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Dan Weber: Listen in on what some people who make NKY sports special had to say at HOF induction


The capacity crowd for the December induction into the Northern Kentucky Sports Hall of Fame would make good witnesses as to why you ought to catch one of these affairs at the Gardens in Park Hills if you can.

The inductees have much to say.

We’ll let you listen in with us to some of the people who make Northern Kentucky sports special.

Glenn Meyers did it the old-fashioned way, as a standout baseball pitcher at Newport Central Catholic, the University of Louisville and for a national championship Midland Organization team.

“I’ve had a great support system, still do, in my family,” Glenn said, praising his “parents and my wife.” And even to this day, when he’s no longer on the mound and even when he was and could pretty successfully block out distracting sounds, Glenn said he could hear his dad calling out: “Throw strikes.”

That’s all he ever tried to do, Meyers said, thanking his NewCath coach Dave Faust – and the KHSAA, “for not having a pitch-count rule.” In other words, Glenn was the definition of a workhorse.

NKSHOF President Joe Brennan, Vic Brown, Denny Wright, Glenn Meyers, Mick Abner, Mark Wehry, and NKSHOF VP Ken Shields

• At the mention of Faust, now the boys’ basketball coach at St. Henry, NKSHOF Vice-president Kenney Shields, who introduced the inductees, offered an important footnote to the proceedings.

“Dave Faust is about to break the record for most wins in the Ninth Region,” said Shields, who should know. It’s his record. From 1988 when he left Highlands after also coaching at St. Thomas, for NKU, with a total of 460 Ninth Region wins.

Kenney had broken Newport legend Stan Arnzen’s record of 452 with the next in line, Covington Holmes’ three-sport coach Tom Ellis at 441.

“There couldn’t be a finer man,” Shields said of his soon-to-be-successor Faust.

• Next up was Victor Brown, who earned his HOF spot as a player and a coach. Five years he played for Dayton’s Greendevils, three as a two-way starter. He would return to Northern Kentucky, after four years as a starting offensive guard at Anderson College and beginning his coaching career in Indiana.

After living with his high school coach, Tom Daley, as a sophomore during football season, it’s no wonder Brown can still recite his various coaches’ words to him as a young man.

“Block with your heart . . . and your feet,” was one of them. And this: “Boys, you play football with two things – intensity and physicality.”

But the thing Vic takes with him, he says, is this: “Your players are 16-/17-years-old. But they don’t stay 16 or 17 forever.”

As proof of that were many of his former teammates and school superintendents he worked for in attendance or his center from that 15-0 Highlands state championship team – Dr. Les Murray.

• Next up was Covington Catholic and UC grad Denny Wright, who was broadcasting NKU games when Shields arrived on campus. “When you talk about dedication, passion and true commitment to broadcasting,” Shields said, you’re talking about Wright, who was steered into broadcasting more than a half-century ago by his UC professor, Herman Newman, famous as the husband of WLW’s Ruth Lyons.

“I’ve been in the business too long and have all these ‘former partners,’” Wright joked, introducing them in the crowd. The ’67 CovCath grad got his start doing the PA at Elder, where he stayed for 40 years. He worked 34 years doing men’s and women’s basketball at NKU and is in his 33rd year at Thomas More. His claim to fame for many of us was working with the late, great broadcasting legend Dale McMillen at WHKK-FM in Erlanger all those years ago.

Now fighting a debilitating muscular disease that keeps him from driving and walking, Wright depends on his wife of 51 years to drive him everywhere and put up with him “talking to anyone who wants to talk to me.”

Others getting a personal shout-out from Wright included Shields, TMU AD Terry Connor, and two legendary Northern Kentuckians – Latonia Race Track’s John Battaglia and PR man Ted Bushelman.

“Even though I didn’t make the big time, as they say,” Wright concluded, “I wouldn’t change anything in my career. I’ve met a lot of great people.”

• Shields injected another of his favorite coaching quotes here before introducing Highlands’ Mick Abner. “You can be yourself better than you can be anybody else.”

But Abner, the freshman coach at Highlands and onetime youth coaching partner with fellow Fort Thomas resident Merrill Hoge, the former Pittsburgh Steelers and Chicago Bears running back and ESPN NFL analyst, liked this Shields quote about coaching: “An athlete wants to know how much you care before they want to know how much you know.”

Abner credited his mother, who raised four boys, for his success along with Coach Roger Walz for the “Death Valley” experience at Highlands when he played his four years there. And now his son Mikey, after two daughters, gives Abner the chance to answer his Bluebird brothers who note that they are “the only ones in the family not to win a state championship.” Abner says the father-son footballers have “unfinished business.”

• Mark Wehry, a Holy Cross alum and the fourth brother where the first three all went to CovCath, always wondered if a Holy Cross guy could “belong” at CovCath before doing 750 internet radio broadcasts for CovCath football, basketball, baseball and soccer. He’s also done Notre Dame Academy sports and TMU basketball.

He then went on to found 859 Sports in 2018 and no longer has to worry about belonging at one or two schools, he’s done most all of them in his 220 broadcasts.

But getting to follow the Ryle girls’ basketball team from the regional through to a state title in Rupp Arena in 2019 to the Highlands’ boys title run in 2021, it’s been a rewarding run for this internet sports guy.

“Denny Wright taught me how to broadcast . . . I can’t believe I’m going in with him,” said Wehry, who takes pride in how he’s heard from a soldier in Iraq wanting to know how a particular game turned out to a grandmother in Florida wondering why her grandson doesn’t get to play more.

“High school sports are the best thing going,” Wehry said, “and we have a front row ticket.”

Dan Weber

• Northern Kentucky resident Paul Sparling, in his 44th year with the Bengals – 30 years as head trainer — and first as a semi-retired consultant, concluded the day by asking: “Is there a better time to be a Bengals fan?” It was a question the Dayton, Ohio, native and Wilmington College alum knew he did not have to answer.

But after a half-century as an athletic trainer and a “decade and a half of losing,” Sparling wasn’t about to miss his chance to talk up his team.

He said that of all the eight Bengals coaches he worked for, “Forrest Gregg was the toughest,” he said of the Green Bay Packer great and Vince Lombardi guy who replaced Northern Kentuckian Homer Rice and took the Bengals to a Super Bowl.

Sparling described how Gregg worked. Said he’d come into the training room and spy someone like ex-Harvard receiver and team intellectual Pat McInally on the trainer’s table for a second straight day with a stone bruise on his heel. “How long have you been out with that?” Gregg would ask McInally. “Two days,” McInally answered.
Gregg’s response. “Christ rose from the dead after three days.” “Pat practiced that day,” Sparling said of Gregg. “He healed people.”

Just having Gregg walk into the trainer’s room “and people got better,” said Sparling, who has just returned from Bradenton, Fla., and is enjoying the much less hectic pace of a job that can be seven days a week for six months of the year.

It’s a job where “80 percent of trainers do not retire, they’re replaced,” Sparling said with most new coaches bringing in their own trainer. Or a job where team personnel find out this week that they’ll be leaving a day earlier than planned for the Saturday New England game thanks to the expected bad weather.

“This Thanksgiving was the first time in 43 years the turkey wasn’t cold and there was enough gravy for my mashed potatoes,” said Sparling, whose trip to the Super Bowl a year ago made him realize it was time.


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One Comment

  1. Denny C. Wright says:

    Dan, thank you so much for the interview at the H of F induction Wednesday. I read the column of my story and really liked everything about it except I was in the class of ’64, not ’67 as you mentioned. I don’t know if it is too late to correct that, but I wanted to let you know just in case.
    Otherwise I loved the story and the day. Thanks again and I hope to see soon, maybe at a Thomas More game.
    Denny Wright

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