THE last time I took a vacation, Charles "Spike" Cordeiro died. I never got a chance to give the former Roosevelt scatback a proper send-off. He helped Herman Wedemeyer put St. Mary's on the football map. Two men who won’t
soon be forgottenNow, I find that two longtime sports figures have also left us: Ching Do Kim, 79, and Ken Kaneko, 80.
I knew Ching Do more personally, often playing golf with him and several other Korean cronies. Once a single-digit handicapper, Ching Do still hit it long, though a little less often, at the end. But, stogie clenched between his teeth, he always was a formidable foe.
But I heard of Kim long before from my cohorts when I started out -- Bill Gee, Red McQueen, Monte Ito and Dan McGuire. They all wrote about him. Somehow, though, they all dropped the "g" from his first name.
We all called him Chin Do and the name stuck. He didn't mind. After all, what do we sportswriters know?
Born in Wahiawa, Kim was an outstanding athlete at Leilehua High School and then lettered four years at right guard for the University of Hawaii Rainbows, playing for Coach Proc Klum. He co-captained the football team his senior year.
At 5-foot-6, 160 pounds, he was the prototype watch-charm guard made fashionable in those days by Notre Dame's Knute Rockne. Kim was tenacious as they came, a bulldog in build and temperament.
HIS claim to fame -- verified by both local dailies -- was place-kicking a 78-yard field goal bare-footed. However, it was as a football coach that Kim really excelled.
He coached the Leialums, who were the scourge of the Hawaii Senior League in the late 1940s. They weren't merely a club team. In 1946 they split on a West Coast tour after playing Fresno State, Portland University, San Jose State and Loyola.
As a coach, Kim might have stressed basics. But he was no dummy. He made sure he had the players. And he got one of the best at the time, Wally Yonamine, to play for him.
Yonamine led Farrington to the 1944 ILH championship so he wasn't an alumnus of Leilehua. But he was the best running back around at the time.
As it turned out, playing for the Leialums turned Yonamine's career around. Yonamine had just gotten out of the Army when Kim asked him to play for his team. Yonamine so impressed a San Francisco 49ers' scout in the game at Portland, that he turned down a football scholarship at Ohio State to sign with the NFL team.
Yonamine's football career was short-lived, but in San Francisco he met Lefty O'Doul, who advised him to play pro baseball in Japan. The rest, as they say, is history.
It was no surprise that Yonamine, who is a member of the Japan baseball hall of fame, spoke at Ching Do's funeral. "He had such a great influence on my life," Yonamine said.
KANEKO had less publicity than Kim, but he probably preferred it that way.
It is said that the less you were aware of an official, the better job he was doing. Kaneko, you see, was a football and basketball official.
Kaneko played on McKinley's championship basketball team his senior year and he thought winning the territorial championship in Hilo would be a snap. Only, the Tigers ran into the Hilo Vikings and a guy named Ah Chew Goo.
A quiet man, Kaneko told of the time when he was playing for a local baseball team called Nippon and was wearing his uniform going to the game on a Sunday morning in December, 1941.
It was definitely not the attire to wear that Dec. 7.
But Kaneko put on the proper uniform later, serving in the 100th Battalion and then spending time with the American military police during the Japan occupation after World War II.