SPRINGDALE — The two most professionally decorated of the eight honorees couldn't attend last Friday night's University of Arkansas Sports Hall of Honor banquet at the Northwest Arkansas Convention Center, but the least decorated honoree said he brought the best to the table.
Dr. Jim Counce, just Jimmy Counce when he lettered for former Arkansas basketball coach Eddie Sutton's Razorbacks from 1974-78, never earned All-Southwest Conference.
Not surprising. It's hard to award four of the five first-team All-League spots to one school, which had Sidney Moncrief and Ron Brewer and Marvin Delph filling three all-conference spots automatically.
Arkansas' fabled "Triplets" and their coach came to Springdale to see honored the unsung but so valuable hard-nosed defensive forward of those 26-2 and 32-4 SWC champions of 1977 and '78 that went all the way to the 1978 Final Four.
"They were the greatest teammates anyone could hope to play with," Counce said. "Any one of them, had they so chosen, could have averaged30 points per game. But they cared more about team than they did themselves. Even though they might be here tonight because of me, it is more correct to say that I stand here tonight because of them."
Counce also praised Sutton, who long ago was enshrined in the Hall of Honor.
"He made me better than I thought I could be and he made us better than we thought we could be," said Counce, a longtime cardiologist and thoracic surgeon.
Friday night's elected honorees included Shawn Andrews, Richard Bell, Ron Calcagni and Billy Joe Moody from football, Veronica Campbell-Brown from women's track, Alistair Cragg from men's track and former coach Tom Pucci from men's tennis.
Pucci, now the longtime athletics director at the University of California at Pennsylvania, coached Razorback tennis from 1976-84, inheriting a program that was practically an extension of the P.E. department and converting it to Southwest Conference champions and nationally competitive.
Sprinter Cambell-Brown, the UA's most decorated Olympian with five medals - three gold for her native Jamaica, and recent World Championships silver medalist in Berlin - was competing in China during the banquet weekend.
Arkansas head women's coach Lance Harter accepted on Campbell-Brown's behalf.
Andrews, the Razorbacks' Camden-born, three-year, two-time All-American offensive tackle before turning pro early with the Philadelphia Eagles and both a Lombardi Award and Outland Trophy finalist in 2003, was in Philadelphia getting treatment on the back injury that sidelined him for the 2009 season.
His brother, Derrick Andrews, accepted the award. On a night honoring the Razorback uniform, Sergeant First Class Andrews' Army uniform was the night's mosthonored apparel by the applauding 1,000-plus attending.
Derrick Andrews, currently on leave from his station in Kuwait, said he was stationed in Kosovo in 2000, when Shawn called him besieged by coast to coast recruiting offers.
"He said there is only one school I want to play for," recalled Derrick, "and that's the Arkansas Razorbacks. I said, 'Play for them. We are from Arkansas and we are representing Arkansas.'"
Seven-time NCAA champion distance runner Cragg, also still competing professionally, ranks among the greatest two or three greatest distance runners in the incomparably great era of recently retired 40-time national champion track/ cross country coach John McDonnell.
He was an ordinary runner at SMU become extraordinary transferring to Arkansas.
"It didn't take long for me to realize what made the sea of red so strong," Cragg said. "The factwas they weren't running for themselves, they were running for their teammatesand coaches. It's a family at Arkansas. It doesn't matter what sport you do, football, basketball, baseball or track, you are a Razorback."
Quarterback Calcagni, lettering from 1975-78, said it was an honor playing for "coaching legends" Frank Broyles and Lou Holtz, both in the College Football Hall of Fame.
Under Holtz, Calcagni quarterbacked the 1977 Razorbacks to a shocking 31-6 Orange Bowl upset over Oklahoma.
That year sure ended better than it began, Calcagni said, recalling upon succeeding Broyles, Holtz met with him and told him "Ron, you aren't tough enough to be my quarterback."
Calcagni recalled telling his coach otherwise though he still regrets not using his hometown of Youngstown, Ohio versus Holtz's Ohio heritage of East Liverpool.
"To this day," Calcagni said, "I would love to have the opportunity to say to him, 'I come from Youngstown, Ohio, a steeltown. Now Coach you came from - what type of a town - a pottery town, right?"
Bell, a longtime college defensive coach and former head coach at South Carolina, and Moody, both played for Frank Broyles and both were influenced by the late Wilson Matthews. Matthews was Bell's coach at Little Rock Central and the Arkansas linebackers coach when Moody was a Razorback.
"Wilson Matthews treated me like a dog," Bell said, smiling, "but by doing so he made a man out of a boy."
Moody cracked up the audience start to finish.
"I'm going to make this pretty short," the UA's 1960-62 fullback-linebacker said. "We are pretty old up here, and I know I'm not the only one that needs to go potty."
Turns out his bladder held up and so did his stories.
Moody recalled breaking his hand one spring but evasively explaining how he broke it when Broyles and Matthews visited him in the infirmary.
"They left," Moody said, "but then Coach Matthews comes back in and said, 'Did you whip his ass?' I said, 'Yes, sir.' And he said, 'You had better have !'"
News, Pages 8 on 09/20/2009