QUIET HERO: THE KEN PLOEN
STORY
A BOOK REVIEW
James R.
Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
©
September 25, 2011
My first memory of Kenny Ploen was in the fall of 1947 when he was
twelve, and he came over to the grounds of the Clinton County
Courthouse to play football with us, without pads. He lived
in the neighborhood but always played in the schoolyard across the street from
his home on the grounds of Hawthorne Elementary. In
a perfect spiral, he threw that football a good fifty yards.
I had the pleasure of playing with him on the Clinton High
School basketball team when he moved up to the varsity as a sophomore
and joined the River Kings playing with us in substate. He
was awesome there as well.
In his senior year, Clinton High finished third
in the 1953 Iowa High School Basketball State Tournament, which as
impressive as that was, he immediately put on his track shoes without a beat,
and won the Indoor Iowa High School 120 yard high hurdles (St.
Mary’s High School of Clinton won the Iowa State Basketball Championship in
1953).
It so happened, I was president of Hillcrest Dormitory at
the University of Iowa when he was a Nile Kinnick Scholar-Athlete,
Clinton’s first, as a freshman. He, like Phil Leahy, who
was Clinton’s second Niles Kinnick Scholar, was an “A”
student. At Iowa, I got to know him better as his brother, Del Ploen, who
went to Iowa State University, was my best friend, and also an
excellent athlete and student. I got to know Kenny better at Iowa,
finding him as modest and as competent as his older brother.
Incidentally, the same was true of Phil Leahy.
Besides being an outstanding athlete, Kenny Ploen continued to be
an honor student at Iowa, earning a degree in civil engineering. He
would go on to win the Big Ten Football Championship at Iowa, and
the Rose Bowl Game in 1957, along with Most Valuable Player for
that prestigious performance in that game. By the coincidence of
circumstances, at the time, I was on the Flag Ship of the Sixth Fleet (USS
Salem CA-139) operating in the Mediterranean Sea during Kenny’s senior year and followed his exploits in the
ship’s newspaper.
Always modest, he had his brother present this book to me with the
inscription “To Jim Fisher, Hope you enjoy the book, Ken Ploen, Old
#11.”
Two Canadian sportswriters, Roy Rosmus and Scott Taylor have put a
beautiful book together of Kenny Ploen’s life story, along with photographs and
tributes to teammates and coaches, as well as competitive players and coaches,
and others who have had the pleasure of knowing our most celebrated sports
figure from Clinton, except for Iowa’s Duke Slater, an African
American, who came from Clinton and played in the 1920s.
As successful as Kenny Ploen’s life was before he joined the Winnipeg
Blue Bombers of the Canadian Football League, it went into
another gear once he joined that team. For the next ten years,
the Winnipeg Blue Bombers dominated Canadian football, largely because of
Ploen’s leadership and play. The team went to six Grey
Cups (the equivalent of the NFL Super Bowl) and won
four. He was named the Most Outstanding CFL Player of the
1960s.
There are family pictures of his siblings and parents, and a
picture of him with his high school River King teammates Dick St. Clair, Don
Hart, and Phil Leahy. There is also a picture of Nile
Kinnick, whom he strikingly resembles, the great Iowa quarterback for whom
the Iowa academic/athletic scholarship he won is named.
The book takes you through his perfect skill set for Iowa’s coach Forest
Evashevski’s “Wing-T” offense, where he used the option play with
devastating brilliance, the high lights of the 1957 Rose Bowl Game. Kenny,
an extremely shy person, had a characteristic courtship and marriage
to University of Iowa’s MECCA Queen, Janet Newcomer, spurning
the NFL draft for a
much more lucrative long-term contract with the Canadian CFL’s Blue Bombers,
where coach Bud Grant, an equally modest and unassuming guy, but
also a dedicated hunter and fisherman like Kenny, was interested in installing
the Wing-T offense in his new job. And as they say, player and coach
proved to be a match made in heaven.
The book is resplendent with quotes:
“Kenny, you were the fiercest competitor I ever met in
football. I consider it an honor even to have played against
you.” (Bernie Faloney, Hamilton Tiger-Cats quarterback)
“They called it the house that Jack Jacobs built, but Ken Ploen
paid the mortgage.” (co-author Roy Rosmus)
“Ploen simply murdered you, methodically and slowly, with an ice
pick.” (coach Neil Armstrong
of Edmonton Eskimos)
The book is not a hagiography of a saintly character but of a
humble and gifted young man who employed his skills with the precision that is
endemic to his character. The book is of a similar design.
The most moving part traced the nature of Kenny’s greatness, of
how similar he was to Nile Kinnick
in so many ways, how it was always about the team and never about him, and how
players responded to his leadership with gusto and timely
execution.
The book is a tribute and dwells little on his injuries that
forced him to retire, or how some of his business adventures proved less than
fulfilling. A trained civil engineer, with a BSCE from Iowa, he
maintained that engineering status with Martin Paper Products in
his early years while playing in the CFL, and subsequently, as a color
commentator of CFL football games in broadcasting, and then as an investor in Minute
Muffler, never finding in business the consistency of football,
which from my perspective, is not surprising given my several books on that
subject.
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