Latest Sports Hall of Fame selections to be inducted today
Trent Dimas by the numbers:
For those 36 seconds of near-perfection in 1992, Dimas had been preparing for 16 years.
Tonight, almost 23 years after winning Olympic gold on the high bar in Barcelona, Spain, with a score of 9.875 — what imperfections the judges saw in not giving him a perfect 10 remains a mystery — Dimas and six other richly deserving men will officially be inducted into the New Mexico Sports Hall of Fame. The list:
The late Vicente “Rocky” Arroyo, a former Lobos basketball player, high school coach and game official.
Bill Bridges, a former Hobbs basketball player who went on to an All-America career at Kansas and became a three-time NBA All-Star.
Dimas, whose electrifying, gold-medal performance in 1992 will never be forgotten. And if your memory needs refreshing, it’s readily available online.
The late Ralph Kiner, a baseball Hall of Famer born in Santa Rita, N.M.
Farmington’s Ralph Neely, the Oklahoma AllAmerican and Dallas Cowboys All-Pro offensive tackle.
Pete Shock, a Cliff High School and Western New Mexico basketball standout who went on to coach the Cliff Cowboys to 10 state championships.
George Young, a former Silver City track & field star who won an Olympic steeplechase bronze medal in 1968. In 1972, he became the first American runner to compete in four Olympic Games.
There’s a tinge of sadness attached to tonight’s ceremony. Arroyo, 89, a former UNM player, a highly successful high school coach and an accomplished game official, attended the Hall of Fame’s December news conference to announce the inductees. He died in January.
More poignant still: Craig Arroyo, Rocky’s son, died of a heart attack just three days after that news conference.
Neely said at that same news conference — smiling but not necessarily kidding — that he should have been selected sooner. He’s right, and the Hall of Fame board knows it. Since the Hall nine years ago opened itself to all of the state and not just
Albuquerque, there has been a concerted effort to catch up. That’s one reason this year’s class is the biggest ever.
One among many candidates from the state’s edges who remains unrecognized is the late Dale Shock, who preceded his son, Pete, at Cliff and won more than 400 games. The Cliff job remains a family affair; when Pete Shock retired last year, his son, Brian, succeeded him as coach of the Cowboys.
Thus there is no fatherson duo of inductees this year, as there was last year when longtime Highland track & field coaches Henry and Gary Sanchez were inducted together — Henry posthumously. Like Arroyo, the elder Sanchez attended a December news conference but died before the 2014 banquet.
Yet, late Hobbs coaching legend Ralph Tasker, a 2006 NMSHOF inductee, was a father figure to Bridges and many other Eagles players.
In a 1993 interview, Bridges said this about his legendary high school coach: “Don’t make the mistake of dismissing Ralph Tasker simply as a basketball coach. He has taught generations of young men teamwork and pride in accomplishment.”
Tonight, Bridges’ accomplishments in Hobbs and beyond have earned him a spot next to his old mentor.
Young, a 1955 graduate of Western High School in Silver City, left the next fall for the University of Arizona. He has been gone from New Mexico so long that, in December, one Hall of Fame board member admitted he didn’t know who Young was when his name came up as a possible inductee.
It seems curious that Young never won an individual state title while in high school, though he did run on Western High’s winning mile medley relay team as a senior.
Perhaps the distances were too short for him; until 1964, New Mexico high school track & field offered no race longer than the mile.
In a 2012 interview, Young said he didn’t consider himself a distance runner when he entered the Arizona track program without a scholarship in 1956.
Four years later, he ran the Olympic steeplechase in Rome.
Kiner’s New Mexico connections are by far the most tenuous of this year’s inductees.
Santa Rita, a copper-mining town in the southwestern part of the state, no longer exists. Kiner grew up in California and, after his long and successful careers in baseball and broadcasting, died in California last year at age 91.
Yet, Kiner has come home. Before his death, he chose to be buried with his parents in Farmington. And Dimas? Go to YouTube and watch the video of him catching the ever dangerous Kovacs release, sticking the landing as if with glue, and leaping into the arms of Ed Burch, his longtime coach at Albuquerque’s Gold Cup Gymnastics School (and another worthy Hall of Fame candidate).
As Burch said at the time: “That was awesome.”
It still is.