FAYETTEVILLE — Arkansas often felt like an outsider in the Southwest Conference.
The Razorbacks were a charter member of the SWC more than a century ago, but after Oklahoma State left in 1925, Arkansas spent more than 65 years as the only non-Texas team in the league. The University of Arkansas voted to leave the SWC in 1990 and had made a full transition to the Southeastern Conference within two years.
Between the time Arkansas left and the conference’s final game in 1996, the SWC established a hall of honor that inducted 30 members. Perhaps a bit scorned from the Razorbacks’ departure, no Arkansans were inducted into the hall.
When the league disbanded, all of the SWC’s intellectual property rights were transferred to the Texas Sports Hall of Fame, including the rights to the SWC Hall of Honor. But for 18 years, the SWC Hall never was updated.
So when the Texas Sports Hall of Fame rebranded the SWC Hall in 2013, the only members were those 30 who had been inducted in the ’90s or those who had been inducted into the Texas Sports Hall of Fame.
Of the 167 grandfathered into the SWC Hall that year, only two had any relation to Arkansas. Those were Jerry Jones and Jimmy Johnson, the Dallas Cowboys’ owner and former two-time Super Bowl-winning head coach who were teammates on the Razorbacks’ national championship team in 1964. Johnson had been inducted into the Texas Sports Hall of Fame in 2000; Jones was inducted in 2006.
“Many of those names that were grandfathered in were Longhorns and Aggies,” said Cooper Jones, president and CEO of the Texas Sports Hall of Fame, a 36,000-square foot facility located in Waco.
The SWC wing includes equal square footage for each of the nine schools that comprised the conference from 1972 until the Razorbacks’ departure in the early ’90s. Last year alone, more than $45,000 was spent to upgrade video, audio and lighting within the SWC Hall.
“We made a big attempt to make sure that we represented each of those nine schools equally,” Jones said. “We have tried to go back as far as we can to honor some of the accomplishments that happened 50, 60, 70 years ago.”
Each year, the SWC Hall selects nine new members for induction — one from each school. From Arkansas, those classes have included former coaches Frank Broyles, John McDonnell, Nolan Richardson and Norm DeBriyn, and players Joe Kleine and Dick Bumpas.
But because one new member each year does not change the disproportionate amount of Arkansans to the other former SWC schools, a separate committee also was established to enshrine Razorbacks in bulk.
Arkansas is not the only former SWC program attempting to stockpile former players and coaches in Waco. Texas Tech and Baylor also have committees that have considerably added to their total there.
“I think what Arkansas and Texas Tech and Baylor have done is really smart,” Jones said. “It allows them to get in some fantastic athletes that, quite frankly, deserve to be in, but just haven’t had the chance to get that recognition.
“In the case of Arkansas, if you’re working on Steve Atwater and Wayne Martin and the early ’90s men’s basketball team, all of a sudden if you’re just picking one or two per class, it’s going to take years and years and years.”
Former Arkansas quarterback Bill Montgomery chairs the committee to select Razorbacks. It also includes Kevin Trainor, a longtime administrator for the Razorbacks, and Harry King, a sports columnist based in Little Rock. Arkansas athletics director Jeff Long has a say in new membership, as do former coaches and administrators from the SWC.
“We have talked in not very concrete terms about continuing on with that the next several years and then we will make a re-evaluation,” Jones said.
The first three large classes included as many as nine former Arkansas coaches and athletes each year. This year, the class included 14, including Orville Henry, the longtime sports editor for the Arkansas Gazette. Henry, who died in 2002, was the first non-player or coach inducted as part of the Razorbacks’ delegation.
“The Southwest Conference had many great storytellers from Blackie Sherrod to Dave Campbell … and there probably was no one who had the ear and the majesty of the way he writes than Orville Henry,” Montgomery said. “He covered Arkansas at the time when we were at our height. He deserves, without any question, to be in the Southwest Conference Hall of Fame.”
This year’s class was inducted during a luncheon at the Little Rock Touchdown Club on Monday. The other inductees included former football players Jim Benton, Ronnie Caveness, Joe Ferguson, Steve Little, Fred Marshall, Wear Schoonover, Billy Ray Smith Sr. and Dennis “Dirt” Winston; basketball players Ron Brewer, Amber Shirey and Darrell Walker; and track athletes Edrick Floreal and Cynthia Moore.
With their inductions, Arkansas now has 47 inductees. The Razorbacks have passed the Aggies and are catching up with the Longhorns to create a more accurate representation of the conference’s power structure.
Arkansas might have felt like an outsider in the SWC, but it is feeling more at home in the SWC Hall.
Arkansans in Southwest Conference Hall of Fame
Football: Lance Alworth, Jim Benton, Frank Broyles, Dick Bumpas, Bill Burnett, Ronnie Caveness, Chuck Dicus, Joe Ferguson, Quinn Grovey, Dan Hampton, Leotis Harris, Wayne Harris, Ken Hatfield, Steve Little, Fred Marshall, Wayne Martin, Bill Montgomery, Billy Moore, Loyd Phillips, Cliff Powell, Wear Schoonover, Clyde Scott, Billy Ray Smith Sr., Billy Ray Smith Jr.
Men’s Basketball: Ron Brewer, Todd Day, Joe Kleine, Lee Mayberry, Sidney Moncrief, Nolan Richardson, Eddie Sutton, Darrell Walker.
Women’s Basketball: Bettye Fiscus, Amber Shirey.
Baseball: Norm DeBriyn, Kevin McReynolds.
Golf: R.H. Sikes.
Men’s Track & Field: Mike Conley, Joe Falcon, Edrick Floreal, John McDonnell, Frank O’Mara, Niall O’Shaughnessy.
Women’s Track & Field: Bev Lewis, Cynthia Moore, Melody Sye.
Journalist: Orville Henry.