ABILENE, Kan. (AP) — Phog Allen coached the University of Kansas basketball team for 39 seasons and retired as college basketball's winningest coach, with 746 victories.
Allen's record was broken by one of his former players, Adolph Rupp, a native of Halstead who coached at Kentucky for 41 years and won 876 games.
Rupp played on Allen's 1922 and 1923 teams that won the Helms Foundation national championships.
Rupp's record, in turn, was broken by another native Kansan: Dean Smith, of Emporia and Topeka, who won 879 games at North Carolina. Smith also played on Allen's Kansas teams that won the NCAA championship in 1952 and finished second in 1953.
Allen, Rupp and Smith all won national championships and all have basketball arenas named for them, but they have a lot of company in the "Cradle of Coaches" section at the State of Kansas Sports Hall of Fame in Abilene.
Billie Moore, a native of Westmoreland, won national titles at UCLA and Cal State-Fullerton and coached the first U.S. women's Olympic team in 1976.
John Lance won 600 games in 41 years of coaching at Pittsburg State, and Jack Hartman was the winningest basketball coach in Kansas State history.
The state of Kansas has 21 inductees in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame, far more than any other state, said Ted Hayes, executive director of the Kansas hall.
For that matter, James Naismith himself, the man who invented the game, was the first coach at the University of Kansas — and the only one with a losing record.
But the Kansas Sports Hall of Fame honors more than just basketball, and more than just coaches and athletes of national prominence.
"We honor the athletes you might expect to see, like (Olympic runner) Jim Ryun," Hayes said.
"But we also honor those you might not expect, like Billie Moore, and the Little River girls basketball team that won 97 straight games."
Some of the athletes came to the state from elsewhere, like Philadelphia native Wilt Chamberlain, who led Kansas to the NCAA basketball finals in 1957.
And some are Kansans who performed their greatest feats elsewhere, like Wichita native Barry Sanders, who won the Heisman Trophy at Oklahoma State and played professionally with the Detroit Lions.
One section features life-size action pictures of athletes like Chamberlain, Danny Manning and Clyde Lovellette, so visitors can see how they match up in size with the greats.
Another section features Olympic champions, including 10,000-meter champion Billy Mills of Haskell and KU, sprinter Thane Baker of Kansas State, and John Kuck, the 1928 shot-put champion from Wilson and Emporia State University.
"We have Thane Baker's jersey and shoes and the 400-meter relay baton with the 39.5-second world record in Melbourne," Hayes said. "We also have John Kuck's jersey and gold medal from the Amsterdam Olympics."
A high-school gallery is under development but already has acquired a lot of material.
"We have Jim Ryun's high school track jersey, Steve Henson's No. 32 basketball jersey from McPherson, and Nikki Ramage's No. 45 from Little River," Hayes said. "We also have Jackie Stiles' basketball and track jerseys from Claflin."
All of the artifacts are authentic and were donated by the athletes themselves or by family members.
The hall has a basketball from a 1925 game at the University of Chicago when Wichita High (now Wichita East) won the national high school championship with a 39-24 win over Southeast Detroit High.
The Sports Hall of Fame was founded in 1961 as part of the state's centennial celebration. Nineteen people were inducted in the charter class, and their portraits were on display at the Mid-America Fairgrounds in Topeka.
The hall moved to Lawrence in the 1970s, then to Abilene in 1989. The First National Bank of Abilene donated its building in 1994 for a permanent site, and the hall officially opened in 1997.
The hall now has 84 inductees following the 2000 ceremony, which included former Wichita State and major league baseball player Joe Carter.
Original projections were for 20,000 to 30,000 visitors a year, Hayes said, but attendance has been below expectations in spite of Abilene's location along high-traffic Interstate 70.
"We need to advertise, and we know it," Hayes said.
But advertising is expensive, and the hall has a limited budget derived in part from admission fees and donations and its bimonthly magazine, "Kansas Sports."
The hall also receives money from a $1 surcharge on one game each year at the state's six regent schools or from a school fund-raiser.
Kansas State this year decided to sponsor a benefit golf tournament for the hall at Colbert Hills Golf Course in Manhattan. Jim Colbert, a Senior PGA pro and former Kansas State golfer, was inducted into the Kansas Sports Hall of Fame in 1998.
A bill in the Kansas Legislature this year would have provided about $80,000 to the hall from the state sales tax on admissions to high school playoff games. That bill failed after a Wichita legislator added an unrelated provision for special education funding.
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On the Net: http://www.kshof.org
Copyright 2000 By The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.