On Monday, my dad was inducted into the Springfield Sports Hall of Fame as a Friend of Sport for his more than 30-year service officiating baseball, football and basketball. If you’re from the area and you played organized baseball, from Little League to college level, chances are he officiated at least one of your games.
He is one of the best, most well-liked and respected officials this area has ever seen, second only to Al Barlick as far as I’m concerned. He’d never say that, though, so it’s up to others to do it.
I took a video of his speech, but for some reason YouTube hates freedom the video my camera takes, so I will just link to the .AVI file.
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I had these grandiose plans to be a Johnny-on-the-spot with my camera, taking all kinds of photos, Springfield Scene magazine style, of the assembled local sportserati.
You know what they say about best-laid plans. The evening started out in a Crowne Plaza suite, where there were various yellow beers in cans. Then we went downstairs to the ballroom level for the pre-ceremony schmoozefest, where I found that they had sweet, sweet Guinness on draft. That just about ended my evening right there. This photo of Fred Hickman, the other Friend of Sport inducted Monday, illustrates this point nicely:
Luckily, my overarching politeness kept me from getting up to get more Guinness once the ceremony started. It would be kind of rude for a drunk to stumble out for more beer during an inductee’s speech, so I was able to dry out a little bit, especially during one speech in particular.
Most of the speeches were short, two to three minutes or so. But one inductee had no use for such constraints. Southeast graduates of a certain age know all about Bob Kyes, whether you had him as a teacher or not. And everyone who was fortunate enough to have a class with Mr. Kyes will tell you that he was their favorite teacher, and everyone will have a favorite Mr. Kyes story.
Anyway, as typical of Mr. Kyes, he got to telling stories, most of which had nothing to do with sports or halls of fame, and ended up going on for about 15 minutes. But he did, as typical of Mr. Kyes, have his audience eating out of the palm of his hand. He’s a charismatic cat.
Keynote speaker Bob Trumpy had a nice speech as well, although he tried to sneak in an O.J. Simpson joke, which went over like the proverbial fart in church.
Tasteless jokes aside, congratulations to this year’s Hall-of-Fame inductees, especially my dad. For more photos, check out my Flickr set.
