Hog calls

Arkansas embraces those who embrace it

Frank Broyles greets friends and supporters during the reception prior to a banquet in his honor at the John Q Hammons Center in Rogers on Saturday June 7, 2014.

FAYETTEVILLE -- A New England accent, a Wisconsin accent, a Georgia accent and an Irish brogue, all distinctive in their own right yet all thoroughly belonging to Arkansas, echoed throughout the evening at the Arkansas Sports Hall of Honor banquet at the Northwest Arkansas Convention Center in Springdale.

The New England accent was heard by all. Pat Bradley, the shooting guard, or "gahd" as Nolan Richardson imitated so often when referring to his record-breaking three-point marksman from Everett, Mass., for his 1996-99 Razorbacks basketball teams, was among the evening's nine inductees.

Among the many mingling and attending were Frank Broyles, the retired Arkansas athletic director and Hall of Honor member who has been an Arkansas resident since December 1957 but still has a syrupy Georgia accent.

Norm DeBriyn, the Hall of Honor member and retired Razorbacks baseball coach who first came to the UA in 1969 and still an associate director in the Razorback Foundation with an accent that exudes Cheese Head was there, too. So was retired track/cross country coach John McDonnell, another Hall of Honor member whose native Irish lilt never left him.

All in their own way brought positive change to Arkansas, but all did so while appreciating Arkansas and assimilating into Arkansas to become Arkansas lifers like few ever do regardless of how long they live here.

Bradley said it took an insider from outside, his father, to drive home how much Arkansas means to Pat, whose New England accent speaks to Arkansas over Little Rock's sports talk radio airwaves.

"When you went to Arkansas there were people back home saying you wouldn't last a week," Bradley recalled his father telling him. "It's been 19 years and they haven't gotten rid of you yet."

Arkansas rarely rids itself of those it calls Arkansas' own because they sincerely came to call Arkansas their own.


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MARK OF ZORRO

According to film historians The Mark of Zorro was made three times (1920, 1940 and 1974).

Actually, they should include a fourth. Especially today in remembrance.

Arkansas' Steve Cox marked Zorro in 1979 at Jones Stadium in Lubbock, Texas, the same stadium that Arkansas visits today for a game against the Texas Tech Red Raiders.

The Red Raiders' mascot is a black stallion ridden by a Red Raider. The Red Raider is called "The Masked Rider" but is inevitably equated with "Zorro" to generations who either saw the movies or reruns of the old Zorro TV show made in the late 1950s, with later versions in the 1990s and 2011.

An eventual eight-year NFL kicker, Cox didn't horse around on kickoffs. He consistently boomed them out of the end zone, although he unwittingly horsed around on one during that 20-6 Southwest Conference victory over Tech in Lubbock.

"The Red Raider was behind the goal post," Cox, a Jonesboro businessman and Charleston native, recalled several years ago. "My kickoff hit the horse in the rear. Zorro raised up. I don't think he fell off, but it was a bull's-eye."

Sports on 09/13/2014