Arkansas Business

This story is from the archives of ArkansasSports360.com.

Ray Tucker visited the sports halls of fame in Alabama and Mississippi before he and other officials decided how they hoped Arkansas' long-awaited Hall of Fame Museum would be designed.

(Video: Click here to watch video of Tucker talking about the new class of inductees and the hall's explansion plans.)

What stood out to Tucker, the executive director of the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame, were the amazing names in the Alabama and Mississippi sports halls of fame, and how those states and Arkansas could boast major players in every sports in the past century.

Many sports greats are shared among these three Southern states. Arkansas and Alabama both honor Paul W. "Bear" Bryant, who grew up in Moro Bottom (Dallas County) and went to high school at Fordyce and then attended and later coached Alabama, where he became legendary. Bryant was inducted into the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame in 1965, and he still had three more national championships and more than a hundred wins to go in his esteemed career.

Very likely, before Tommy Tuberville's coaching career is done at Auburn, he'll be inducted into that state's hall of fame, just as he will be in Arkansas on Feb. 22 at Alltel Arena.

Tuberville will be among a dozen inductees in the 50th class of the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame. Baseball great Torii Hunter of Pine Bluff is also in the class, along with former Razorback basketball All-American and the UA's all-time scorer, Todd Day; Razorback football All-American Bruce James; Oaklawn Park owner Charles Cella; West Memphis basketball star Michael Cage, who was a rebounding force in the NBA in the 1980s; racehorse owner W.C. "Cal" Partee; fishing great Jerry McKinnis; baseball manager Gaylen Pitts; women's basketball star Tracy Webb; former Harding football coach John Prock; and former Razorback Jon Richardson, the first African-American scholarship football player at Fayetteville.

The first class, in 1959, featured baseball great Bill Dickey, woman's basketball star Hazel Walker, legendary Hendrix athlete and coach Ivan Grove, Razorback two-sports star and NFL great Jim Lee Howell, and the Arkansas Razorbacks' first All-American, Wear Schoonover.

"One of the fears we had a long time ago was that we might run out of names to induct into the Hall of Fame," Tucker said. "But as we've grown, I think the popularity of the Hall of Fame has grown, and end result is that the popularity of sports has increased.

"The example I like to give is, you pick up a Sunday newspaper during the pro football season and you look and see how many ties people in the NFL have to the state of Arkansas and there will be 35 or 40 of them. There used to be three or four. We don't have this fear of running out of folks anymore."

But keeping the public from forgetting who had made it was another matter until about 10 years ago, when some State Hall of Fame officials took note of the museums springing up in neighboring states, especially impressive facilities in Birmingham, Ala., and Jackson, Miss.

Tucker, a longtime sports-caster in the market, had left KTHV-TV, Channel 11, and was hired in 1998 as executive director of the state's Hall of Fame. At that point, the only area devoted to honoring Sports Hall of Fame members was outside the Statehouse Convention Center, where the annual induction ceremony was held before it moved last year to Alltel Arena to accommodate the more than 1,300 who attended.

The first thought 10 years ago, Tucker recalled, was putting some touch kiosks throughout the new Alltel Arena corridor to honor the state greats. The fancy neighboring museums with their interactive displays, perfect for a tourist attraction, changed all that.