QUIET HERO: THE KEN PLOEN STORY -- A BOOK REVIEW

 

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.

Kenny Ploen now enjoys retirement with his wife, along with his grown children and eight grandchildren, fishing and hunting with his brother, Del, and spending the winters in his Florida home.  

Clintonians can be proud of their native son continuing his winning ways in the afternoon of his life.  He is a legend in his own time, and the most outstanding athlete-scholar Clinton, Iowa has ever produced, along with Duke Slater, the African American tackle in Clinton High School and the University of Iowa.  Like Kenny Ploen, Duke Slater was an excellent high school and university student, attained all-American recognition at the University of Iowa, then had a career with the Chicago Bears in the NFL, and finally as a Federal Judge in Chicago, Illinois.