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1941 - present
Three claims, one city: Read in order, this section's fifteen names sort themselves by the way the city holds them. Five are Fort Wayne's by team alone: McDermott, Yardley, Collins, Thornson, and Tatis, born in New York, Hollywood, Inglewood, Winnipeg, and San Pedro de Macoris, and made permanent here by the Pistons, the Daisies, the Komets, and the TinCaps. Two are Fort Wayne's by raising after a birth elsewhere: Wichman of Detroit and Peppas of Kansas City, both schooled here, both unthinkable as any other city's. And the rest are the city's own product outright: Vogel, Wedge, Woodson, Ball, Chin, Beasley, Essex, and Pollard, born in Fort Wayne and schooled in its gyms, pools, and rinks, at Snider, Northrop, South Side, Harding, Woodlan, and IPFW.
The threads: The list cross-stitches itself without any help. Three Olympic gold medalists across forty years, all made within a few miles of each other, in a county the Waynedale News could still count on one hand in 2008. Three Fort Wayne schoolboys on Super Bowl winning defences in thirteen seasons. Two Snider graduates at the head of two different sports, Woodson in football and Wichman in the pool, with Vogel a third Snider name in the water. Two Daisies who bookend their league: Collins its greatest Fort Wayne pitcher, Peppas the player who won its last game. A Komets pair, the adopted Thornson and the native Chin, holding the retired numbers 11 and 26 between them.
The gaps, named: The list is not complete, and the leg says where. The Kekiongas era of 1871 names its teams better than its men, and no early baseball player is padded in on a guess. Women's basketball and softball, and the Fury and Mad Ants years, yielded no home-grown star at this section's standard from the sources reached, and the omission is printed here rather than repaired by assumption. What stands is what the sources carry: fifteen players, three kinds of claim, and a small industrial city that kept producing, and attracting, people who finished near the top of American sport.
Sources:
- The articles of this section and their sources, as printed above.
- Waynedale News, 17 September 2008 (the Allen County Olympic gold count).
- Allen County Genealogical Society, people pages (the Fort Wayne Super Bowl lineage).