Texas Sports Hall of Fame honors teams, players from Southwest Conference
By J.B. Smith Tribune-Herald staff writer
Curator Jay Black (left) and Executive Director Steve Fallon stand inside the new Southwest Conference Wing of the Texas Sports Hall of Fame.
The Southwest Conference perfected the recipe for rivalry: Mix together nine proud, mostly Texan universities in athletic competition and watch the fur fly.
The conference is long gone, but the passions it inspired burn on, and the Texas Sports Hall of Fame is banking on them as it unveils its new Southwest Conference exhibit Feb. 6.
The exhibit is the centerpiece of a $5 million expansion that has more than doubled the size of the museum at 1108 S. University-Parks Drive. Officials hope that it will double the museum’s annual attendance of about 25,000 and raise its profile among sports fans everywhere.
Memorabilia in the Baylor exhibit honors former all-American and gold medalist track star Michael Johnson, among other Bear runners in coach Clyde Hart's successful program.
Through displays of artifacts and videos clustered around a miniature Cotton Bowl field, visitors can relive the conference’s glory days, in a variety of sports.
“These were unique rivalries, historical in nature,” said Tom Stanton, the former Baylor athletic director and lead fundraiser for the project. “Everybody remembers them. Sports fans remember listening to Kern Tips announce or getting in their cars with their parents and driving to Dallas, Lubbock or Waco. These are memories etched in people’s minds.
“If there was ever an organization that had the responsibility to honor and memorialize the Southwest Conference, no one was in better position than the Texas Sports Hall of Fame,” he said. “We also thought it would be a great economic development opportunity for Waco.
Unique museum
Executive director Steve Fallon said the displays should be a hit among alumni of all the former schools: Texas Christian University, Baylor, Rice, the University of Texas, Texas A&M, Southern Methodist University, the University of Arkansas, Texas Tech and the University of Houston.
Each university has its own display, containing everything from Rice’s owl mascot to Earl Campbell’s jersey from 1977, when he won the Heisman Trophy as a Texas Longhorn.
“This is the only museum dedicated to the history of an athletic conference,” Fallon said. “It was a great football conference — but also a well-rounded conference for basketball, baseball, football and track and field.”
The Southwest Conference, which began in 1914, consisted mostly of Texas schools, though Arkansas and Oklahoma teams also belonged at various times. It disbanded in 1996, partly because larger universities in the league desired to realign to capture a bigger television audience.
Dave’s library
In addition to the Southwest Conference display, the 19,000-square-foot museum expansion includes a sports library named for former Tribune-Herald sports editor Dave Campbell, a room for health and fitness education and a “great hall” that seats up to 400, with a catering kitchen. With the expansion Fallon is hoping to triple the amount of events that the facility books.
One case at the Texas Sports Hall of Fame honors many of the legendary television and radio broadcasters who called games for teams all over the Southwest Conference.
The project has been six years in the making.
The Hall of Fame years ago secured the intellectual property rights and much of the archival materials from the Southwest Conference but has never had the space to display it properly, so the Southwest Conference focus was no surprise.
“I thought, what a tremendous opportunity,” Stanton said.
Stanton visited and got funding commitments from all the universities, with donations totaling nearly $500,000.
Twenty-one foundations statewide donated to the project, including local groups such as the Cooper Foundation, Rapoport Foundation, Waco Foundation and Baylor-Waco Foundation. Other money came from former players and other private philanthropists.
The biggest single source of funding was $1 million in public money from the Tax Increment Financing Zone, which funds improvements in the central city through a dedicated portion of property taxes collected in the zone.
Stanton and Fallon agreed that the upfront TIF money made it easier to raise the remaining funds.
Drawing in visitors
Jay Black, museum curator, said the new exhibit has broad appeal, given the number of alumni each of the nine schools has.
“If you’re not a huge sports fan, you can still appreciate the history of the schools represented here,” he said. To illustrate, he pointed out the Rice Owl mascot, “Sammy,” which Rice loyalists rescued from the clutches of Texas A&M partisans who had stolen him in 1917.
“You don’t have to be a great sports fan to appreciate why the owl needed saving,” he said.
The exhibit has personal connections for Grant Teaff, the renowned former Baylor coach who now heads the American Football Coaches Association next door to the museum.
For one thing, Teaff is featured prominently in the Baylor exhibit.
During his tenure, 1972 to 1992, he was named Southwest Conference Coach of the year six times.
But his affinity to the Southwest Conference predates his coaching career.
He remembers lying on the floor as a kid and listening to games on the Humble radio network.
Exhibits, such as this one in the Texas Tech exhibit, line the halls of the Southwest Conference wing at the hall of fame. This case honors the Red Raiders’ basketball history, including the 1993 women’s basketball national championship.
“I’m one of the millions of people who were impacted by the conference,” he said. “As a young boy in Snyder, Texas, I determined that I wanted to be a head coach in the Southwest Conference.”
As a coach he saw that Texans’ loyalties to college sports ran deep.
“When I moved to Waco, I met so many people who said, ‘We really want you to do well, on every game except when you play this one school.’ For some it was A&M or Texas or SMU.
“That was its uniqueness. In any community, you had people so loyal and so dedicated. On a Saturday before the game you would see caravans of cars headed for Austin or College Station.”
Preserving history
Teaff saluted the Texas Sports Hall of Fame for its efforts to preserve and pass the knowledge of the Southwest Conference era to future generations.
“My dream, once the Southwest Conference went away and the Big 12 came, that some day, somehow, it would be remembered,” he said. “Thank goodness people here in Waco and across the state have done a terrific job to see that the Southwest Conference is not only remembered but honored and glorified.”
jbsmith@wacotrib.com
757-5752
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