Gus Malzahn, Arkansas State University Head Football Coach. Photo courtesy Arkansas State University.

This year’s celebrity event will be hosted by new Arkansas State University head football coach Gus Malzahn and members of his coaching staff. Lunch will be served at noon, tee time will be 1 p.m., awards will be presented at 5:30 p.m. and a reception and dinner will conclude the day’s activities at 6 p.m.

The Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame Celebrity Golf Classic long has been one of the premier golf events in the state, featuring past inductees into the Hall of Fame and other sports celebrities.

Former KATV-TV, Channel 7, general manager Dale Nicholson is serving as the honorary chairman for the event.

That evening’s dinner is being billed as “Talking Football with Gus Malzahn.” The cost for an afternoon of golf for four players and a dinner table of 10 is $2,500. The fee for just a golf team of four is $2,000.

Individual dinner tickets for “Talking Football with Gus Malzahn” are $150, and tables of 10 can be purchased for $1,500 each.

Those desiring more information should call Jennifer Smith at (501) 663-4328 or Catherine Johnson at (501) 821-1021.

Malzahn was introduced as ASU’s new head football coach on Dec. 14. At the time, he was considered by many to be the top assistant coach in the country. He served as the offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach at Auburn University for the past three seasons.

Malzahn, a Fort Smith native, was the 2010 winner of the Broyles Award, which goes to the nation’s top collegiate assistant coach each year.

ASU athletic director Dean Lee said: “We want to hire a man of character, a man of integrity and a man of honor. Coach Malzahn has all of those qualities and many more. He is going to do so many things outside of football for our student-athletes.”

“This is a program on the rise,” Malzahn said of Arkansas State. “When I initially talked with Dr. Lee, discussing his vision of where this program is heading, that is when I knew that this was the place for me. I told the team to buckle up because we are about to take this thing to the next level.”

All proceeds from the July 30 event will benefit the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame.

The Hall of Fame inducted its first class in 1959. The Class of 2012 was inducted in February at Verizon Arena in North Little Rock with more than 1,400 people in attendance at the induction banquet.

Ray Tucker is the executive director of the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame, and Little Rock businessman Andrew Meadors is the organization’s president.

The Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame Museum on the west side of Verizon Arena is open each Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. until 4:30 p.m. It includes an 88-seat theater with a video highlighting the careers of Arkansas sports greats along with a touch-screen kiosk with a database of all Hall of Fame inductees.

Members of the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame vote each year on inductees. Membership dues are $50 annually. Membership forms can be obtained here.

Pat Day, Class of 2008

Day remains a legend in Kentucky, where he rode in the Derby for 21 consecutive years.

He also remains a legend in Arkansas, where he was inducted into the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame in 1999. His reign as the leading jockey at Oaklawn Park in Hot Springs began in 1983 when he won the first of 12 consecutive riding titles. Day became the all-time leading rider at Oaklawn, Churchill Downs and Kenneland Race Course.

In his prime, Day was so dominant at those tracks that the odds would quickly drop on any horse he was riding. He won Eclipse Awards as the nation’s outstanding jockey in 1984, 1986, 1987 and 1991. He was inducted in 1991 into the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame.

Arkansans may best remember him for his lone Kentucky Derby win in 1992 aboard Lil E. Tee, owned by Magnolia businessman Cal Partee, who was inducted into the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame in 2008.

Here’s how William Nack later described Day’s Derby win in Sports Illustrated: “Pat Day had just reached the top of the escalator leading to the jockeys’ room at Churchill Downs when Jorge Velasquez, crouching in wait for his friend and fellow rider, sprang forward, grabbed the 100-pound Day around his thighs and raised him high above the ground. The air was filled with whoops and howls.

“’Congratulations,’ said Velasquez, setting him back down. ‘It’s about time! And don’t stop now.’

“’Boy, does this feel good,’ said Day. ‘All in God’s good time. It feels so good I think I’ll do it again. … The longer you wait, the sweeter it tastes.’

“An hour earlier, in one of the most stunning endings to the Kentucky Derby in recent memory, Day, who has won more riding titles at the Downs than any other jockey, drove a tiring Lil E. Tee down the middle of the homestretch, beating a hard tattoo on the colt’s flank with a left-handed whip, to score his first victory ever, after nine defeats, in America’s most famous horse race. Moments later the tote board lit up like a circus wagon with the posting of the pari-mutuel returns. Sent off at nearly 17-1, Lil E. Tee paid $35.60 to win. He finished a length in front of a 30-1 shot, Casual Lies.”

The 4-5 favorite in the race was a French horse, Arazi, who finished eighth.

Lil E. Tee’s trainer, Lynn Whiting, had urged Day earlier in the spring not to abandon the horse for a more high-profile thoroughbred.

“I want you to stay on this horse,” Whiting said. “I’ve got a good feeling about him.”

“While Day has regularly been among the nation’s leading riders – last year he became only the sixth jockey in history to earn more than $100 million in purses in a career – he had failed year after year to win the Kentucky Derby, the victory he coveted most dearly,” Nack wrote. “In 1987 he had the choice of riding Alysheba or Demons Begone, the Derby favorite. Alysheba won it, under Chris McCarron, while Demons Begone bled so badly that Day had to pull him up on the backstretch. In 1990 he chose Summer Squall over Unbridled in the Derby and finished second, three lengths behind Unbridled at the wire. He also finished second on two other occasions – in 1988 on Forty Niner, who was beaten a diminishing neck by Winning Colors, and on the odds-on favorite, Easy Goer, who finished two lengths behind Sunday Silence in 1989.

“A born-again Christian who broke from a life of drugs and alcohol in 1982 and eventually found religion, Day counts none of these Derby experiences as disappointments: ‘In January of ’84, I committed my life to Christ, and I haven’t had any disappointments since then. If I win, praise God; if I lose, praise God.’”

In the Arkansas Derby on April 18, 1992, John Ed Anthony’s Pine Bluff beat Lil E. Tee by a neck. Whiting, though, immediately shipped Lil E. Tee to Louisville.

“I just thought he deserved a second chance,” the trainer said.

After Lil E. Tee won the Kentucky Derby, Pine Bluff won the Preakness two weeks later for Anthony, a 2001 inductee into the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame. Thus 1992 turned out to be quite a year for Arkansas – the state’s governor was elected president and Arkansas owners won the first two legs of the Triple Crown.

Day, who was born in Colorado in 1953, is the lone jockey to have ridden in each of the first 20 Breeders’ Cups and has the second most Breeders’ Cup victories with 12. In addition to his 1992 Kentucky Derby victory, Day won the Preakness five times (1985, 1990, 1994, 1995 and 1996) and won the Belmont Stakes three times (1989, 1994, 2000).

Day won the Arkansas Derby aboard Rampage in 1986, Demons Begone in 1987 and Crypto Star in 1997.

In 2005, a hip injury and surgery to repair damaged cartilage ended his streak of 21 consecutive Kentucky Derby mounts. He announced his retirement on Aug. 3, 2005, during an emotional news conference at Churchill Downs.

“This is the end to a storybook career that has just taken me above and beyond my wildest expectations,” Day said that day. “This is a decision that I came to with much difficulty. I think I got the nod from God a year ago, and I failed to pay heed to all of the instructions.”

Of his career, Day said: “Lil E. Tee in the Derby stands out above all of them. Of all the races that I’ve been blessed with the opportunity to win, the thrill of winning them pales in comparison to the joy and thrill of winning the Kentucky Derby. That race certainly is the cornerstone.”

Day had begun his career as a rodeo cowboy but was talked into becoming a jockey because of his size – 4-11 and 100 pounds. He retired with 8,803 victories (fourth on the all-time list) and $297,941,912 in earnings.

In a 1989 Sports Illustrated story, J.E. Vader described Day’s life this way: “The Days’ kitchen in Hot Springs is warm and bright, with blue-and-white country-chic accents, geese on the walls, on the dish towels, on the pot holders. Irene Elizabeth, 2, marches around wearing one shoe, humming, then stops to pull some pots and pans out of a cupboard. In a cardboard box near the dryer a Yorkshire terrier, Miracle, nurses five newborn pups. The microwave beeps. Pat’s wife, Sheila, is preparing lunch: home-baked bread, apple sauce (served in commemorative Derby glasses) and a chicken casserole topped with crumbled potato chips.

“It’s almost too much – too homey, too clean, too close to the latest baby-boomer blueprint for happiness. But it fits perfectly with Day’s racetrack image: straight-arrow, God-fearing, modest, honest, polite. His new image, that is.

“Sheila talks about the early years of their marriage: ‘When Pat did the drugs and the drinking he was a different person. When we were first together I used to pray, God we need help. He was just, uh. …’ Pat, always helpful, calls in from the other room with the words she is seeking. ‘A real Jekyll and Hyde,’ he yells.

“’Yes, that’s right,’ Sheila says. ‘Jekyll and Hyde.’”

Two years after they were married, Pat and Sheila had a fight. After she slammed the door and drove off, he went to the balcony of their Chicago condominium and jumped off, landing two stories below. Fortunately for Day, the grass was soft due to rain and he was not hurt. The year was 1981.

“The old Pat Day is gone, say those who knew him back then,” Vader wrote. “No more temper tantrums, no more Mr. Hyde. But how can such anger just disappear? When he talks about the old days, Day mentions the devil a lot.”

Vader added: “The second son of an auto repairman, he grew up in Colorado in places named Brush, Rifle and Eagle. When he graduated from Eagle High in 1971, he pursued his true calling, bull riding.

“’In my mind,’ he says, ‘to be a cowboy was to drive all night to the rodeo drinking coffee, and as soon as the rodeo is over you get to drinking and chasing women. You do that until the sun comes up and you have to hit the road again.’ Day loved the life.

“Trouble was, the rodeo clowns soon learned to be extra alert when Day left the chute. ‘I didn’t show much promise,’ he admits. Again and again, the diminutive cowboy would sail off a bull, pick himself up and knock the dust off his chaps.”

Seven months after beginning work as a jockey, Day won his first race in July 1973. He was on a colt named Foreblunged at Prescott Downs in Arizona. The purse was just $347.

There would be more than 8,000 additional wins during the next three decades, many of those at Oaklawn. Those who saw Day ride will never forget his style.

“I didn’t have to be taught,” he once said. “It was just there”

Carpenter, who was Henderson’s head coach from 1971-89, compiled a 119-76-5 record at the school and was inducted posthumously into the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame in 2002. Thirteen of his teams finished in the NAIA Top 20.

George Baker of Arkadelphia, a longtime assistant for Carpenter at Henderson, has captured Carpenter’s personality and recorded his many contributions in a book titled “When Lightning Struck the Outhouse: A Tribute to a Great Coach.”

“This book has been a labor of love that, in retrospect, came easy to me,” Baker says. “I drew from 16 years of daily contact with Coach Carpenter. I also garnered the thoughts of his friends, players and opponents.

“We laughed long and hard almost every day. We passed along inside jokes that only he and I understood, most of which I cannot repeat in the interest of decorum. We traveled the world. We won and lost and suffered the outrageous slings and arrows of disgruntled fans. We tasted the sweet wine of victory, and we left an indelible mark in the annals of small college football that is remarkable.”

The preface to the book was written by longtime Arkansas sportswriter Jim Bailey, a 2003 inductee into the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame.

Bailey writes: “In a recent conversation, I asked George if he’d always planned to write about his favorite coach. He said no.

“’Coach Carpenter died in 1990,’ he said. ‘Over the next few months, even the next few years, people would ask about the funny things he said and did, like jumping on the Southern Arkansas University mule mascot after Henderson beat SAU. I guess that’s what started me to thinking seriously about a book. And the deeper I got into it, the more fascinating it became.

“’And the more I learned about him, I realized how kind and considerate he was, how many people he helped without ever saying anything about it. For example, I knew he helped a lot of former players find jobs, either in coaching or something else. And especially how intelligent he was. He enjoyed being mistaken for a clown.’”

Bailey writes that he met Carpenter in 1967 “after he had joined the coaching staff of Henderson, his alma mater, as an assistant to Clyde Berry. Sporty walked over to me, stuck out his hand and said: ‘Hey, Scoop, Ralph Carpenter.’ Five or 10 minutes later, he had everyone in the room laughing. He always used his formal name in introductions, although I don’t recall anyone addressing him as Ralph.

“He grew up in Hamburg (‘the Burg,’ he usually called it), served in the Navy and played center and guard for Henderson before starting a succession of high school coaching jobs. Duke Wells, athletic director and former Henderson coach, spotted potential in Carpenter. When a coaching vacancy occurred in 1970, Sporty was appointed head coach, obviously with Wells’ approval.

“’Sporty always liked for people to underestimate him,’ Wells said a few years later when the Reddies were pretty much dismantling the Arkansas Intercollegiate Conference. ‘But he never fooled me.’”

Wells was a 1970 inductee into the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame.

Carpenter’s high school coaching career before coming to Henderson included stops at Wynne and Magnolia. Henderson was in a rebuilding mode in Carpenter’s first two seasons as the Reddies posted records of 4-4-1 in 1971 and 4-6 in 1972.

Henderson then went on a remarkable run that saw the Reddies go 10-1 in 1973, 11-2 in 1974 (losing to Texas A&I in the NAIA national championship game), 11-1 in 1975 (defeating East Central Oklahoma in the Bicentennial Bowl at War Memorial Stadium), 8-2 in 1976, 9-2 in 1977 and 7-2-1 in 1978.

Bailey writes that by the 1989 season, Carpenter was “desperately ill, even to a layman’s eye. He coached the team that fall, though.”

The Reddies went 7-4 in Carpenter’s final season as head coach.

Baker calls it “the most courageous thing you could ever imagine. You know, Coach Carpenter always worked hard, daylight to dark, meetings, practices, but when the football staff was out eating dinner or something, Coach Carpenter would not allow anyone to mention football. Outside the office and the field, we weren’t supposed to talk shop. Coach Carpenter thought 23 hours of football a day was enough.”

Carpenter was famous for his postgame quotes.

Once, after a Reddie tailback had fumbled late in a crucial game at home, Carpenter described him as a “triple threat – a threat to the opposition, a threat to us and a threat to himself.”

The title of Baker’s book comes from Carpenter’s quote after a highly ranked Reddie team was upset by the University of Arkansas at Monticello in 1977. It was one of only two losses for the Reddies that year.

“Lightning struck the outhouse, and we were in it,” Carpenter said after the game.

Charlie Boyd, a Lake Village native who’s now a Little Rock attorney, was on that team.

“We had just gotten beat by UAM at their place, and the dressing room for the opposing team was around an indoor pool,” Boyd says. “I recall being next to Coach Carpenter when the reporter asked him what happened and can attest, under oath, that his answer was just what the title of the book says it was.”

Four years later, Henderson was 7-0 and ranked No. 1 nationally in the NAIA when the Reddies went to Monticello. UAM stunned Henderson that night by a score of 27-16.

Carpenter said after the loss, “It was a total waste of time. We would have been better off to have stayed home, parched peanuts and watched Barbara Mandrell on the TV.”

Mike Dugan, now a Hot Springs businessman, spent a decade as Henderson’s sports information director.

He tells this story, which says a lot about the kind of man Carpenter was: “One of the wonderful moments I enjoyed with Sporty was a basketball trip to Monticello. A notice had just been sent out by the university that at no time should a state-owned vehicle be seen at a location other than what was listed as an authorized destination. As soon as I picked him up that afternoon, he told me to drive to Walmart.

“I protested, but he insisted. So I began a nervous wait while he went inside. When he came out, he threw his package into the back of the car and away we went.

“As we neared Monticello, he began to give me alternate directions and sent me down an isolated highway and through the gates of a cemetery. We left the car, and Sporty got down on one knee to clean the weeds from his parents’ graves. The package contained flowers.

“This was a warm side to a man I already knew had a big heart.”

Baker says, “My journey with R.L. ‘Sporty’ Carpenter began in July 1974 and ended with his death in February 1990. What a trip.”

Carpenter’s funeral was held in a packed Arkansas Hall on the Henderson campus. As they rolled his casket down the aisle and the organist played the slow version of “Old Reddie Spirit,” there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

In April 1990, the Henderson board of trustees voted to rename Haygood Stadium as Carpenter-Haygood Stadium.

Baker’s book can be ordered online at www.georgebakerauthor.com

– Rex Nelson

Norm DeBriyn, Class of 1991

Large crowds are showing up in Fayetteville for games at Baum Stadium. People across the state are talking about the diamond Hogs. Fans drive in from central Arkansas, east Arkansas and south Arkansas for weekend series. A statewide radio network allows Arkansans in all 75 counties to keep up with the team.

Former head coach Norm DeBriyn, the father of modern Razorback baseball, has to smile when he thinks back to the way things used to be.

DeBriyn, a 1991 inductee into the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame, coached the team for 33 seasons until his retirement after the 2002 campaign. He’s now a vice president of the Razorback Foundation.

When DeBriyn took charge of the Razorback baseball program, few people other than the players paid attention. The stadium was at the old Washington County Fairgrounds. There were rocks in the infield, holes in the outfield and broken boards in the fence. The team didn’t even have a full-time coach.

DeBriyn had come to Arkansas in 1969 from Colorado State College (now the University of Northern Colorado) to teach first aid, driver’s education and other courses in the College of Education. As a first aid specialist, he was on the sideline at Razorback Stadium when the Arkansas football team fell to Texas, 15-14, in the Big Shootout in December 1969.

“The football program was first class all the way, but none of the other sports at Arkansas measured up to what we had back in Colorado even though it was a smaller school,” DeBriyn says.

Wayne Robbins, who had played baseball at Mississippi State in the 1950s and later played in the Baltimore Orioles organization, coached the Razorback baseball team on a part-time basis from 1966-69 while pursuing his doctorate and serving as an associate to the dean of arts and sciences. In December 1969, Robbins announced that he had accepted the position of press secretary for U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina.

“I knew I wanted to coach,” DeBriyn says. “I had coached the freshman baseball team for one year at Northern Colorado and had five years of high school experience. I applied for the baseball job when Wayne left. They gave the job to somebody else, and he quit after one day. George Cole called me in and gave me the job. He said, ‘Here’s the baseball file.’ Everything was in one file folder. That’s how important baseball was back then.”

Cole, a Bauxite native who had starred in football at Arkansas in the 1920s, had been inducted into the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame in 1963. He was about to replace the legendary John Barnhill as athletic director.

The school fielded its first baseball team in 1897, but the sport was discontinued from 1930-46. Deke Brackett was the coach for three seasons once baseball resumed in 1947. Athletic trainer Bill Ferrell took the job in 1950 and compiled a 139-149 record in 16 seasons. Robbins was 50-51 in his four seasons as the Razorback baseball coach.

DeBriyn, a fiery native of Ashland, Wis., took over a program that long had competed as an independent. Due to the lack of an adequate travel budget and the lack of interest in baseball, the school hadn’t competed in baseball as part of the Southwest Conference since 1926.

DeBriyn’s first team went 19-13. During the next three seasons, the Razorbacks were 23-18-1, 16-16 and 23-7-1 with the 1973 team earning an NCAA tournament bid as an independent. Arkansas lost two consecutive games at the regional tournament in Arlington, Texas, but it was obvious DeBriyn was building something that soon would be more than an afterthought in Fayetteville.

By the 1974 season, DeBriyn had accomplished one of his major goals: Returning Arkansas to the Southwest Conference in baseball. The Razorbacks were 22-21 overall and 9-15 in the SWC that spring.

Arkansas had another losing record in conference play as the Hogs went 8-14 in the league in 1975. They were 12-12 in SWC play a year later.

The 1977 Razorback team improved to 33-18 overall and 14-10 in the conference, the start of 14 consecutive seasons with winning conference records for DeBriyn. Razorback baseball had begun attracting a fan base in northwest Arkansas while earning statewide media attention for the first time. The 1978 Razorbacks were 31-13 overall and 18-6 in conference play.

Arkansas made its first trip to the College World Series in Omaha, Neb., in 1979. The Hogs had records of 49-15 overall and 19-5 in the SWC as they finished as the national runner-up to Cal State-Fullerton. The Razorbacks won four games at the NCAA East Regional in Tallahassee, Fla., to earn their way to the College World Series.

Arkansas posted three more wins at the CWS in what at the time was a double elimination event. Fullerton, which already had a World Series loss, beat the Hogs, 13-10. Fullerton won a second game between the two teams, 2-1, to eliminate the Razorbacks.

Still, it was clear that Arkansas baseball had arrived.

The Razorbacks came back with a record of 44-22 and an NCAA tournament appearance in 1980. That would be followed by records of 31-21 in 1981, 40-15-2 in 1982, 44-21 (and an NCAA tournament appearance) in 1983 and 40-16 in 1984.

A landmark moment in the program’s history came in 1985 when Arkansas hosted the Southwest Conference Tournament for the first time and took home the trophy with three consecutive victories. A win over Baylor was followed by back-to-back wins over traditional national power Texas. Arkansas made the College World Series that season and finished third. The Hogs ended the season with a 51-15 record.

DeBriyn had moved his team from that cow pasture that passed as a baseball field to George Cole Field in 1975. With financial assistance from former star players Kevin McReynolds, Johnny Ray and Tim Lollar, lights were added in 1985. That made hosting the conference tournament possible.

Arkansas was 51-14 in 1986 with an NCAA tournament appearance. A year later, the Razorbacks won the Southwest Conference, finished fifth in the College World Series and ended the spring with a 51-16-1 record. After a 39-23 mark and an NCAA tournament appearance in 1988, Arkansas won another Southwest Conference championship in 1989 and found itself in the College World Series for the third time in five seasons. The Razorbacks finished fifth in the CWS and concluded the ’89 season with a 51-16 record.

Winning records were now the norm (pardon the pun) at Arkansas. In the decade of the 1990s, the Razorbacks were:

• 39-23 in 1990
• 40-22 in 1991
• 31-26 in 1992
• 33-26 in 1993
• 33-26 in 1994
• 38-23 in 1995 with an NCAA tournament appearance
• 39-20 in 1996 with an NCAA tournament appearance
• 36-20 in 1997
• 38-21 in 1998 with an NCAA tournament appearance
• 42-23 in 1999 with a Southeastern Conference championship and an NCAA tournament appearance

DeBriyn also was instrumental in raising the money for the construction of Baum Stadium in time for the 1996 season. Without Baum Stadium, it is doubtful Dave Van Horn would have left his job as the head coach at Nebraska to replace DeBriyn at Arkansas. Baum, considered by many baseball experts to be the finest college stadium in the country, is a key. It was a key to getting Van Horn, and it’s a key to recruiting current players.

Razorback fans everywhere have Norm DeBriyn, Charlie and Nadine Baum, and Pat and Willard Walker to thank.

Charlie Baum and Willard Walker were among Sam Walton’s first store managers and became investors when Wal-Mart Stores went public. The Baum and Walker families became close to DeBriyn through the years. DeBriyn, working with then-athletic director Frank Broyles, convinced the two couples to help fund Baum Stadium.

The stadium was designed by the nationally known firm HOK. It has room for more than 10,000 spectators with amenities that are better than those found at most minor league professional ballparks. In 1998, Baum was named by Baseball America as the nation’s top college baseball facility. Five years later, it ranked second.

“It’s an incredible facility,” DeBriyn says. “There’s not one like it anywhere in the country. There’s no way to describe the excitement our players and coaches have when they take the field.”

The rocky field at the fairgrounds that DeBriyn inherited 42 years ago has become a distant memory.

After winning the SEC in 1999, the Razorbacks fell to 24-30 in 2000 and 27-29 in 2001.

“It was a tough year in 2000, and 2001 wasn’t much better,” DeBriyn says. “We started slowly in 2002, but we got better as the year went along (finishing 35-28) and won the regional tournament at Wichita. Going into the super regional, I told my wife I was done regardless of how we performed. Baseball was a 24/7, 365-day-a-year thing for me, and I had done it for 33 years. Coach Broyles told me to sleep on it, but my mind was made up. I knew it was time.”

All the while, DeBriyn had his eye on Dave Van Horn, who had played at Arkansas in 1981. In his one season as a Razorback before joining the Atlanta Braves organization, Van Horn earned All-Southwest Conference honors and was the conference’s newcomer of the year. After three seasons as a player, Van Horn joined DeBriyn’s staff. The Razorbacks were 184-71-1 in the four years Van Horn coached with DeBriyn, making it to the College World Series twice.

“I had talked to Norm in the spring of 2001 and really felt he was ready to step down,” says Van Horn, who was the head coach at Nebraska at the time. “If they wanted me as the head coach at Arkansas, I was willing to go at that point. Norm called me while we were at the Big 12 Tournament in 2001 and said he was going to coach another year.”

Nebraska went to the College World Series in 2001, the school gave Van Horn a lucrative new contract, a new stadium opened in March 2002 and Nebraska returned to the CWS in 2002.

“Suddenly, it became a lot harder to move,” Van Horn says.

DeBriyn says Van Horn “was going to be my recommendation whenever I decided to retire. I made that known to Coach Broyles, and Coach Broyles had begun to follow his career closely after Dave went to Nebraska. … In retrospect, things have worked out.”

Van Horn accepted Broyles’ offer, and baseball success has continued at Arkansas.

When DeBriyn announced his retirement from coaching in June 2002, Broyles said: “This is an emotional occasion. … Norm is the consummate coach, friend and associate. I can truthfully say that in the 33 years, we’ve agreed on everything. That is something to behold, and that’s the reason this is such an emotional time for me. The thing about our baseball program is that it was led by Norm and his staff with integrity and a focus on academics.”

DeBriyn was inducted into the American Baseball Coaches Association Hall of Fame in 2003.

At the time of DeBriyn’s retirement from coaching, Van Horn said: “There’s not a person I respect more than Norm DeBriyn. He has been my mentor and friend and in many ways has been a second father to me.”

Numerous former Razorback baseball players echoed those sentiments.

Former St. Louis Cardinal catcher Tom Pagnozzi put it this way: “I never would have gotten to the point I’ve gotten without the extra time he spent with me and all the things we did in practice. I attribute so much of my success to him.”

After 33 seasons and 1,161 victories, DeBriyn now works out of Razorback Foundation offices adjacent to Baum Stadium. He can see the big crowds and the victories Van Horn’s Razorbacks are piling up this season, knowing this is a program he built from the ground up.

– Rex Nelson

John Ed Anthony, Class of 2001

John Ed Anthony was destined to work in the timber business. Spending the first few years of life in a remote south Arkansas lumber camp known as Smead will do that to a man.

“It was about 25 miles from Camden in the middle of nowhere,” Anthony says as he puts another log on the fireplace at his home at Shortleaf Farm near Hot Springs.

It’s a chilly morning, and Anthony is looking back on a career that saw him become one of the country’s top lumbermen and thoroughbred horse owners.

“The place was named for Lamar Smead, a former Ouachita County sheriff. There were a lot of poor people living in those woods. My dad would tell stories of how men would walk up and down the railroad line looking for work.”

Anthony was born Feb. 14, 1939, at a clinic in Camden. His parents lived in Smead until he was 3, when they moved to a tiny community between Fordyce and Bearden known as Hopeville.

“The Anthony family roots were at Hopeville in Calhoun County,” Anthony says.

Anthony’s grandfather, Garland Anthony, became a legendary figure in the colorful history of the Arkansas timber industry. Known in south Arkansas simply as Mr. Garland, he stayed active until he was involved in a car wreck at Bearden in 1981 when he was 97 years old. He died soon after the accident.

“He would fire drivers as fast as I could hire them for him,” John Ed Anthony says. “He liked to drive himself.”

Mr. Garland’s grandfather, Addison Anthony, had come to the Camden area in the 1840s from Virginia. Garland Anthony was born in 1884 and grew up near Bearden, where his family farmed and raised livestock.

The late 1800s were heady days for the timber business in the area as huge, valuable stands of virgin timber were cleared. Four large mills – the Cotton Belt Lumber Co., the Freeman-Smith Lumber Co., the Eagle Lumber Co. and the Stout Lumber Co. – operated within six miles of Bearden. At one point, the four mills employed more than 2,000 men. The virgin forests had been cleared by the early 1900s and not replanted.

“Many of those operations moved to the West Coast once they had cut all the virgin timber in the South,” John Ed Anthony says.

Garland Anthony had an idea, and John Ed Anthony’s father Ted helped take it to the next level.

“He would cut the second-growth forests and say, ‘Leave those little trees,’’’ John Ed Anthony says. “In a sense, it was the beginning of modern forestry.”

Garland Anthony and his uncle built a small sawmill in 1907. John Ed Anthony says Mr. Garland’s uncle threw up his hands one day and said: “Garland, if you’ll pay for this darned thing, you can have it. I’m going back to the farm.”

Garland Anthony persevered in the lumber business, joining forces with three brothers to form the Anthony Brothers Lumber Co., which operated into the 1920s. Other partnerships were established throughout south Arkansas as the Anthony family acquired cut-over timberland and nursed it back to health. John Ed Anthony’s father, Ted, was Mr. Garland’s oldest son.

By the 1930s, the Anthony family was believed to have one of the largest private lumber operations in the world. Through multiple partnerships, the family operated between 20 and 30 mills in south Arkansas and east Texas. Mr. Garland knew that the cut-over pine land left behind by large companies would renew itself in 20 to 30 years if properly managed. The family became a leader in selective harvesting techniques.

John Ed Anthony began the first grade at Bearden in 1945. At Christmas that year, his parents moved to Woodville, Texas, a town deep in the piney woods of southeast Texas between Lufkin and Beaumont. Ted Anthony had differences with family members and wanted to work in another state. In 1951, John Ed Anthony’s parents divorced.

“My father moved back to Arkansas,” Anthony says. “He lived in Hot Springs at first and then later lived back in Bearden. I would spend my summers in Arkansas working in the mills, but I went to school from the first through the 12th grade in Texas.”

Anthony was a star football player at Kirby High School but injured a shoulder and never played football in college.

“I always knew I was going to the University of Arkansas,” he says. “Even though I grew up in Texas, I considered myself an Arkansan. I remember getting a letter from the Razorback head coach, Jack Mitchell. Had I played in college, I would have been a freshman on Jack Mitchell’s last team and a sophomore on Frank Broyles’ first team at Arkansas.”

Anthony drove to Fayetteville to enter school, having never seen the campus.

“I don’t know that I had ever been north of Arkadelphia,” he says. “I remember parking right in front of Old Main and getting a parking ticket on my first day of school. I didn’t know any better.”

Much later in life, Anthony would serve 10 years on the University of Arkansas Board of Trustees.

“That was a significant time for me,” he says of his board service. “I enjoyed it.”

By the second semester of his senior year, Anthony was taking classes at the law school in Fayetteville.

“You could do that back in those days,” he says. “A month before I graduated in 1961, I received word that my dad had died of a heart attack.”

Ted Anthony was only 48 at the time of his death. His son knew that he should head to Bearden and fill his father’s shoes.

So it was that 22-year-old John Ed Anthony and 77-year-old Garland Anthony joined forces in 1961.

“My son Steven (the president of Anthony Timberlands Inc. since 2004) was a month old at the time,” John Ed Anthony says. “We moved to Bearden where the Bearden Lumber Co. was the flagship company of the family enterprises. We lived in a rented house.”

Anthony would drive to Union County each day to manage a mill at Mount Holly. At 5:30 a.m. one day in 1962, someone began knocking loudly on the door of his home. It was Mr. Garland.

“Come on, boy,” he told his grandson. “You’re taking over the Bearden mill.”

At age 23, John Ed Anthony found himself operating the family’s most important mill. He soon began pulling together all of the partnerships Mr. Garland had entered into through the years. It wasn’t a simple task. He found deeds in cigar boxes and agreements scribbled on the backs of envelopes.

In 1966, John Ed Anthony oversaw the replacement of the old mill at Bearden with a concrete-and-steel facility. When he approached partners in the early 1970s with expansion plans, they declined. Anthony moved forward by himself. He formed Anthony Timberlands Inc. and purchased the Hot Spring County Lumber Co. at Malvern. He then purchased a lumber company in Benton, whose operations later were consolidated with the Malvern mill.

When International Paper Co. began selling some of its Arkansas operations, Anthony purchased IP’s hardwood mill at Beirne in Clark County in 1981 along with thousands of acres of additional timberland. Anthony’s grandfather had made land purchases that generally consisted of parcels containing 5,000 to 8,000 acres around the mills in which he had an interest. By 1961, the family controlled about 70,000 acres. By 2006, under John Ed Anthony’s stewardship, that number had grown to 180,000 acres owned and another 30,000 acres managed by the company.

The mills at Bearden, Malvern and Beirne continue to operate. The company also operates Anthony Wood Treating at Hope, Anthony Hardwood Composites at Sheridan and a sales office in Arkadelphia. The various entities have annual revenues of more than $200 million.

Though the bulk of his career has been centered on the timber industry, John Ed Anthony is perhaps best known nationally for his involvement in the thoroughbred racing business. In 1974, an Arkadelphia lumberman and investor named Dick Sturgis owned a thoroughbred facility near Okolona known as Delta Farms. Sturgis talked Anthony into buying a three-year-old thoroughbred named P.F. Mayboy, a two-year-old filly and a yearling for a total of $20,000.

That was the beginning of what would become Loblolly Stable. In 1975 at the Kenneland sale in Kentucky, Anthony bought Cox’s Ridge as a yearling.

“I almost bought Seattle Slew at that sale,” he says of the horse that went on to win a Triple Crown in 1977. “I would have been hard to live with if I had owned Seattle Slew.”

Anthony became known for naming his horses after south Arkansas communities and landmarks. Cox’s Ridge was among Loblolly’s first big winners, capturing the Metropolitan Handicap at Belmont Park in New York. Temperence Hill, Demons Begone and Pine Bluff would later win the Arkansas Derby for Anthony. Temperence Hill won the Belmont Stakes in 1980, Pine Bluff won the Preakness Stakes in 1992 and Prairie Bayou won the Preakness the next year.

At Loblolly’s peak, Anthony owned more than 150 horses. Anthony and his first wife, Mary Lynn Dudley, divorced in 1988 after almost 28 years of marriage but continued as the co-owners of Loblolly. Mary Lynn later married then Arkansas Supreme Court Justice Robert Dudley, and Anthony also remarried. In 1994, Loblolly was dissolved. The mares, yearlings and weanlings were sold at auctions in Kentucky.

John Ed Anthony missed the sport, so he created Shortleaf Stable. He and his wife Isabel Burton Anthony live on the Shortleaf acreage between Lake Hamilton and Lake Catherine. They have about 20 horses that are part of the business now, along with 13 retired horses on the farm. The last Loblolly horse that’s still around is a 25-year-old stallion named Harperstown, named for a small logging community that was south of Fordyce.

John Ed and Isabel Anthony have other interests. In September 2006, the $5.8 million Anthony Chapel complex opened at Garvan Woodland Gardens near Hot Springs following a major donation by the couple. There’s a six-story, wood-and-glass chapel along with a bride’s hall, a groom’s quarters and the copper-and-steel Anthony Family Carillon, an electric bell tower. The complex was designed by Fayetteville architects Maurice Jennings and David McKee.

Anthony’s grandson Addison makes the seventh generation of Anthony family members working in the forests of south Arkansas. Through his efforts, John Ed Anthony has ensured that it’s a family tradition that won’t end anytime soon. He has come a long way from that lumber camp at Smead.

– Rex Nelson

Charlie Spoonhour, Class of 2009

In addition to that, he was an outstanding coach who was loved by his players. His university teams won 373 games. Add in the high school and junior college wins, and the 2009 Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame inductee had more than 700 career victories.

Spoonhour was born in Mulberry, Kan., in June 1939 but grew up in Rogers. He attended college in Clarksville at what’s now the University of the Ozarks, where he lettered for three years in basketball. He often said that his real goal when growing up wasn’t to be a college basketball coach but to be the second baseman for the St. Louis Cardinals.

“He loved baseball,” Moe Iba, for whom Spoonhour worked as an assistant at the University of Nebraska, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “If that wasn’t his first love, it was his second as far as sports.”

Remembering Spoonhour’s frequent trips to Cardinal spring training once the basketball season had ended, Rick Hummel wrote in the Post-Dispatch: “Once, after his University of Nevada-Las Vegas club had lost at South Carolina in the NIT, he bolted immediately to the airport, flew to Atlanta, spent the wee hours in the airport there and arrived in Jupiter, Fla., well ahead of his luggage, wearing only his Runnin’ Rebels warm-up jacket and the same pants he had sported at the game.

“Another time, Cardinals manager Joe Torre suited Spoonhour up for an exhibition game and had him sit on the bench next to him. He even let Spoonhour try to flash the squeeze sign to the third-base coach although by the time ‘Spoon’ had gone through his gyrations, everybody on both sides knew what was up.”

Spoonhour died at his family’s condominium near Chapel Hill, N.C., of complications that developed following an August 2010 lung transplant at Duke University Medical Center. Spoonhour had been diagnosed earlier that year with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a condition defined by the Mayo Clinic as “scarring or thickening of the lungs without a known cause.”

“Charlie was unforgettable,” said Doug Elgin, the Missouri Valley Conference commissioner. “He was a legendary figure – bigger than life – both as a person and as a coach. And whatever you saw with him wasn’t a shtick. He never forgot his roots. He may have moved on to St. Louis and other places, but there still was a lot of northwest Arkansas and southwest Missouri down-home boy in him.”

Spoonhour spent seven seasons as a high school basketball coach and then spent another 14 seasons as an NCAA Division I assistant coach and as a junior college head coach. He was on Bill Thomas’ staff at Southwest Missouri State (now Missouri State) in Springfield from 1968-72. Before that he had held coaching positions at the high school level at three Missouri schools – Rocky Comfort, Bloomfield and Salem.

Rocky Comfort is a small community in McDonald County just north of Bentonville and often figured in Spoonhour’s comedy routines.

Here’s a sample: “Rocky Comfort isn’t much of a city. There are no businesses, just one big ol’ school. There was an opening for a coach, and I got the job. I believe it was because I was the only applicant. First day of school and I’m living in an 8-by-28 pink trailer by the home-ec cottage. That was part of the deal. All of a sudden I hear this banging on the door. I stagger out of bed, open the door and it’s pitch black outside. The school superintendent is standing there.

“I said, ‘What time is it?’ He says, ‘About 6 a.m.’ I’m thinking, ‘6 a.m.? I don’t even throw up till noon.’ So I ask him, ‘What time does school start?’

“And he says, ‘We start at 8:20, but you’re driving the bus.’”

Spoonhour said he didn’t even know how to operate the clutch.

“People were yelling at me as I went down the road: ‘Hey, fatty, grind a pound out for me, too.’”

There’s more: “Reba Westfall was the principal at Rocky Comfort. Now you got to remember that the folks in Rocky Comfort weren’t the most sophisticated in the world. They ate a lot of vanilla wafers and drank milk through a straw. One time Reba got one of the parents real mad at her so the parent started saying ‘a spell, a spell on Reba Westfall.’

“Well, I didn’t know any better, so I asked what the spell was for. Turns out Harold’s momma put a spell on Reba because Reba flunked Harold in biology. So I ask, ‘Anything happen to Reba?’ They said, ‘Not much. She limped a little.’ So I say, ‘Is Harold gonna play basketball?’ They said, ‘Probably.’ I say, ‘Well, then he’s a starter because I’m not fixin’ to limp.’”

Spoonhour taught English and coached four sports in addition to driving that bus each morning at Rocky Comfort. He said he made $4,280 a year and was happy to get it, even when he also was asked to help direct the junior class play.

He told the Los Angeles Times about an incompetent electrician who worked on his pink trailer: “I turned the shower on, and when I woke up I was on the bed. The guy had wired it incorrectly and nearly electrocuted me. So I had to turn my shower on every day with a broom handle. You would get a real shock. … You’re sitting on the bed, wet, wondering what happened to you.”

His high school record in seven seasons at three schools was 172-46. After those four years as an assistant at Southwest Missouri, Spoonhour became the head coach at Moberly Junior College in Missouri in 1972. His teams went 26-9 and 32-8, and Spoonhour moved on to the University of Oklahoma as an assistant in 1974.

After just one season in Norman, Spoonhour became the head coach at Southeastern Community College in Burlington, Iowa. In six seasons there, Spoonhour took the Blackhawks to four regional championship games and three national junior college tournament appearances. His record at the school was 147-46.

Following two seasons as an assistant coach at Nebraska under Iba, Spoonhour made his way back to Springfield in 1983 as the head coach at Southwest Missouri. His teams there made five NCAA Tournament appearances and two NIT appearances. His record was 197-81 in nine seasons. That led to the head coaching job at Saint Louis University, a Jesuit school whose basketball team had won only five games the year before he arrived.

Spoonhour’s 1992-93 SLU team went 12-17 but that was followed by records of 23-6 and 23-8. Suddenly, Billiken basketball was hot.

During his seven years at SLU, Spoonhour led the Billikens to postseason play in four seasons with three trips to the NCAA Tournament. The 1994 trip to the NCAA Tournament was the school’s first appearance since 1957. SLU made it into the national rankings for the first time in 29 years that season, which earned Spoonhour national coach of the year honors from the U.S. Basketball Writers Association.

By the 1997-98 season, the Billikens were ranked among the nation’s top 10 in attendance, averaging 17,708 people per game.

After news of Spoonhour’s death made it to the SLU campus last month, several hundred spoons were stuck into the ground in his honor.

“When his teams were filling the old St. Louis Arena in the mid-1990s at 17,000 a night, the sign everyone wanted to see at the end of the game was the one which said, ‘Stick a Spoon in Them. They’re Done,’” Hummel wrote.

In a 1994 feature story on Spoonhour for the Los Angeles Times, Gene Wojciechowski noted the coach’s popularity in St. Louis: “Fire marshals look the other way whenever the Billikens have a home game. St. Louis Arena is nearly filled to the rafters whenever Spoonball – that’s what they call it at the school – is being played. … Spoonhour has his own TV show and spends more time on the airwaves than Bob Costas. So numerous were the radio talk-show requests earlier this season that Spoonhour finally asked, ‘Doesn’t anyone else in this town talk?’ They do, but for the moment Spoonhour is the one they listen to.”

Spoonhour compiled a 122-90 record in his seven seasons at SLU. When he retired at the end of the 1999 season, he said: “I’m not sick, no matter how I look. I’m not getting divorced. There’s just a point when you have to get off the merry-go-round, and that time is now.”

After two seasons as a television analyst, Spoonhour came out of retirement to coach at UNLV in 2001. He was 54-31 in three seasons there before retiring again.

Scott Highmark, who starred for Spoonhour at SLU, said after the coach’s death: “He was like a pied piper. People would come to a game just to see Charlie Spoonhour coach. Who does that? He was such an interesting character. He’d go to Tom’s Bar & Grill after a game and somebody would run up to the bar to talk to him and soon they’d be saying Charlie was their best friend. He just had a way of connecting with people better than anyone I’ve ever been around. The wins and losses were great, but it was more the human being. He just drew people to him. He’d come across as this aw shucks country guy, but he was brilliant.”

His wife Vicki noted that he had 348 contacts on his phone.

“I think everyone considered him a friend,” she said. “That says a lot about him” – Rex Nelson.

He waited in front of a television set at his home in Orlando, Fla., that Saturday. He thought it would be a phone call that delivered the news. But he found out like average fans – by watching television. The Arkansas native heard his name called earlier this month along with that of another native Arkansan, Willie Roaf.

“It was one of the greatest feelings in the world,” Kennedy says.

Cortez Kennedy, Class of 2005

For the first time, two past Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame inductees will be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame as part of the same class.

Kennedy, who played at Rivercrest High School at Wilson, was inducted into the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame in 2005.

Roaf, who played at Pine Bluff High School, was inducted into the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame in 2007.

“It was a long process,” Kennedy says of the wait to make it into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Kennedy spent his entire pro career with the Seattle Seahawks. Only one other person who spent a full career in Seattle – wide receiver Steve Largent – is in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Kennedy played on only two teams with winning records and in just one playoff game during his 11-year career. Yet his individual statistics were remarkable. He played in the Pro Bowl eight times, earning a spot in the game in just his second season.

Kennedy had 58 career sacks, an unusually high number for a tackle. He was the NFL Defensive Player of the Year in 1992 after recording 14 quarterback sacks. Kennedy, whose final season was 2000, was named to the Seahawks Ring of Honor and the University of Miami Hurricanes Ring of Honor. He also was named to the NFL’s All-Decade Team for the 1990s.

Kennedy was an iron man, completing seven seasons without missing a game and playing in at least 15 games 10 times during his career. He’s just the 14th defensive tackle to make it into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Center Rob Tobeck, who played with Kennedy in Seattle for a season and against him twice as a member of the Atlanta Falcons, told The News Tribune in Tacoma, Wash.: “You had to know where he was. You had to have a second pair of eyes on him. He commanded a double team. … Even in practice, when the offensive line goes down and does one-on-one pass drills, you had to be quick to get to your set because he was so quick and explosive off the ball.

“He was an incredible talent and a really good guy. No doubt it’s good seeing another Seahawk, a teammate and a guy that you played with and that you had a lot of respect for as an opponent, getting in. … And to see a guy that was also such a good teammate makes me happy. He had great hands, too. I think that sometimes doesn’t get talked about a lot in line play – playing off blocks with your hands – but he certainly was good with his hands.”

In the cotton country around Rivercrest High School, which has a rich sports tradition, playing football was the thing to do.

“Cortez Kennedy says he found the game of football for one simple reason,” Scott Johnson writes in The Daily Herald at Everett, Wash. “’Where I grew up, in Wilson, Ark., there was nothing else to do,’ he said. ‘We used to throw rocks at each other for fun.’

“Kennedy chuckled as he said it, like he so often does. A massive, 300-plus pound man, Kennedy puts people at ease with his laugh as quickly as he initially disarms them with his size. The cackling sound of Cortez Kennedy’s pleasant chuckle often reminded teammates that football is, after all, a game.

“Kennedy himself never had big goals as a football player. His dream in life was to follow his stepfather into the construction business or, at best, make it as a state trooper. Even when he started to shine at the sport during his days at Rivercrest High School, Kennedy was anchored down by subpar grades in the classroom. He ended up at Northwest Mississippi Community College, where he fully expected the playing days to quietly wind down to an oblivious conclusion.”

When Kennedy was playing junior college football in Mississippi, an assistant coach from the University of Miami who also happened to be a native Arkansan, Tommy Tuberville, visited the school.

Tuberville, now the head coach at Texas Tech, is a graduate of Camden Harmony Grove High School and Southern Arkansas University at Magnolia. He’s also a 2008 Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame inductee. Tuberville had come to Senatobia, Miss., to look at an offensive lineman, but the defensive coaches urged him to take a look at Kennedy instead.

“At 6-3 and 306 pounds, Kennedy moved like Baryshnikov while packing the punch of Tyson,” Johnson writes. “His reputation preceded him at Miami, where there was so much talk about Kennedy’s arrival that even some of the school’s most famous football alumni had to stop by to get a look at him. Jerome Brown, a former All-American who was in his rookie year with the NFL’s Philadelphia Eagles, was among the players who sought out Kennedy right away.”

Kennedy remembered it this way in a 2008 interview: “I was in the weight room lifting when this guy comes busting through the doors saying, ‘Which one’s this fat kid who’s supposed to be like me?’ Then he introduced himself and gave me a hug. He said, ‘Keep up the good work.’’’

Kennedy and Brown became close friends. Kennedy, who had earned All-American honors at Miami (the Hurricanes won the national championship his senior season), ended up using Brown’s agent, Robert Fraley. The agent also became a close friend and adviser to Kennedy.

Seattle, which traded its two first-round choices to move up in the draft, selected Kennedy as the third overall pick in 1990. In the summer of 1992, while planning a trip to Florida to see Brown, Kennedy learned that Brown had crashed his Chevrolet Corvette in his hometown of Brooksville, Fla., and died. Brown was 27.

“Mentally, it messed with me because I never had lost a friend like that, a person I cared about like that,” Kennedy said in that 2008 interview.

Fraley, his agent, died in the 1999 plane crash that also killed golfer Payne Stewart.

In the fall of 1992, Kennedy temporarily changed his jersey number from 96 to 99 to honor Brown. Despite being on a 2-14 team, Kennedy was the unanimous selection as the NFL Defensive Player of the Year. He played like a man possessed that fall with those 14 sacks and 28 tackles for loss.

Several months after Fraley’s death, Kennedy played in his first NFL playoff game and gave his bonus to charity in memory of Fraley and Brown.

Johnson writes: “Kennedy’s playful side was a mask at times, hiding the pain that had bored its way into his soul over much of his adult life.”

Kennedy now lives in the same Orlando neighborhood where Fraley once lived.

“Cortez Kennedy spent most of his playing career as a dichotomy,” Johnson writes. “Big, strong and quick as a whip on the field, he was often docile and relaxed off it. Mean and nasty between the trenches, Kennedy was more of a softy when the pads came off.

“On the field, Kennedy was known for a quick first step that often put him in the opponents’ backfield at about the time the ball was exchanged from center to quarterback. Off the field, Kennedy was known more for his infectious laugh – a wheezing, guttural, heh-heh-heh chuckle that often included a stuck-out tongue. … Cortez Kennedy was an enigma of sorts, but Seattle Seahawks fans will most remember him as a football player. His shy personality often led him from the spotlight, and so Kennedy did most of his talking with what he did on the field.”

Tim Reynolds of The Associated Press describes Kennedy’s Orlando home as being like a museum these days.

“His last Seattle Seahawks helmet is perched on a shelf, and his Miami degree – the one he went back to finish at his own expense after leaving school early for the NFL – is on the wall, not far from photos of him posing with two U.S. presidents. There’s a street sign bearing his name from his hometown, framed letters from giants of sport, palm trees around the pool, unbelievable golf-course views and just about anything else he would want.

“Some days, his biggest dilemma is deciding whether to catch the afternoon flight from Florida back home to Arkansas for a quick deer hunting trip. His life is happy, full, complete.”

Though he remains a fan favorite in Seattle, Kennedy now spends a great deal of time with the New Orleans Saints. He has close friends working for the team. In Orlando, neighbors include Lou Holtz, U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson and golfer Ian Poulter.

“On one recent afternoon, Kennedy got into his golf cart – he rarely golfs – and zipped around the development,” Reynolds writes. “A bowl of soup at the clubhouse. Chatting with some neighbors after they putted out on the first green. Saw a young girl near the tennis courts and asked her why he hadn’t seen her parents around in a couple of days. He couldn’t drive 100 feet, it seemed, without someone taking notice.”

Kennedy’s 16-year-old daughter, Courtney, is a high school junior and a star athlete in basketball and track.

“He is still a mountain of a man, though in very good shape,” Reynolds writes. “Weight almost ended his football career at Miami, before Randy Shannon – his former roommate – would literally guard the refrigerator to keep him out of it at night, then would wake him up early the next day for training runs while wearing a black garbage bag to create even more sweat and heat. A 90-minute walk is part of his regular regimen. He is quiet, soft-spoken, thoughtful. He’s saved his money, envisions a return to the NFL in some capacity someday, probably after Courtney starts college.”

Shannon says: “People, fans, people around him, they always liked him because he’s a likable guy. But they will never know how good a player Cortez Kennedy was. Never. But in that locker room, we knew. He would do anything it took on the field to win and be an example, did it in high school that way, college, Seattle. That was Cortez. No doubt, one of the best. Ever.”

He has come a long way since his days living in the cotton country of south Mississippi County, but he has never forgotten his roots. He may now live in Florida, but Cortez Kennedy is proud to hail from Arkansas. Not many people who came from this state ever played the game better.

– Rex Nelson

Willie Roaf, Class of 2007

“My dad and I talked about it recently – that she is smiling down from heaven, knowing that I’m being recognized for being one of the best. … She would have preferred that I was a better student, but she wanted the best for me in whatever I chose to do.”

Roaf was born April 18, 1970, in Pine Bluff to dentist Clifton Roaf and attorney Andree Layton Roaf. His mother, who died in July 2009, had made a name for herself by the time her son began playing in the NFL.

Nashville, Tenn., native Andree Layton met Clifton Roaf when both were students at Michigan State University. They married in July 1963, and from 1963-65, Andree Roaf worked as a bacteriologist for the Michigan Department of Health in Lansing. She worked in Washington, D.C., from 1965-69 for the U.S. Food & Drug Administration before moving to Pine Bluff to become a staff assistant for Pine Bluff’s urban renewal agency from 1971-75.

Andree Roaf took a job as a biologist for the National Center for Toxicological Research in 1975 while also attending law school at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. She graduated second in a class of 83 in 1978, taught at the law school for a year after graduation and then went into private practice with the firm of Walker Roaf Campbell Ivory & Dunklin.

In January 1995, she became the first black woman and only the second woman to serve on the Arkansas Supreme Court when she was appointed by Gov. Jim Guy Tucker to replace Justice Steele Hays, who was retiring.

She was not eligible to run for her Supreme Court position when the term ended but was appointed by Gov. Mike Huckabee to serve on the Arkansas Court of Appeals. She later was elected as an appeals court judge and was a 1996 inductee into the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame.

Willie Roaf is quick to note that his mother would have preferred her son to have been an attorney or doctor. He drew so little interest from college recruiters at Pine Bluff High School that he considered switching from football to basketball. Finally, he decided to play football at Louisiana Tech University in Ruston, where his career took off.

For the first time, two past inductees of the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame will be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame as part of the same class.

Roaf was inducted into the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame in 2007.

Cortez Kennedy, who played high school football at Rivercrest High School at Wilson and was inducted into the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame in 2005, also will be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame this August at Canton, Ohio.

Roaf was 6-4, 220 pounds when he went to Louisiana Tech, small for a college offensive lineman.

Former Tech coach Joe Raymond Peace said assistant coach Jerry Baldwin brought film of Roaf playing high school football for Pine Bluff.

“Jerry said he was probably a better basketball player than football player,” Peace told Jimmy Watson of The Times at Shreveport. “I looked at about eight plays, and I could tell he had great feet and hips. At the time of my visit, I believe I was the only head coach to go into the home, although Larry Lacewell would go in later.”

By his sophomore season, Roaf was 6-5, 300 pounds. Louisiana Tech played Alabama, Baylor, South Carolina, Ole Miss, West Virginia and Southern Mississippi during his senior season, allowing professional scouts plenty of opportunities to watch him work.

“I told him that schedule would allow him to become an All-American, and it would make him a lot of money,” Peace said. “The good lord blessed Willie with the talent to be the best in the game, but he really never had a clue about the talent he had. He was always humble. There’s no doubt he’s the best lineman I ever coached, and he deserves all the honors he has received. He’s just a good person.”

Roaf was picked in the first round of the 1993 NFL draft by the New Orleans Saints. He was the eighth selection overall and the first offensive lineman to be drafted.

Roaf will be only the second player who spent the bulk of his career in New Orleans to be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Former Saints linebacker Rickey Jackson was part of the Class of 2010. Roaf spent the first nine years of a 13-year NFL career with the Saints.

To acquire Roaf, the Saints had to send former NFL Defensive Player of the Year Pat Swilling to the Detroit Lions for the eighth overall pick. The decision proved to be a wise one. Roaf started 131 games for the Saints and helped the franchise to its first playoff win, a 2000 victory over the defending Super Bowl champion St. Louis Rams. A torn ligament in his right knee forced Roaf to miss the second half of the 2001 season. He was traded to the Kansas City Chiefs, where he made the Pro Bowl in each of his four seasons.

Roaf was voted to the Pro Bowl 11 times in his 13 seasons, tied with Hall of Famer Anthony Munoz for the most Pro Bowl appearances by an offensive tackle. He earned a spot on the NFL All-Decade Teams for both the 1990s and the 2000s.

“The Kansas City years were more important (for the Hall of Fame) than the New Orleans years, even though I went to seven Pro Bowls in New Orleans,” Roaf told The Kansas City Star. “I went to Kansas City and played with that great offensive line. … I needed Kansas City more than Kansas City needed me.”

Roaf said his father, a college teammate of former Chiefs star Ed Budde at Michigan State, will introduce him at the induction ceremony in Canton.

“There weren’t many takers for Roaf (coming off the injury at New Orleans), but Chiefs personnel director Bill Kuharich, who was with the Saints when they drafted him, convinced general manager Carl Peterson and coach Dick Vermeil to bring him to Kansas City,” Randy Covitz wrote in The Kansas City Star.

“Knowing what kind of individual he was, knowing what kind of pride and character he had and his passion for the game, certainly a change of scenery wouldn’t hurt,” Kuharich told Covitz. “I didn’t have any doubts he would return to form.”

Roaf had spent his rookie year for the Saints at right tackle before moving to the left side of the line.

Roaf, who was an All-Pro selection four times as a Saint and four times as a Chief, said he will go into the Hall of Fame as a representative of the Saints even though players’ busts in Canton don’t specify teams.

“I played four years with the Chiefs, and those were great, but I’m from Arkansas,” he said. “I went to Louisiana Tech. My history goes more with the Saints than the Chiefs. But believe me, my Chiefs days were very, very special to me, and I will cherish those.”

Roaf helped the Chiefs lead the NFL in scoring with 484 points in 2003 and 467 points in 2004. Quarterback Trent Green joined with running backs Priest Holmes and Larry Johnson to put up franchise-record numbers behind Roaf and the other Kansas City offensive linemen.

Owners of both the Saints and the Chiefs praised Roaf.

“It’s such a deserving honor,” Clark Hunt of the Chiefs said. “To me, Willie is the epitome of what a Hall of Famer is – not only somebody who is individually dominant, but somebody who made everybody who played around him better.”

Saints owner Tom Benson said Roaf “meant a great deal to our team during his career with us. He was the best player on our team during his entire tenure with us, one of the top players in the history of our franchise and one of the NFL’s greatest at his position.”

Roaf was in two playoff games with the Saints, winning one and losing one. The Chiefs lost their only postseason game with Roaf in 2003 to Indianapolis, 38-31, in a game in which neither team had a punt.

“Nothing against our defense, but our offense was putting up numbers against the top defenses in the league when I was in Kansas City,” Roaf told Covitz. “We just needed to slow people down some more.”

Roaf also was inducted into the New Orleans Saints Hall of Fame in 2008 and the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame in 2009. In 2009, he took a job coaching the offensive line at Santa Monica Junior College in Santa Monica, Calif.

Roaf was widely respected by both teammates and opposing players. He once owned a home in Colorado, for instance, with Jerome Bettis.

“They met so many years ago in a hotel suite in Indianapolis and never did two men seem less likely to become best friends,” Les Carpenter wrote for Yahoo! Sports. “Jerome Bettis came from Detroit, talking fast and loud, while Willie Roaf from Arkansas barely said much at all. But there they were, guests of the Washington Redskins at the 1993 NFL scouting combine, two soon-to-be top 10 draft picks, and they were taking a test that made little sense: a personality exam asking how they would react in certain kinds of situations.

“Other than having the same agent, they appeared to have little in common besides that ridiculous Redskins’ test. But somehow that was enough to build a friendship for a lifetime.”

Bettis and Roaf were represented by Lamont Smith, one of the few black agents at the time. Smith lived in Denver and believed his clients should train in Colorado’s thin mountain air. Bettis and Roaf spent $140,000 for a three-bedroom home in the Denver suburb of Aurora. The home only covered 1,600 square feet, but Roaf said it “had a nice yard. It was just nice to have a good place.”

Bettis was named the NFL Rookie of the Year after his first season with the Rams.

“As the years went on, Roaf developed a reputation as one of the NFL’s best offensive linemen,” Carpenter wrote. “Soon Bettis’ Rookie of the Year award was eclipsed by Roaf’s routine trips to the Pro Bowl.”

“We were 22, 23-year-old guys, and we thought we were going to go out and be studs in the NFL,” Bettis told Carpenter. “We talked about it all the time. We were both highly competitive guys, and I was messing with him all the time, telling him how good I was going to be.”

They sold the house after several years, but the friendship lasted. Bettis was at the hospital for the birth of Roaf’s first daughter

Roaf also kept Smith as his agent throughout his career.

Carpenter wrote that Smith urged Roaf “to appear tougher when he was a senior at Louisiana Tech. As the son of a dentist and judge, NFL teams felt Roaf might not be hungry enough or mean enough to play professionally. Before a big game against Alabama, Smith stressed to Roaf’s mother that the lineman needed to act mean. Roaf obliged by flattening an Alabama pass rusher at one point, ripping off the player’s helmet and tossing it away.”

“After that, there were no more questions about his toughness or his meanness,” Smith said.

Off the field, though, Road remained humble and quiet.

When he’s inducted at Canton, he will no doubt be thinking of his mother, also a Hall of Famer due to her induction into the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame.

“Mom would be very happy to know I achieved the level of being one of the best to do what I did,” Willie Roaf said. “I know she’s looking down proud right now.”

– Rex Nelson

It was announced during the weekend that Arkansas natives Willie Roaf and Cortez Kennedy have been elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Kennedy, who played high school football at Rivercrest High School at Wilson, was inducted into the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame in 2005.

Roaf, who played high school football at Pine Bluff High School, was inducted into the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame in 2007.

“Those of us at the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame always love to hear good news about our former inductees,” said Andrew Meadors of Little Rock, the president of the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame. “It’s a huge honor for Willie Roaf and Cortez Kennedy to be chosen for the Pro Football Hall of Fame. We’re proud of them and join all Arkansans in offering our congratulations.”

Cortez Kennedy, Class of 2005

Kennedy was one of the best defensive linemen ever to play in the NFL. The Seattle Seahawks selected him in the first round of the 1990 NFL draft (the third selection overall) after he had earned All-American honors at the University of Miami. The Hurricanes won the national championship his senior season. Kennedy had played at Northwest Mississippi Community College before receiving a football scholarship to Miami.

Kennedy was named to the Pro Bowl in just his second season and ended up playing in the game eight times. He had 58 career sacks, an unusually high number for a tackle. He was the NFL Defensive Player of the Year in 1992 after recording 14 quarterback sacks. Kennedy, whose final season was 2000, was named to the Seahawks Ring of Honor and the Miami Hurricanes Ring of Honor. He also was named to the NFL’s All-Decade Team for the 1990s.

Roaf was lightly recruited out of high school in Pine Bluff. He ended up at Louisiana Tech University in Ruston, La. He was picked in the first round of the 1993 NFL draft (the eighth selection overall and the first offensive lineman to be drafted) by the New Orleans Saints. Roaf played nine years for the Saints, participated in seven Pro Bowls while in New Orleans and earned a spot on both the All-Decade Teams for the 1990s and the 2000s. Roaf was traded to the Kansas City Chiefs in March 2002 and played four seasons for the Chiefs. He was selected for the Pro Bowl in each of those four seasons.

Willie Roaf, Class of 2007

Roaf played one season at right tackle and then spent the rest of his career on the left side of the line. He announced his retirement in July 2006.

Other former Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame inductees who also are in the Pro Football Hall of Fame include:

• Dan Hampton, who was inducted into the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame in 1992
• Don Hutson, who was inducted into the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame in 1960
• Bobby Mitchell, who was inducted into the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame in 1977
• Lance Alworth, who was inducted into the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame in 1979

The Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame inducted its first class in 1959. The Class of 2012 was inducted Friday night at Verizon Arena in North Little Rock with more than 1,400 people in attendance at the induction banquet.

Ray Tucker is the executive director of the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame.

The Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame Museum on the west side of Verizon Arena is open each Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. until 4:30 p.m. It includes an 88-seat theater with a video highlighting the careers of Arkansas sports greats along with a touch-screen kiosk with a database of all Hall of Fame inductees.

Members of the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame vote each year on inductees. Membership dues are $50 annually. Membership forms can be obtained by going to the organization’s website at www.arksportshalloffame.com.

She’s not a pioneer in the traditional sense of clearing land and homesteading an area. But she’s certainly a pioneer in the sense of advancing women’s sports in Arkansas. Downing became the head women’s basketball coach at what’s now Southern Arkansas University in Magnolia in the fall of 1965, a time when that sport wasn’t on the radar screen of most Arkansans. During her 19 seasons as the head coach of the Riderettes, she became a well-known sports figure in Arkansas.

Downing arrived in the pine woods of far south Arkansas at a school that had been founded in 1909 when the Arkansas Legislature passed Act 100, which authorized the establishment of four district agricultural boarding schools, one in each quadrant of the state. These schools were designed to give rural children access to a better education. Columbia County residents raised the funds necessary to attract one of those four schools to Magnolia.

Buildings were constructed during 1910. In 1911, what was known originally as the Third District Agricultural School opened its doors a mile north of the city. In its early days, the school’s men’s teams made a name for themselves. In 1912, the football team chose the Mulerider name. The football Muleriders had their first unbeaten season in 1919. Dolph Camp, who later would become the school’s president, played center on that team.

A 1925 legislative act changed the name of the two-year junior college to the State Agricultural and Mechanical College. It most commonly was referred to by Arkansans as Magnolia A&M. College student enrollment exceeded that of high school students for the first time in 1931 at Magnolia A&M, and by 1937 the high school classes had been abolished. In 1951, the Legislature renamed what was now a four-year liberal arts college Southern State College. The success of the men’s teams continued as Coach Elmer Smith’s Mulerider football squads won back-to-back Arkansas Intercollegiate Conference championships in 1951-52 and Coach W.T. Watson’s men’s basketball teams won back-to-back AIC basketball championships in 1966-67.

Margaret Downing soon made women’s sports matter in Magnolia.

Her women’s basketball teams would win eight championships during the next two decades, competing at the state level in what was at first the Arkansas Women’s Extramural Sports Association and was later the Arkansas Women’s Intercollegiate Sports Association. Nationally, her teams competed in AAU national tournaments.

By the time Downing retired from coaching, the AIC had added women’s basketball to its roster of sports.

Downing didn’t just coach basketball. She served as the head swimming and diving coach from 1966-68 and again from 1969-73, claiming an AWESA championship in 1967 and an AWISA title in 1969. Her swimming and diving squads finished second in the conference on two other occasions.

Downing also won an AWISA championship in softball in 1980. She coached volleyball for three years from 1973-75, winning an AWISA championship in 1974 and placing second the other two seasons.

In recognition of her accomplishments, Margaret Downing will be inducted into the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame on Friday, Feb. 3. Tickets for the annual induction banquet at Verizon Arena in North Little Rock are $100 each and may be obtained by calling Jennifer Smith at (501) 663-4328 or Catherine Johnson at (501) 821-1021.

Downing is among 11 individual inductees – six from the regular category, three from the senior category and two from the posthumous category – in the Class of 2012. The Hall of Fame also will induct the 1994 University of Arkansas national championship men’s basketball team.

Downing attended Arkansas State Teachers College (now the University of Central Arkansas) and graduated from there in 1953. One of the people who influenced her the most was Dr. Betty Mae Swift, who was hired in 1949 as a physical education instructor and remained at the Conway school until she retired in 1983. It was Swift, a no-nonsense instructor who demanded that her students and players live up to strict standards in the classroom and in athletics, who coined the name Sugar Bears for the women’s sports teams at the university.

Swift, who died in 2000 at age 78, joined forces in later years with Downing to convince the AIC to add women’s sports in 1983, signifying their acceptance as a full partner with the men’s programs.

Downing says Swift was a mentor who “taught all of us to just roll up our sleeves and do the job ourselves. She definitely was a good adviser, teacher and friend. I will always carry in my heart the numerous things she taught us, both in and outside the classroom, along with the intangibles of loyalty, honor and dedication to duty.”

Swift would spend many hours outside of class preparing students to take tests that would qualify them to officiate various sports even though there was little demand for women’s officials in those days.

Downing, taught to achieve her full potential academically as well as athletically, went on to receive her master’s degree from the University of Tennessee in 1960 and her doctorate from Texas Woman’s University in 1973.

Downing made a number of coaching stops before settling in Magnolia. She coached at the high school level in Monticello, Texarkana, North Little Rock and at the Tennessee School for the Deaf. She coached collegiately at Connecticut College for Women, Central Connecticut State College and Ouachita Baptist University at Arkadelphia. Her Ouachita teams were nationally ranked, laying the foundation for the success experienced by Carolyn Moffatt at Ouachita from 1965-84 as her teams went 213-162. Moffatt was a posthumous inductee last year into the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame.

At Southern Arkansas, Downing’s first basketball team captured an AWESA championship. AWISA was founded in 1969 and her teams won seven of the first eight titles – 1969-70, 1970-71, 1971-72, 1973-74, 1974-75, 1975-76 and 1976-77. Her 1972-73 squad placed second, and the 1976-77 team shared the championship with the University of Arkansas at Monticello. Downing retired from coaching basketball with a record of 223-163 at the school.

The first time AWISA awarded a coach of the year award – following the 1977-78 season – it went to Downing.

Downing was not only known statewide as a leader in the field of women’s athletics but was recognized nationally and internationally. She was the manager of the U.S. women’s basketball teams twice in the Pan-American Games. She also served as the president and treasurer of the U.S. Olympic Committee for Women’s Basketball, as the president of AWISA and as the president of the Southwest Region of the Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women. Downing served at one time or another on the AAU’s national basketball rules committee, the U.S. National Basketball Committee and the International Basketball Committee.

She was just as successful in the classroom as she was as a coach. Downing was named the Southern Arkansas University honor professor for the 1987-88 school year and is remembered fondly by thousands of former students as one of the best instructors to serve the university. When SAU established its Hall of Fame for athletics, she was in the inaugural class of 2003. Downing already had been inducted into the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics Hall of Fame in 1987.

Through the years, the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame has honored several of the pioneers of women’s athletics in the state. For example, Hazel Walker, an 11-time All-American AAU basketball player who later managed and played with her own professional team, was in the first induction class in 1959. A member of the Class of 1966 was Quinnie Hamm Toler, who once scored 114 points in a game at Sparkman and 1,245 points for the season. Joan Crawford of Van Buren, a 13-time AAU All-American basketball star, was a member of the Class of 1978.

Now, Margaret Downing has earned her rightful place with such luminaries of the past – Rex Nelson.