Sweet 16 of '25 - Canaries legends Jabari Henry & Gary Weckwerth

Local legends and sports headline makers  who have captivating stories to tell. That is what "Happy Hour with John Gaskins" is all (well, mostly) about, and how the show is doing "last call" before ringing in 2026 with new shows srarting Jan. 5. From Christmas Eve to Jan. 2, we are re-releasing some of out best conversations of 2025. Our first episode featured retired football icons John Stiegelmeier (SDSU) and Bob Nielson (USD). Ep. 2 brought back the venerable play-by-play voices of Augustana (Jeff Fylling) and USF (Tom Frederick). Ep. 3 was "The Kim Show" with South Dakota'a all-time high school football  coaching wins leader Kim Nelson and Disabled American Veteran of the Year Kim Hubers, the Iraq War vet who described her trip to New Orleans for the Super Bowl and to meet Minnesota Vikings star Justin Jefferson. It was her first venture to The Big Easy since helping Hurricane Katrina relief efforts. For Ep. 4, we gave you basketball legends Aaron Johnston (SDSU) and Matt Mooney (USD). Ep. 5 welcomes back the boys of summer - Jabari Henry and Gary Weckwerth. Nobody has spent more summers playing in a Sioux Falls Canaries uniform at The Birdcage than Jabari Henry. Nobody has collected more hits, doubles, home runs, walks, and RBI playing for the Birds. And on May 29, the Orlando native slugged a towering 414-foot "Bari Bomb" for 147th career home run, setting the American Association of Professional Baseball's all-time record. For good measure, Henry added another dinger later in the game. That is a snapshot of the nature of the almost-always smiling Henry. He goes big. It happened again on Aug. 7, when, down to his last strike against Winnipeg, Henry provided the only hit in a Canaries win at The Birdcage — an 11th-inning walk-off moon shot that curled behind and around the right field foul pole to send the stadium into pandemonium. The Birds had not registered a hit all night prior to that. Sioux Falls reached the playoffs for a third consecutive season. In the deciding third game of the first round, Henry blasted three homers to help the Birds knock out league leader and fiercest league rival Sioux City. It was the stuff of Reggie Jackson. Henry had become "Mr. September." His heroics were far from done. The Canaries' second round playoff series came down to a do-or-die Game 5. Henry hammered a three-run blast early to set the tone, then added a grand slam late for good measure in an 11-2 route of the Birds' other fiercest league rival, Fargo-Moorhead. That set the stage for a best-of-five championship series against defending champion Kane County. With the Birds on the brink of winning their first title in 17 years — and second in the club's 33-season modern history, Henry joined Happy Hour to look back on a remarkable career that was potentially coming to an end.  The 34-year-old had been at the ground level with manager Mike Meyer since Meyer arrived in 2017 and needed a veteran with an infectious personality to help scrape the Canaries from the bottom of the league.  It took eight years to climb to the mountain top together, but the two finally found the winning formula with a mix of grizzly independent league veterans and some young talent that played college ball just a few years ago in Sioux Falls at both Augustana and USF. As you probably know, Games 4 and 5 at The Birdcage will go down as unforgettable Friday and Saturday nights, with the old joint as electric as it has ever been. The Canaries came within three outs of winning Game 4 and took Game 5 into the 10th inning before the Cougars ripped the hearts of the Birds' chests. And yet, still, Jabari Henry went out swinging and went out smiling. In this chat from Sept. 18, just ahead of those fateful games, he takes us through his eight-year Sioux Falls journey, which included a detour for a season to the crown jewel of the league, the St. Paul Saints, who left the league after the 2020 season to become the Triple-A affiliate of the Minnesota Twins. How did Jabari pick up the pieces from an affiliated minor league career that was taking off, then crashed and burned, leaving him to join the independent ranks? And what turned him into "the most dangerous power hitter in the league, if not the league's history," according to Meyer, who has played or coached in the American Association for over 20 years? Gary Weckwerth A couple months before our conversation with Henry, we chatted with one of the two men who started it all with the Canaries back in 1992. Gary Weckwerth was the team's first general manager. Maybe you also know Weckworth as that guy that took over for legendary Sioux Falls sportscaster Jim Burt on the KELO-TV news in the 1980's. Maybe you know him as the guy that teamed with Pat O'Brien — then, a well-established national broadcaster on CBS Sports — and Mark Ovenden for the broadcast of the first-ever Sioux Falls Skyforce game in 1989. Maybe you know him as the guy that hosted the first South Dakota State football weekly TV show, starting in the 1990's with Mike Daly. You most likely know him as the first managing owner of the Sioux Falls Stampede, which skated out of the gates to instead on-ice and box office success in the 2000's and won two titles during his time. And you may or may not know him as the guy who, after the first few seasons with the Canaries, left the squad, then came back around over a decade later to co-own the team. His most famous move — changing the name to the Pheasants in the early 2010's, only to change it back to the Canaries after taking three years of public backlash for it. Weckwerth has been at the forefront of almost every major new sports development in Sioux Falls the last 40 years, whether he was covering it, running it or owning it. And "Weck" has plenty of colorful stories to tell about all of it, starting with his days as an aspiring sportscaster at St. Cloud State University, where he dropped out a couple semesters short of his degree to take an on-air job at KELO-TV. The rest is Sioux Falls sports history well lived, plus some bumps along the way — a sudden and unceremonious firing from the Canaries, the "Pheasants" pivot, his ongoing battle with cancer, and his return back to KELO-TV 30 years after he left it to get into the business world.