Thursday, October 05, 2006
Another call for UVa hall
Roof gives Sewell favorable mark
Doug Doughty
Doug Doughty's UVa Insider is exclusive to roanoke.com and is posted by 5 p.m. Thursdays in season.
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This will be an abbreviated UVa Insider as I head off to a fundraiser for the Virginia Sports Hall of Fame, but the day’s activities got me thinking.
(OK, it’s a captain’s choice golf tournament, but fundraiser sounds better).
Speaking of fundraising, have I ever said that the University of Virginia needs a sports hall of fame?
There’s a hall of champions room at Scott Stadium and large action portraits of ex-star football players on the Bryant Hall walls and now there will be a walk of fame at the new John Paul Jones Arena, but no department-wide hall of fame.
They seem to be dancing all around the floor but not in the middle.
It made me stop to wonder how many members of the Virginia Sports Hall of Fame had UVa ties.
Here’s the list: Bill Dudley, Terry Holland, Henry Jordan, Buck Mayer, Lee McLaughlin, Joe Palumbo, Barry Parkhill, Sonny Randle, Eppa Rixey, Ralph Sampson, Tom Scott and Buzzy Wilkinson.
Lee McLaughlin was a three-year UVa letterman and captain of the 1940 team but he was best known as the coach at Washington and Lee before he was tragically electrocuted in the late 1960s.
(McLaughlin was also the great uncle of ink-stained South Boston sports editor Tucker McLaughlin, a familiar target on this site.).
What strikes me is the number of UVa football inductees -- Jordan, Palumbo, Scott and Randle -- who played during the ‘50s, an era not usually associated with great UVa football, although Scott played on three straight eight-win teams from 1950-52 and Palumbo on teams that won 23 games between 1949-51.
I didn’t watch UVa football during the ‘50s, but I do know that John Papit rushed for 3,238 yards between 1947-50 and held the UVa career rushing record for 42 years before it was broken by Terry Kirby in 1992.
Kirby’s record was broken, in turn, by Tiki Barber in 1996 and Thomas Jones in 1999.
Papit isn’t in the hall of fame. Neither is Jim Bakhtiar, who ranked among the nation’s top 10 rushers for three straight seasons (1955-57)..
IT’S INTERESTING with all of these hall of fames to note the people who haven’t been enshrined and compare them to some of the people who have.
It’s clear, in the case of the Virginia Sports Hall of Fame, that nobody gets in overnight.
Sampson is the only inductee with UVa connections who has actually played in the past 25 years.
Shawn Moore, whose last game as Virginia quarterback was in 1990, was the best UVa football player I ever saw. He’s not in the Virginia Sports Hall of Fame. Neither is Herman Moore, who had a better NFL career than Shawn and once held the NFL record for receptions in a career.
I’ve got believe that Bryant Stith, a Virginian and the all-time scoring leader in UVa men’s basketball history, will get in some day. I don’t know how you could leave out Jeff Lamp, but when you look at all the people that aren’t in, you wonder when they get around to the Moores and the Stiths and the Lamps.
That doesn’t even take into account the Bruce Arenas of the world. Arena won five NCAA men’s soccer championships at Virginia but I don’t see how he goes in before George Welsh, who changed the face of Virginia football.
There’s one way to reward the deserving. Virginia needs to form it’s own all-purpose hall, but that would be too obvious.
LAST SATURDAY’S Duke-Virginia football game pitted two young quarterbacks, Virginia redshirt freshman Jameel Sewell and Duke “true” freshman Thaddeus Lewis, who may be seeing a lot of each other over the next three years.
Duke coach Ted Roof candidly discussed the aftereffects of Lewis’ head injury at Virginia Tech and how it may have eroded his confidence Saturday, when Sewell and the Cavaliers clearly had the upper hand in a 37-0 victory.
“I thought [Sewell] was very efficient,” Roof said. “When we started pressuring him, they were throwing a lot of three-step stuff and he was very efficient getting rid of the football. We got to him sometimes, just like they got to Thad, so there was some tradeoff there.
“I thought he did a good job of managing the game and moving their team.”
