Now that you’ve done your civic duty and voted in Tuesday’s election, I’ve got another poll for you to consider.
I love sports polls. You know, the ones that rank the best or worst moments for a franchise or choose who are, or have been, the best athletes.
The Sporting News is running a Mount Rushmore series that picks the top four pro athletes from 13 cities in the U.S. with NFL, NHL, NBA and MLB teams for at least 20 years, plus a WNBA franchise. St. Louis doesn’t qualify because we’ve never had a WNBA franchise, the St. Louis Hawks played in the NBA for only 14 seasons (1955 to 1968) before moving to Atlanta, and we’re still the only city ever to lose two NFL franchises – the Cardinals moved to Arizona after the 1987 season and the Rams shuffled back to Los Angeles in 2016. A friend who works at SN said the Mount Rushmore series is so wildly popular that it’s likely to expand to include cities like St. Louis.
At Leader World Headquarters last week, some of the news staff debated the SN picks for cities like New York, Chicago and Minneapolis, and speculated on who would make up a Mount Rushmore for St. Louis. It’s obvious Stan Musial tops the list, but after that it gets a bit murky. My other three choices are Brett Hull, Bob Gibson and Ozzie Smith. Yes, Hull won Stanley Cups with the Dallas Stars and Detroit Red Wings, not St. Louis, but come on, he scored 527 goals as a Blue, including an incredible 86 in the 1990-91 season. Gibby and Ozzie need no explanation as they are among the finest players in baseball history.
The debate led me to wonder who to place on the Jefferson County athletic Mount Rushmore. It could be a man or woman in any sport, in any era. I posed that question on our Leader Facebook page and the names started pouring in. Most of the nominees began their sports careers as standout athletes at the county high schools, and many went on to pro or Olympic careers.
I wouldn’t dare try to boil down all those names and select my own four. Instead, I’ll list some of the candidates entered as of Sunday. Brittany Borman and Bill Bradley were the most recognized and that’s a great place to start.
Borman, a 2008 Festus graduate, won state championships for the Tigers in track and field in the high jump, discus and shot put before winning NCAA championships at the University of Oklahoma in the discus and javelin. She went on to compete in the javelin in the 2012 and 2016 Olympic games.
No athlete from the county is more recognized worldwide than Bradley, the Crystal City native who attended
Princeton, helped the U.S. basketball team win Olympic gold in 1964 and enjoyed an 11-year hall of fame career in the NBA with the New York Knicks (1967-1977). He later served New Jersey in the U.S. Senate for almost 20 years and ran for president in 2000.
Another candidate to consider is stock-car driver Rusty Wallace of Arnold, the winner of the 1989 NASCAR Winston Cup championship. His brothers, Kenny and Mike, were also professional racers.
Staying on the pro level, St. Pius X graduate Mike Henneman played baseball at Jefferson College before being drafted by the Toronto Blue Jays in 1982. Henneman reached the big leagues with the Detroit Tigers in 1987 and went 11-3 as a rookie that year, which he capped off as the winning pitcher in Game 3 of the American League Championship Series against the Minnesota Twins. In his 10-year career with the Tigers, Houston Astros and Texas Rangers, Henneman was 57-42 with 193 saves.
Another local baseball player to reach “the show” was Northwest graduate Brian Boehringer, drafted by the Houston Astros in 1990. He also pitched 10 seasons in the pros, starting with the New York Yankees in 1995. The following year, the Yankees won the World Series with Boehringer pitching five innings in relief. He retired in 2004 with a record of 26-34 after playing his final three seasons for the Pittsburgh Pirates.
Local fans also will remember Fox grad Mike Wells. The defensive lineman was a prep All-American with 411 tackles for the Warriors and also won the state discus title twice. After a stellar career at Iowa, where he earned all-Big Ten honors and set a career record for tackles for loss with 54, he was drafted in the fourth round of the 1994 NFL draft by the Minnesota Vikings, who released him that fall. He played four years with the Detroit Lions and three with the Chicago Bears before retiring in 2001.
One of the most interesting names proposed was Clyde Lovellette, a basketball hall of famer and the first player to score the rare triple crown of his sport, winning championships in the NCAA (with Kansas), the Olympics (1952 U.S. team) and the NBA (Minneapolis Lakers).
Two people who posted Lovelette said he ran for sheriff in Jefferson County and officiated middle school basketball games in the area. I researched background stories published after his death in 2016 in the The New York Times, Washington Post and Indianapolis Star. All of them said he was a sheriff in his home state of Indiana, but none mentioned his running for office here. The county clerk’s office confirmed Lovellette was one of nine candidates to run for sheriff in the county in 1964. Walter “Buck” Buerger won the election and served as Jefferson County Sheriff until 1992.
There have been so many great high school athletes from the county, it would take a blue-ribbon panel of local historians to rank them. That panel could include Ryun Kasten, who is back at Herculaneum as assistant principal at the high school. Kasten coached the Blackcats to eight cross country state championships, three with the girls and five with the boys. Of course, he nominated Kaitlyn Fischer and Jason Ramsey, both winners of multiple state championships in track and field at Herky. Fischer smoked the field by almost a minute to win the Class 2 state cross country title in 2012. Ramsey’s name is sprinkled throughout the University of Central Missouri record books in the hurdles, relays, decathlon and pentathlon.
In 2018, I did a story about De Soto High retiring the No. 40 jersey worn by Kim Mahn, the leader of the Dragon basketball teams that won state titles in 1988 and 1989. Mahn’s jersey was the first the school retired and they haven’t retired one since. Mahn died in April after a 20-year battle with multiple sclerosis. A threat at guard or forward, Mahn typically led the Dragons in scoring and is second in school history with 1,997 career points behind Jaime Miller, with 2,363 from 1993 to 1997.
Since my arrival here in 2016, I’ve covered a dynasty (Festus boys cross country) and many individual wrestling and track and field champions. If I had to pick one athlete who stands out the most in that time, it would be Isaiah Martin, the 2017 Hillsboro graduate who just completed an amazing career in track and field at Purdue University, earning all-American status five times. Martin, a decathlete, just might be the next county athlete to hit the world stage in the Olympics.
For a list of all the names people submitted, go to the Leader Facebook page and scroll until you find them. Have fun, and leave your opinion.
Thanks for reading.