---

Inductees outshine
even Titans’ Chow

TREASURES. Giants. Legends. Mount Rushmore in the flesh.

Hawaii High School Athletic Association executive director Keith Amemiya knew exactly how to sell yesterday's informal get-together in anticipation of today's HHSAA Foundation Hawaii High School Award of Achievement inaugural induction:

Four Hawaii sports legends and Norm Chow.

You know you've got good headliners when Norm Chow gets an "and."

And Miss America!

Quite a lineup.

You know you've got star power when Miss America -- Angela Baraquio-Grey, the 2001 winner -- is reduced to mere bonus status.

Chow, having tutored three Heisman Trophy winners, had a hand in three college national championships, and now a coordinator in the NFL, just may be the most accomplished coach to ever come out of Hawaii.

And in this room he's an "and."

Who isn't? We all are, next to Larry Ginoza, Eddie Hamada, Charlie Wedemeyer and Wally Yonamine.

When these four guys get together the best any of the rest of us could hope for is to be asked to give the speech.

So that's what Chow will do tonight at the official ceremony, the Hawaii High School Athletic Awards recognition dinner.

The national star will lionize four guys who likely have never had their names mentioned on ESPN.

It's amazing -- with the exception of Yonamine, who once played for the 49ers and is in the Japan Baseball Hall of Fame -- that a group of guys who have stayed "small-time" for so long could loom so very, very large.

I asked Ginoza: Football coaches are football coaches, Chow started in high school, too -- did Ginoza think, if he'd picked one fork in the road or another, if his life had taken a different turn or two, could he have been another Norm Chow?

Oh, no, he said: "When I look at Norm, I think, special people get to do special things."

He was being humble, and he was being honest. And he was more right than he knows.

Special people. Doing special things.

Ginoza was a head coach for 20 seasons, made Waianae a synonym for "football powerhouse." His teams went to the Prep Bowl six times, winning three and tying another. And then he stayed on as an assistant for another decade. All in all, he worked as a coach with high school kids for more than 30 years.

And Hamada, who became "Mr. Iolani," a beloved figure, the living personification of "One Team." He won championships (his Raiders tied Ginoza's Seariders in that 1980 Prep Bowl). He was a high school head football coach for almost 30 years. And then, he, too, stayed in school, kept working with kids.

Like Yonamine, Wedemeyer was a wizard of an athlete, and is being inducted for his heroics as a Hawaii high school star.

But let's be honest -- no run of touchdowns ever had as much impact as his time as a high school coach.

Wedemeyer may have been all-world at Honolulu Stadium in his schoolboy days at Punahou. But he is best known and most loved for coaching at Los Gatos in California, coaching from a wheelchair, coaching even though "Lou Gehrig's Disease" had robbed him of his voice.

(His wife, Lucy, another Punahou alum, is one of the few who could challenge Chow's perennial title of Assistant Coach of the Year. She would translate for Charlie as he called plays through eyebrows, winks and grins.)

Wedemeyer is famous for many reasons. But when it comes down to it, he's a guy who imparted priceless life lessons as a high school football coach.

"Teachers influence," Lucy said. "Coaches influence. That's our role."

"That's why I'm still on the football field with the kids," Charlie said.

Yeah, he's still there. Twenty years after his last varsity team won a championship in his last game as head coach, Wedemeyer is still out there, helping with the JV squad.

I asked Ginoza if it was especially meaningful to work with high school kids. He thought so, but he had nothing to compare it to, he said.

"That's the only thing I did," he said. "I don't know anything else."

Ginoza said it himself: Special people get to do special things.