Coach Gordon Pynes explains process of Atlanta Athletics Hall of Fame

Atlanta legendary coach Gordon Pynes is just one of the many people behind the scenes of what has become the Atlanta Athletics Hall of Fame.

The idea formulated some 20 years ago when Pynes and then Atlanta AD Ben Scharnberg had an idea to honor deserving athletes who had gone above and beyond in both high school and life.

Coach Pynes has been dedicated to making sure word gets out about the Hall of Fame which just wrapped up its second year, and while many people may know about it they probably don’t know the process that goes into selecting the candidates for enshrinement.

Choices Made

When asked how the choices were made for who goes into the Atlanta Hall of Fame Coach Pynes replied, “We wanted to take it up to the modern era but we didn’t’ want to miss anybody just because you’re 40 years old and never heard of them. I always use Babe Ruth as an example. Many people today don’t know who Babe Ruth is, but you would put him in in your hall of fame regardless. We started out with this foundational idea of getting four really solid “old timers” to begin with.”

“The Class of 2018 was the first. We decided in the beginning that we would have at least one female. Our female pool will be much shallower than our male pool because until Title IX came along in the early 80’s you didn’t have a lot of girls’ sports consistently now we have had for the last 30 years or more. It will be a little more difficult to find a female athlete from Atlanta for the hall than a male but we have found two really good ones and there are definitely quite a few more. That’s how we’ve gone about it,” Pynes said. “One of our problems is we have so many good athletes from this little town that it’s going to be very competitive taking three or four a year and sometimes with only taking two males it’s going to be very competitive but right now we are taking it by decade.”

“Now there may be a decade when we don’t feel like there’s anybody qualified to fit however we may also look into people that may not fit one year but may make it the next. So what we’re hoping for is to get the public involved and for them to send in nominations. We’ve got a diverse committee that’s very knowledgeable on Atlanta and its sport’s history. We will filter through the nominations and that may disappoint some people but once the nominees have their name in the hat they stay there,” Pynes aid. “So the following year we may not find someone as qualified as the guys the year before and we’ll look back on the nominees who didn’t make it and consider them. We want to get the public involved and want them to understand that just because you nominate somebody doesn’t mean they automatically get in but they might get in five years from now and get passed over four times conceivably.”

“Some of the athletes we’ve had all the way up into professional football and baseball could be nominated from the same decade and then the committee has to pick from that pool of talent and you wonder who to pick for that year,” Pynes added. “So it is going to be very competitive and that much more of an honor to get into the hall of fame.”

Consideration

When asked if former coaches will have an opportunity to be inducted into the hall of fame Coach Pynes said, “Yes because we’ve already had Coach Rabb who started the Rabbits and we’ve had two who were really good athletes for Atlanta and Booker T. Washington go on to have successful coaching careers in Freddie James and George Jackson. The excelled at both coaching and playing sports. So we’ll definitely have some coaches involved here and there.”

“The focus is primarily going to be on the athletes and you don’t have to be an athlete that made it to the professional ranks,” Pynes said. “There may have been some super-duper athletes who got hurt in high school and it derailed their opportunity to go play college sports or some who chose to go into the workforce but yet they had an outstanding high school career so they need to be considered.”

“The rules apply to be both exemplary in high school and after. You have to have been out of high school for 10 years also. That gives us at least a 10-year look at how the person did both in high school and after, Pynes continued. “The main idea is to carry on an outstanding sports tradition in this town and another purpose is that the kids coming up get knowledge of the tradition and carry it on. We’ve always had Atlanta Pride and this is part of it. We want to boost Atlanta Pride.”

Reception

Coach Pynes responded to the question of how the idea of the hall of fame has been welcomed by those who have been honored by saying, “Obviously once they are notified so that we can invite them for the ceremony they feel greatly honored. Now last year the four men were deceased members and we had the one female athlete who was alive. With the Class of 2019 all three inductees were alive and well and they have been greatly honored. Take for instance Freddie James who is in the Texas Black Sports Hall of Fame and the Dallas Coaches Hall of Fame so when I told him of his induction into his hometown’s Hall of Fame he said ‘this will be my greatest honor’. And you have to think when your hometown inducts you in its really neat.”

The Beginning

“Now let’s go back to the beginning because I don’t want to leave out Ben Scharnberg. He and I had been thinking about doing this for a long as far back as the 90‘s. We wanted the kids, especially at the high school level, to see who has gone on before them and what they have accomplished. For instance when I got to Atlanta as the track coach I asked them where are your school track records? They looked at me like ‘what are you talking about’ and I began to find out from some of the people involved in track and from track fans records that had been set,” Pynes remarked. “Some of them were embellished but I began to put these records I had gathered up on the board and all of a sudden some of the athletes would say ‘coach that’s my cousin I bet I could beat his record’ and sure enough some of them did. But putting those records up was enough to motivate the kids to go out and try and top them every year and they have been breaking records ever since. I think most of the records I started out with has been broken.”

“But back to Coach Scharnberg. He and I had this idea but we kept putting it off and I got out of coaching completely and although we kept talking about it we never got around to doing anything about it,” Pynes said. “One day I said ‘Ben I’m getting older and if we’re going to do this lets do this’ so we formed a committee and tried to get it as diverse as we could but then Ben turns around and goes back to work as an assistant principal in Hughes Springs. Although he’s helped us here and there I was hoping he’d be free to be more involved. It was his idea as well not just mine.”

The Process

Coach Pynes discussed how happy he was with the process so far for the first two years.

“We took a full year to get everything going. We didn’t want to rush things and wanted to do some extensive research to get things right. We needed to raise some money, look into the past of our inductees and we also wanted to visit other towns that had their own Hall of Fame. We went to Kerrville where Ben Scharnberg is in the Hall of Fame, we went to Brenham which has a very good one but it’s strictly football and we didn’t want to do football only we wanted all sports,” Pynes stated. “Then we went to Brownwood which is basically your Gordon Wood museum. Gordon Wood is probably the most successful high school football in Texas high school history. We called a few others and asked how they were set up and got a few ideas.”

“The big thing was we needed money and where were we going to put this thing,” Pynes said. “We finally came up with putting the plaques in the hallway of Atlanta Rabbit Stadium where we felt more traffic would flow through for both football games and track meets.”

“We ended up at Spirit Memorial in Texarkana which is a gravestone business and they brought up the black granite which we liked. We asked about the etching and they showed us samples that were really good but it was also pretty expensive. It is made from a volcano in India so we asked if we were to go this route how long would it take to get the granite in and they said about 90 days to

120. We were already at the 120 mark then so we went for it,” Pynes said. “The plaques are 20x16 and cost $850 apiece. The pictures and etchings came out really good. We had a photo taken in 1912 of Hub Northen and for a photo that is 107 years old it came out pretty vivid on this black granite and it will be there forever.”

“We were looking at needing five plaques at $850 which comes to about $5,000 to pull it off. We made it but it wasn’t easy. The second year was a little easier but getting the publicity out has been harder than expected. Of course the Citizens Journal helped out, the radio, Lions Club, we talked to a couple of homecoming reunion groups but it seemed to be slow going at first,” Pynes added. “We have a pretty good group of donors and what we are trying to do is have several corporate sponsors we can depend on to help out every year for a couple of hundred dollars.”

Pynes also spoke on the amount of work that goes into inducting the athletes and/or former coaches in.

“There is a fair amount of work that goes into this and everyone on the committee helps out in a big way,” Pynes said. “I told them as long as my brain is working right I’ll dig up the research.”

The donor list on this year’s brochure was long but Pynes said more help is needed.

“This has gone over very well especially if you look at the donor list but we need a lot more,” Pynes stated. “We would like to see younger folks get involved. If we can raise up to $3,500 we can pull this off every year. That goes from the supper to the plaques. We have had some donations from Brookshires and Chicken Express and that has helped out. Having 35 people donate $100 each would do it. The main thing is to get the word out.”

Cool Tidbits

“When you get into this you find out some pretty interesting tidbits like with Hub Northen a country boy from Atlanta playing pro baseball with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1912. The owner of the Dodgers was a man named Charlie Ebbets who later formed Ebbets Field in Brooklyn,” Pynes said. “Ebbets had all of his players with their wives go down to the docks to greet the survivors of the Titanic. Here’s a country boy from Atlanta along with his wife involved in history with the Titanic. These kind of little nuggets make it very interesting when you come across them.”

“Then you have Bear Allday whose family name is well known around the area and has been a fixture in Atlanta’s history. We just had a major leaguer retire this past year that’s his great-grandson. He’ll be in the Atlanta Hall of Fame in the next three or four years. Well Bear attended little Centenary College in Shreveport which had about 350 students back then but they played football,” Pynes remarked. “That team Bear was on beat Texas A&M at Kyle Field, they beat SMU, Rice, TCU and one other. They beat five Southwest Conference teams and were undefeated. The next year their coach went to coach A&M and they won a National Championship under him. Here’s another country boy and athletic star from Atlanta who’s playing for a little college in Shreveport and they become a national football powerhouse. Of course football ended there after the great depression. Few people know that once upon a time they were a powerhouse.”

The Committee

Another question raised to Coach Pynes was who was involved in the decision making and who was on the committee.

“Well this committee involves a current school board member who was the former school board president so that gives us a link to the school and we have a lady who is a graduate of Booker T. Washington High School somewhere before 1970 because that’s about the time integration occurred and that gave us a link to that school which has been gone for nearly 50 years,” Pynes remarked. “Then we have a former principal here who played as a freshman and sophomore at Booker T. but then when integration occurred he played his final two years for the Rabbits at AHS under this year’s inductee George Jackson. George was a young coach from Atlanta who came back home to coach at his alma mater.”

“We have seven people on the committee and three of them are women. One of them is the aunt of former Atlanta player Derrick Blaylock who made it to the NFL and will probably be in the Atlanta Hall of Fame in the next few years. She’s a big sports fan so that helps us out,” Pynes continued. “Then we have a retired lawyer who played back in the 50‘s and knows plenty of people and is very knowledgeable. We not only needed knowledgeable people but people with good contacts who could help us raise money and knows the ins and outs.”

“Then we have Frank Allday who is the grandson of last year’s inductee Bear Allday and family member of future hall of famer Drew Stubbs who played professional baseball so he’s got some knowledge of sports and all,” Pynes added. “And our final member is a financial advisor here in town who played ball for the Rabbits so we have a very diverse group of people.”

The Reason

Answering the question about the best reasons for coming up with the idea for an Atlanta Hall of Fame Pynes said, “The number one reason is carrying on the outstanding athletic tradition and honoring athletes who not only have been outstanding athletes but have become outstanding people.”

“Secondly you have a historical link into the lives of these athletes that will live on and hopefully stay in the light when the Atlanta Hall of Fame is talked about,” Pynes added. “We have to be the only school in the state of Texas whose mascot is named to honor a man who was their coach and it is a totally unique concept. I bet you not too many people outside of this area and even some in this area know that.”

“I’m involved in most of this mainly because of my dad,” Pynes said. “My dad grew up here, was the last quarterback to play for Coach Rabb and all of my life I heard stories about Coach Rabb and finally got to meet him when I was in my early 30‘s.”

“I feel I had enough Atlanta history pumped into me to keep me curious and of course I never dreamed I’d live here or work here so when it came to pass my curiosity picked up even more,” Pynes said. “There’s nothing like tradition and of course in sports you have lots of interests especially when you’re winning. Sports are big here. Most of the time people hear of Atlanta and think Georgia but when it comes to sports the school is well known across the state for its excellence in its sport’s programs.”

As of now the Atlanta Athletics Hall of Fame has eight inductees and with the talent that runs deep in the history of Rabbit athletes that number will be history as the years go by.