Ray Tucker Takes Us On A Video Tour of the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame
In this video, shot for ArkansasSports360.com, Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame Director Ray Tucker talks about the sports hall's plans for the future, which include a new 5,000-sqaure foot conference center. It also includes a look at some of the hall's many exhibits.
Tucker, a longtime sports-caster for KTHV-TV, Channel 11, was hired in 1998 as executive director of the state's Hall of Fame. At that point, the only area devoted to honoring Sports Hall of Fame members was outside the Statehouse Convention Center, where the annual induction ceremony was held before it moved in 2007 to Verizon Arena, then called Alltel Arena, to accommodate the more than 1,300 who attended.
Located inside Verizon Arena in North Little Rock, the 15,000-square-foot museum was designed by a specialty museum building company based in Houston. It contains murals, displays and touch kiosks covering every sport from football to auto racing, including Mark Martin's original dirt-track race car from Batesville.
Among the greats honored in the hall is Paul W. "Bear" Bryant, who grew up in Moro Bottom (Dallas County) and went to high school at Fordyce and then attended and later coached Alabama, where he became legendary. Bryant was inducted into the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame in 1965, and he still had three more national championships and more than a hundred wins to go in his esteemed career.
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Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame