3 Mid-Columbia greats who died over weekend leave indelible mark on Tri-Cities sports
It’s been one of those rough weekends, the kind where you’re happy that it’s actually Monday.
The Tri-Cities community lost three standout people — three who had a lot to do with the local sports community — whose influence will be hard to match.
Paul Antonovich, Scott Pierce and Brad Fisher were all great people too. And that may be our biggest loss. We won’t have them around anymore.
Paul Antonovich
Paul Antonovich died Friday from a heart attack. He had also been battling cancer.
He was a longtime softball coach at Pasco High, then Chiawana High (until stepping down after the 2019 season), and had been a club softball coach too.
The number of young women he coached and influenced numbers into the hundreds. That in itself is a huge loss.
Antonovich could be seen on the Chiawana football sidelines during every Friday night game, as an assistant athletic trainer.
But go to any Riverhawks sports event, and Antonovich might be seen manning one of the entrances to the gym or doing some other work assignment.
“He was busy with his softball team in the spring, but in the fall and winter he’d be at our school’s other sporting events, working it as an assistant athletic trainer,” said Chiawana athletic director John Cazier. “This is such as huge loss not only to his family, but the Chiawana community too.”
Cazier said he first remembered Antonovich when Cazier himself was a sophomore at Pasco High.
“Paul was a C team boys basketball coach then,” Cazier said. “That was around 1987.”
Later, when Cazier became athletic director, Antonovich was a joy to work with.
“When he said he would get something done, he got it done,” Cazier said. “Don’t forget, he was a P.E. teacher too. To lose him so suddenly is a huge loss for everybody.”
Antonovich was always there for the students and the athletes. And he was there for decades. Those people are harder and harder to find.
Scott Pierce
Scott Pierce was a former unlimited hydroplane driver who won a national championship in 1991 with the Miss Budweiser team.
He was part of that tight-knit boat racing community, the kind where once you’re admitted as a member of the family, you’ll always part of that family.
From 1981 to 2001, Pierce drove in an unlimited and was always in the Tri-Cities for the Columbia Cup.
The Woodinville resident won seven unlimited races in his career.
After retiring in 2001, he became a color commentator for television broadcasts of boat racing.
But boat racing never gets out of your system, and for the past three years, Pierce owned the GP-55 Grand Prix America hydroplane.
Those guys don’t get the kind of attention in Lampson Pits that the unlimiteds get. But Pierce was there to race his boat – maybe not drive it now, he had a younger driver in the cockpit.
But what was nice was to be able to go down to the dock, greet him with a handshake, and just talk about racing.
He could do that for hours.
Pierce, 64, succumbed to organ failure on Sunday at EvergreenHealth in Kirkland.
Brad Fisher
Brad Fisher passed away Sunday after a long battle with glioblastoma stage 4 brain cancer.
Fisher graduated five years ahead of me at Kamiakin High School, but through my job at the Herald our paths frequently crossed over the years.
As the mayor of Kennewick in 1988-89, Fisher was always looking for ways to improve the community. He was the mayor when the Tri-City Americans began play at the Tri-Cities Coliseum (now Toyota Center).
Over the years, I would ask him to donate to a nonprofit I worked with. He would do it without a second thought.
He’d call me out of the blue and tell me he had a tee time at Canyon Lakes, and would I want to play for free. He was a passionate WSU booster.
The best story involved the Green Bay Packers. Fisher was in his 20s when he and some friends took a tour of Lambeau Field, the home of the Packers.
At the end of the tour, the man giving the tour asked him if he wanted to put his name on the season-ticket waiting list. Fisher asked how long was the waiting list. The guy said 16,000.
Fisher — who had been a Packers fan since he was 10, watching them win the first two Super Bowls — signed up.
Each year he’d get a mailing from the Packers to where he was on the list. Finally, 27 years later in 2013, he was in.
He had me come to his RBC Wealth Management office in Richland to sit back and watch him and five of his Tri-City fans divide up the tickets to his first season.
Fisher got his choice of the two games he wanted — after all, they were his tickets. But then the other guys, all lifelong Packers fans, picked their games.
Before he would give them away to his friends, though, he made each one of them sign a contract with three rules:
1. There would be no reselling of the tickets. He was selling them to his friends at face value (at the time they cost $82, and secondary market prices were at least $213).
2. They had to abide by the Packers Fans Code of Conduct, which basically meant don’t get kicked out of the game for bad behavior and risk losing the season tickets.
3. And there would be no wearing of jerseys, while sitting in those seats, of any other NFL team.
These were all easy rules to abide by with these Packers fans, and they were all giddy as 12-year-old boys expecting to meet their heroes in a few minutes.
It was a glimpse into how generous Fisher could be.
Last fall, unbeknownst to me that he was sick, he called me and offered me Packers tickets to any game of my choice, free. All I had to do was find my way to Green Bay.
I just couldn’t make it work.
But I appreciated his generosity. Always have.
My condolences to all family members and friends of these three great men.
This week begins with a hole in our hearts.
Evans delays retirement
Talked to Garrett Evans last week about the Red Mountain Events Center idea out at Tri-City Raceway.
Evans, from the Wenatchee area, is a legend in stock car racing. He’s got an estimated 400 victories at numerous levels of racing in his career.
His first race at Tri-City Raceway was in 1977, and he was a yearly fixture at the West Richland track until it closed in 2004.
Evans said his plan was to retire from racing after this season, because he is 64 years old and the car number he has always had is 64.
He thought it’d be cool to go out that way.
Unfortunately, the coronavirus had other plans and has kept him from racing but just a couple of times, all in Idaho.
“I think I’m going to have to postpone the retirement for a year so I can get some more racing in,” said Evans.
Great news for his fans and the racing community.
This story was originally published July 20, 2020 at 2:19 PM.