesperson and a close friend of Bellevue native Tom Cundy (below) of tennis fame.

TOM CUNDY: A KHSAA tennis champ for Roger Klein at Bellevue High, Cundy was among the first-ever group of male athletes at Florida State when it became a co-ed school and as well-known as he would become by building up one of the nation’s largest independent insurance and employee benefits agencies in Ft. Lauderdale, it’s the fraternity brothers he went to school with at FSU, where he became a member of the school’s Board of Trustees, that we’ll remember him for – actor and football player Burt Reynolds, football coach and broadcaster Lee Corso and MLB player and manager Dick Howser.

STEVE CAUTHEN: Northern Kentucky’s second Triple-Crown-winning jockey on Affirmed, Walton native Cauthen – “The Kid” as he was known for his teen success as the youngest Triple Crown winner ever, would go on to 14 years riding in England where it was easier for him to make weight and he would become the only jockey to win the Epsom Derby and the Kentucky Derby before returning as a racing executive and owner of a 400-acre Verona horse.

BECKY RUEHL: Full disclosure, Villa Madonna Academy and UC alum Ruehl is my niece who I got started as a diver when she was 8 and that led her to a career where she won five KHSAA titles, six NCAA championships at UC and a spot in the 1996 Atlanta Olympics where she finished fourth on the platform, just missing a medal, and then, after surgery for a torn rotator cuff, missed the early Sydney Olympics in 2000 won by a diver who had never beaten Becky.

RON MCANALLY: Orphaned as teen, Ron left the Covington Protestant Orphans Home for California in a boxcar full of racehorses before returning in a Hall of Fame career as one of the nation’s most beloved and respected of trainers who would find fame and fortune on the West Coast circuit with more than 2,500 career wins headlined by the all-time leading stakes- and money-winning horse that he picked up as a four-year-old, John Henry.

RALPH LANDRUM: All the St. Henry and UK product would do is play his way onto the PGA Tour by playing his way onto the tour, week after week, starting with the 1983 U.S. Open at Oakmont in Pittsburgh with an eighth-place finish, his best in 13 starts in a major tournament after causing a stir as the pro from the World of Golf then putt-putt course in Florence where he would go on to play for three years with his best Tour finish as runner-up in Memphis Open before returning to Northern Kentucky and Devou Park before his Landrum Golf Management would develop a cutting edge golf facility back at World of Sports.

SHAUN ALEXANDER: A seven-time NFL All-Pro running back with the Seattle Seahawks and 2005 NFL MVP, the Boone County High alum and Alabama All-American was named to the NFL’s 2000 All-Decade team and is the eighth all-time in NFL rushing touchdowns with 100 and the first athlete to be featured on the cover of both the NCAA and Madden NFL video games.

IRV GOODE: Another Boone County alum, the 13-year NFL vet and two-time All-Pro with a Super Bowl to his credit, the UK All-American offensive lineman once made 23 tackles on defense against Ole Miss, then played for the St. Louis Cardinals before winning his Super Bowl with the Miami Dolphins after missing his first two seasons of high school football at Covington Holmes as a not-yet-grown 130-pounder.

HOMER RICE: The former Centre College quarterback who pretty much invented Highlands High School’s top-10 national winningest football program would begin his prep coaching career with a 109-7-1 record his first 11 years before stops as an assistant at Kentucky and Oklahoma, head coach at UC and then as the coach who succeeded Paul Brown at the Cincinnati Bengals before becoming one of the nation’s most respected college AD’s at Rice, North Carolina and Georgia Tech.

JIM CONNOR: You know him from his name on the Thomas More Convocation Center but the gentlemanly Connor, a D-Day veteran who with his family (his son Terry is TMU’s VP-Athletics now) were very much responsible for the all-sports facility, did so much more in his 42-year career starting with three KHSAA state titles in baseball at NewCath (1950, 1954 and 1956) in a basketball/baseball coaching career where his teams won 558 basketball games and more than 800 baseball games while becoming maybe the only coach to ever produce an MLB Rookie of the Year – David Justice – and an NBA Rookie of the Year – Dave Cowens.

WILLIS LEE: You’ve almost certainly never heard of the Owen Countian whose family operated a distillery there, but you should have because the Naval Academy grad may well be more deserving of our attention than anyone else on this list as an Olympic athlete and hero in both WWI and WWII where his early shooting skills won him seven medals – five golds, the most for 60 years — at the 1920 Antwerp Olympics before Lee, as vice-admiral, led the U.S. ships that turned back the Japanese in the second battle of Guadalcanal, considered the turning point in the war in the Pacific.

DONNA MURPHY: Kentucky’s first miss Basketball, Murphy took her game from the streets of Newport, where the lefty jump-shooter showed what girls could do when they got the chance before moving on to a record-breaking playing career at Morehead State, three years of pro basketball with the St. Louis Spirit and assistant coaching stops at UK, Florida, Memphis, UC, Morehead State and then as the head coach starting the program at Asbury College.

FRENCHY DEMOISEY: At 6-foot-6, the Walton native became Adolph Rupp’s first Kentucky-born All-American who led UK to a 50-6 record in his three years and a 1934 Helms Foundation national championship with Rupp crediting him with developing the first one-hand overhead pivot shot, a kind of hook shot, as the game developed in those early years before DeMoisey became Happy Chandler’s executive assistant driving the governor and senator who did not drive “more than a million miles,” Demoisey calculated.

KENNEY SHIELDS: He’s the all-time winningest Northern Kentucky basketball coach with 766 victories from his time at St. Thomas, Highlands and NKU, but in taking the Norse to back-to-back NCAA Division II championship games, Shields introduced NKU to the nation as the former St. Patrick’s Grade School and CovCath athlete never fails to live up to his standard introduction: “If you don’t know Kenney, he knows you.” And everything about you. It’s what he does. What he also did was commit to the kids in Covington and the Turners club as a recreation supervisor and well told in his book: “Nothing More, Nothing Less, Nothing Else.”

RANDY MARSH: From his days as manager of Holmes High’s state baseball champs in 1963, this son of Kenton County Knothole Supervisor Bob Marsh, is the lone Major League umpire from Northern Kentucky after working his first MLB game at Riverfront Stadium in 1981 with a career through the 2009 season while umpiring five World Series – three as crew chief, only the third man to do so – in addition to four All-Star games before the UK grad became MLB’s Director of Umpiring under Joe Torre.

DALE MCMILLEN: No one was more of a booster of Northern Kentucky sports than sportscaster McMillen, a former Dixie Heights football player and Erlanger resident who added NKU basketball and interview shows with the likes of Bengal Ken Anderson to his weekly high school schedule of games before also calling Xavier basketball and UC football and always with an upbeat, positive approach of a man, trained as an engineer, who absolutely loved what he was doing in sports.

RON BEAGLE: How much did Taylor Mill’s Beagle want to play football? Well, he pedaled his bike all the way every day to Cincinnati’s Purcell High School, then a national powerhouse, to do so on his way to a double All-American career as a 180-pound end at the Naval Academy as well as in lacrosse before winning the nation’s No. 2 college football individual prize in 1956 – the Maxwell Award from the Philadelphia club of the same name. A knee injury and his military career commitment kept him from an NFL career.

FRANK JACOBS: At nearly 6-foot-5 and 230 pounds, the tight end/first baseman/post player from NewCath was one of the nation’s top football prospects as Notre Dame, UCLA and Penn State came after Kentucky’s first Mr. Football who finished as runner-up to Florida’s Emmitt Smith as the Columbus Touchdown Club’s High School Player of the Year before choosing Notre Dame where he helped the Irish win their last national title, scoring a touchdown in the 1989 national championship win over West Virginia before going on to a professional baseball career that saw him reach AAA in his five seasons.

STEVE FLESCH: The best golfer ever from Northern Kentucky, the lefty from Covington Catholic and UK, at the age of 57 and still playing on the Seniors Tour, has won four PGA events, another international tournament and showed remarkable consistency, making 171 cuts in 178 events, finishing runner-up three times and third another five in a 32-year career that’s earned the 5-11, 165-pounder an unofficial $18,662,025 including more than $1.8 million in the four majors.

DAVID JUSTICE: With career earnings of an estimated $40 million in his 14-year MLB career for the Braves, Indians, Yankees and Athletics, the sweep-swinging lefty has come a long way from Covington Latin School where he had no baseball team but as a basketball star turned to baseball under Jim Connor, the 6-3, 200-pounder hit his way into an under-the-radar fourth-round draft pick for the Braves, where he would become the 1990 MLB Rookie of the Year for the Braves (the second for Connor in addition to Dave Cowens in the NBA) on his way to 305 career home runs, a .279 career batting average and two World Series’ titles.

SYDNEY MOSS: The daughter of NFL Hall of Famer Randy Moss, Sydney, Kentucky’s Miss Basketball at Boone County High School, returned to Northern Kentucky from the University of Florida to lead TMU to back-to-back NCAA Division III titles as a three-time All-American, once scoring 63 points for the Saints where she would become an assistant coach before taking the head job at Wilmington College in 2024.

CHARLEY WOLF: From Northern Kentucky to St. Xavier High where he helped change the sports teams’ nickname to Bombers from Conquerers as a pass-catching end, Wolf would also go on from Notre Dame to pro baseball in the Reds’ organization to coaching then Villa Madonna College (now Thomas More) to the NBA where he coached Oscar Robertson with the Cincinnati Royals and then the Detroit Pistons before returning to Cincinnati as an auto executive and father of six basketball- and tennis-playing sons – Marty, Steve, Greg, Jeff, Daniel and David.

NANCY WINSTEL: As a member of NKU’s (then Northern Kentucky State College) first-ever women’s basketball team, the left-handed post player from Newport and St. Thomas High School would go on to win 636 games and two NCAA Division II titles (2000, 2008) in a Hall of Fame career at her alma mater that saw her named Coach of the Decade by Women’s Division II Bulletin in 2009. Her 1999-2000 team won NKU its first-ever national title with a 32-2 record, winning 24 straight games.

NATE JONES: The Butler native and NKU grad didn’t let his 179th MLB draft spot in 2007 hold him back as he played professionally for 14 seasons, nearly 10 in the majors, where he earned more than $13 million as an eight-year reliever for the Chicago White Sox as well as the Reds, Braves and Dodgers despite a number of career-threatening injuries that didn’t keep him from a White Sox record 318 strikeouts for a reliever from 2012-2019 and an 8-0 mark in 2012, best ever for a Sox relief pitcher.

JEFF HANS: Going into the 2023-24 season, Jeff Hans was the winningest coach in NCAA women’s basketball with two NCAA Division III titles and one NAIA championship and two runner-up finishes in an amazing 13-year run at Thomas More, winning 339 games against 42 losses (an .889 winning percentage) that has seen the Northern Kentucky Sports Hall of Famer and Wilmington College grad return to NKU this past season as the women’s coach with the goal of turning around a stagnant program much the way he did TMU’s.

BOB JONES: A gentle bear of a man, the former Bellevue High star was a tough 6-6 post player for his Georgetown College national finalist NAIA team in 1961 before moving on to coach at Ludlow High and then to Kentucky Wesleyan for a national championship NCAA Division II team in 1973 as head coach and twice as an assistant there in 1968 and 1969 before returning to Northern Kentucky to coach high school at both Campbell County and Newport, earning region Coach of the Year honors twice.

And here we’re going to do things a bit differently as we honor the single best sport of all-time in Northern Kentucky – softball. We’re talking men’s fast-pitch and slow-pitch where Northern Kentucky athletes were simply the best in the nation and incredibly dominated the sport for decades, and women’s slow-pitch, where Northern Kentucky athletes could play with anyone.

MEN’S SLOWPITCH SOFTBALL

MYRON REINHARDT: When they came to creating a separate category for the Softball Hall of Fame at Oklahoma City for slow-pitch in 1973, the first man they named was Alexandria’s Reinhardt, a school principal and basketball official who led three Northern Kentucky teams – Shields Realty, Lang’s Pet Shop and Gatliff Auto — to World’s titles in the sport’s first decade of national prominence in the mid-1950s as the only man to be a member of the first team to win the World’s title, the first team to win it twice, the first team to win it three times and the first team to come out of the loser’s bracket to win it in a 2,000-game career spanning 20 seasons.

WHITEY BROWN: Joining Reinhardt and Hal Wiggins in the first 10 inductees into the Softball Hall of Fame was the sweet-swinging Williamstown native with the Popeye-like forearms of a professional woodworker and lovely disposition who played until he was 80 and is the 10th player – and fourth Northern Kentuckian – named to the Hall of Fame after five national championships playing for three local teams at third base.

HAL WIGGINS: Another softball Hall of Famer, the Covington native and Ft. Thomas resident was the seventh inductee into the national Softball Hall of Fame – and third from Northern Kentucky – in 1986 after leading Shield’s Contractors, Lang’s Pet Shop and Gatliff Auto Sales to four World’s Championships as a clutch-hitting outfielder with tremendous defensive skills in his 14 years of postseason play (with a 68-23 record) in a 31-year career.

DON RARDIN: One of only two players to win World’s championships in two categories – Open and Industrial – Rardin’s first four titles came with teams in Northern Kentucky (Gatliff, Yorkshire) and Cincinnati (Hamilton Tailors) before he moved to Lexington where he led his IBM team to an Industrial title as a pitcher with the former infielder winning 234 games against just 39 losses while hitting a career .606.

WALT WHERRY: One of the most iconic – and talented – athletes ever to come out of Northern Kentucky, the mercurial Covington product marched to his own drummer as a four-time All-American in slow-pitch (outfield, shortstop and pitcher) while playing for three World’s champs and winning the long-throw contest at Covington Ball Park every year with a legendary arm that could have made him a top MLB pitcher who walked away from baseball at Triple AAA New Orleans for the Pirates and never looked back.

WOMEN’S SLOW-PITCH

DONNA WOLFE: All the EKU grad and Holmes High PE teacher from Covington did in her 20-year softball career was lead six teams to World’s championships including Covington’s Escue Pontiac as a five-time All-American at four different positions while hitting .484 in national tournament play where her teams were 65-12.

MEN’S FAST-PITCH

One place and one place only to start with here – Nick Carr’s Boosters from 1939 as an underdog team with every player from Covington venturing into 100,000-seat Soldier Field in Chicago to win the World’s championship that put four of those players into the Hall of Fame and onto the first-ever pro softball team that Fred Zollner was putting together in Ft. Wayne along with his NBA Pistons team. The fifth, we were fortunate to keep at home, was Bill Cappel, who may have done more good things for sports here than anyone who ever lived.

Here’s that all-Covington lineup:

NORB “THE CYCLONE” WARKEN: From his nickname, you can probably guess that Warken was a fire-balling fast-ball pitcher who won six games – five of them shutouts – on the way to the 1939 title, finishing with 12 hits allowed and 99 strikeouts and only one run – an unearned one – allowed in the last inning of the championship game, a streak he extended to 55 straight scoreless innings the next year.

LEO LUKEN: If one pitcher wasn’t enough for Nick Carr’s Boosters, how about two as Hall of Famer Luken, nicknamed “Lion-hearted” and a product of Covington’s church leagues, racked up a 42-6 record that 1939 season, and then never lost a game after hiring on with the Ft. Wayne Zollner Pistons for another three consecutive ASA championship titles while playing through 1954 when the team disbanded and staying with the Zollner Corporation as production and traffic manager until his retirement in 1982.

BERNIE KAMPSCHMIDT: In 1940, he joined the Pistons as Luken’s catcher after Luken shut out the Pistons, 1-0, and they joined a team of the best pro softball players in the country that the Pistons had signed and the rifle-armed receiver validated that decision as the 5-11, 180-pounder earned All-Star honors four years in a row and was named the team’s manager in 1946, a position he held until the team disbanded in 1954 although he stayed with the company for 42 years before retiring. After his 31-year playing career, Kampschmidt said his greatest thrill was “winning the 1939 championship in Chicago with all the players being from Covington.”

JIM RAMAGE: Just 5-7 and 160 pounds, the man they called “Boogie” was a strong-armed, quick shortstop who could hit, holding five of the 10 top offensive stats in the national fast-pitch league one year including an amazing 15 home runs as well as hits, batting average, runs scored and total bases. Like Luken and Kampschmidt, his Nick Carr’s teammates, he would remain with the Zollner Corporation 42 years before retirement.

BILL CAPPEL: Northern Kentucky was more than fortunate that the Nick Carr’s Boosters’ player who came back to town to stay was the man who became caretaker of the historic Covington Ball Park, from raking the field and watering it, running the concession stand, umpiring the Knothole games, and then even buying you lunch if you happened by Frisch’s on Philadelphia in Covington when Bill was there. The inspiration for the Northern Kentucky Sports Hall of Fame, Bill started leagues for girls and women, gave them a chance to play and well deserved the Latonia complex named for him. As dear, classy, sweet, smart and caring a man as any town could ever hope to have as one of its own.

Contact Dan Weber at dweber@aol.com. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @dweber3440.