ABILENE – Legendary ACU athletes
Wally Bullington and John Ray Godfrey are part of the latest group of athletes who have been selected to the Big Country Athletic Hall of Fame. They are joined in the class by eight other former athletes, coaches, officials and sports writer, including Dallas Cowboy great Bob Lilly.
The 10th annual Big Country Athletic Hall of Fame induction banquet will be held May 9 at 6:30 p.m. at the Abilene Civic Center. Tickets will go on sale in February. For tickets or sponsorship information, call (325) 668-3685 or e-mail
carolepickett@sbcglobal.net.
Bullington was a four-year letterman in football at ACU. He was an assistant coach to Chuck Moser at Abilene High when the Eagles won three consecutive state championships in 1954-56 and then replaced Moser as the Abilene High head coach, compiling a 40-19-1 record in six season. He then spent nine years as head coach at ACU, posting a 62-32-2 record and winning an NAIA national championship in 1973. ACU won 17 national titles in various sports during his tenure as the school's athletic director.
A native of Aspermont, Godfrey was a first team all-America at ACU in basketball in 1968, averaging 23.8 points per game. He holds the single-game scoring record for Moody Coliseum with 41 points. He played on three Southland Conference championship teams at ACU and scored 1,467 points in his collegiate career.
Lilly, who grew up in Throckmorton, is known as “Mr. Cowboy.” Considered the greatest defensive lineman of his era, Lilly was the Dallas Cowboys' first-ever draft pick out of TCU in 1960, the franchise's first selection to the Ring of Honor and the Cowboys' first member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Joining Lilly in the Big Country Athletic Hall of Fame's Class of 2011 will be former Abilene High and Abilene Christian University football coach
Wally Bullington, former Sweetwater all-state defensive back Mike Welch, former Avoca basketball star Cynthia Shelton Raughton, former Aspermont basketball/track standout John Ray Godfrey, and former Abilene High lineman John Paul Young, who was a long-time assistant coach in the National Football League.
Mike McClellan, a star running back at Stamford and the University of Oklahoma, will be inducted into the Hall of Fame posthumously. The winner of the second annual Legacy Award is the Morris Southall family of
Brownwood.
Southall was Hall of Fame coach Gordon Wood's top assistant for 26 years at Brownwood, where the Lions won seven state championships. Two of Brownwood's state championship teams were quarterbacked by Southall's sons Si and Shae. His oldest son Terry was a starting quarterback at Baylor, where he was a teammate of Hall of Fame receiver Lawrence Elkins of Brownwood.
Don Bridges of Abilene will be honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award for officiating. He was a long-time high school and Lone Star Conference official and served as president of the Abilene Chapter of Southwest Football Officials. Carlton Stowers will become the fifth recipient of the Lifetime Achievement for
Media.
Stowers, who was co-captain of the Abilene High track team that won a state championship in 1960, also ran track at the University of Texas. But he made his mark as a sports writer for the Dallas Morning News, Abilene Reporter-News and Dallas Cowboys Weekly and as an author of more than 30 books, including his most recent book which is the biography of former Dallas Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach.
The Big Country Athletic Hall of Fame, working through the Abilene Community Foundation, has also established two scholarship endowments to be available for the first awards this year. The first endowment, The Nancy and Ted Paup Big Country Athletic Hall of Fame Scholarship, was established with a gift from these former Abilenians.
This inspired the Board of Directors for the Big Country Athletic Hall of Fame to match the Paup endowment with their own, enlarging the number of recipients to be chosen each spring. At least two scholarships will be presented at this year's banquet to graduating seniors from one of the high schools in the 19-county Big Country area.
Here is a brief biography of the other inductees in addition to Bullington, Godfrey, Lilly and the Southall family, as well as the lifetime award recipients, Bridges and Stowers.
Raughton, who now lives in Roscoe, was a terrific basketball player at tiny Avoca, which also produced Hall of Famer Max Williams. She played three years for the Wayland Baptist College Hutcherson Flying Queens that won an AAU national championship in 1960. She was also on an all-American team that went to Russia to play in the early 1960s. Raughton becomes the second former player from the legendary Flying Queens to be selected to the Big Country Hall of Fame, joining Rose Mary Jones Delane of Trent.
Welch was a two-time all-stater at Sweetwater, starting at running back and defensive back and helping lead the Mustangs to a state championship in 1985. He then became a four-year starter at defensive back at Baylor. Last year, Welch was named a second-team defensive back on
Dave Campbell's Texas Football Magazine's 50th anniversary high school football team. He was the only Big Country athlete named to the
50th anniversary team honoring the state's top high school football players from 1960-2010.
Young was a starting offensive lineman at Abilene High in 1957 and then played collegiate football at Texas Western. He made his mark as a long-time assistant coach, first at SMU and Texas A&M and then in the NFL with the Houston Oilers, New Orleans Saints, Kansas City Chiefs, Denver Broncos and Chicago Bears. He also coached in the Arena League and NFL Europe and was the head coach of the divisional
championship Dallas Texans team in the Arena League. He is also co-founder of the Angelo Football Clinic in San Angelo.
McClellan played on Stamford's state championship football teams of 1955 and 1956 and was a member of the Bulldogs' state championship track team in 1957. He was a two-time all-state halfback and a state champion in the 100, 220 and long jump. He was an academic all-American at Oklahoma where he played for Bud Wilkinson's Sooners from 1959-61. He was the hero of OU's 1961 football victory over Army at Yankee Stadium when he scored on a 74-yard run in the Sooners' 14-8 upset of Army. He played
two seasons in the NFL with the Philadelphia Eagles.
