Remington Park will change the name of one of its Oklahoma-bred stakes races in August to honor Oklahoma media icon Bob Barry Jr., who passed June 20 in a traffic accident in northwest Oklahoma City.
Remington Park will rename the Ladies on the Lawn Stakes on Friday, Aug. 28, making it the Bob Barry Memorial Stakes. The race will also pay tribute to ‘Junior’s’ father, Bob Barry, Sr., who passed away naturally in 2011. The race for Oklahoma-bred fillies on the turf has been contested since 2009 and will now recognize the 60-year era of Bob Barry Sr. and Bob Barry Jr. working behind a microphone or on camera in Oklahoma.
The 2015 Remington Park Thoroughbred Season begins August 14. It will be the first in track history not covered in some capacity by Barry Jr., the longtime Oklahoma City sports director at KFOR-TV (succeeding his father in 1997) and host of Sports Morning at WWLS-98.1 FM, The Sports Animal.
“There was no more beloved member of the media in this region than Bob Barry Jr. and there’s a reason for that,” noted Remington Park president and general manager Scott Wells. “We watched him grow up. He had big shoes to fill and did so admirably. All of us at Remington Park will dearly miss him.”
A six-time Sportscaster of the Year in Oklahoma, Barry Jr. was at KFOR-NewsChannel 4 since 1982. He tirelessly covered all sports including Remington Park horse racing, giving the top events at the track their due in sportscasts under his watch.
“Junior always made sure the biggest races and stories at Remington Park were included in the local highlights on NewsChannel 4,” noted Dale Day, track announcer at Remington Park, who worked briefly with Barry Jr. while at WWLS in the early 1990s. “Renaming one of our Oklahoma-bred races for both Bob Barry Jr. and Sr. is a fitting tribute to a pair of Oklahomans who loved all sports in our state.”
Barry Sr. began his broadcast career in 1955 at KNOR-AM in Norman, Okla. He was selected as the University of Oklahoma play-by-play announcer by legendary coach Bud Wilkinson in 1961, just prior to beginning his career at KFOR-TV (then WKY-TV) in 1966. Barry Sr. also called Oklahoma State football and basketball (1973-1990) before returning to call Oklahoma games from 1991-2011. Barry Sr. was the sports director at KFOR from 1970-1997, when he then handed the reins to his son. He retired from KFOR in 2008 and is a member of both the Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame and Oklahoma Sports Hall of Fame.