Bonham -- It was a evening set aside to honor some of the outstanding men that have been a guiding influence on countless young athletes as five coaches were inducted into the Fannin County Sports Hall of Fame at the annual inductee banquet Saturday night.
The organization named M.B. Nelson, Jim Acree, Cotton Ford, Joe Lynn Dodson and Randy McFarlin as their newest honorees, bringing the total membership to 91.
"Y'all should be comfortable tonight," guest speaker Jerry Moore joked with the crowd as he took the podium, "because there aren't gonna be any big words used."
Moore made the perfect spokesman for this special occasion, having grown up playing ball in Bonham before going on to a career coaching football collegiately. A 1957 Bonham High School graduate, Moore went on to play football for Baylor University and for the past 14 years he has chalked up a 115-55 record as head football coach at Appalacian State University in Boone, North Carolina.
"This town is special," Moore said, recalling the support he received as a young athlete in Bonham and also reflecting on the examples of gifted athletes that went before him. "You couldn't go to a service station, you couldn't go to McKnight's Drug Store without people encouraging you. I remember growing up on Graham Street and cleaning lots off for baseball games. Man, I wanted to be like Roy McMillan. I wanted to be like Bill Svoboda." Both of those men grew up in Bonham and went on to stellar professional careers, McMillan as a Golden Glove shortstop with the Cincinnati Reds and Svoboda as an All Pro linebacker with the New York Giants.
In a touching moment, Moore said he wanted to introduce the best coach a guy could ever have and then he asked his mother to stand up as the crowd applauded.
Moore also vividly recalled one road trip as a player under head coach M.B. Nelson.
"I talk to my team every year about this," he began. "It was the one trip we made on a chartered bus. We were going to Dallas to play Dallas Jesuit on a Saturday and somewhere around McKinney Coach Nelson told the bus driver to pull over to the side of the road. We were playing cards and reading comic books. There weren't five guys that even knew who we were playing. All we cared about was that we were going to Dallas to play on a Saturday."
With only a few words, Coach Nelson explained why Bonham had not been successful in the recent past.
"You guys don't know how to get ready to play," the coach told his team as cars passed the bus parked on the side of the highway.
Learning to prepare properly made Moore successful during the remainder of his high school playing days and then at Baylor.
"Baylor University had beaten Tennessee in the Sugar Bowl the year before I got there," Moore told the audience. "Out of 49 freshmen at Baylor, I was the best prepared to play. Not the best player, but the best prepared. Every year I tell my guys, you just get one shot at it. You only get to go around once, but if you do it right, once is enough."
M.B. Nelson, the coach that helped turn Bonham into a successful sports program and the mentor that taught Moore those key lessons about the level of dedication required to be successful, was the first inductee into the Fannin County Sports Hall of Fame Saturday night. Nelson took the reins at Bonham in 1955 and later went on to teach at East Texas State University in 1967.
Jim Acree was the next inductee. Acree took over as head coach when Nelson became the high school principal. After working in Bonham, Acree went on to a very successful career at Corsicana.
Cotton Ford also was named to the select crowd in the Fannin County Hall of Fame. Ford came to Bonham in 1962 and was part of an extremely talented staff put together by head coach Jack McElhannon. Ford's widow, Lillian, also pointed out the sacrifice an entire family must endure in this competitive career field.
"I had four kids in four different cities," said the lady referred to by her son Daryl as the "rock" of the family. "That's how it is in coaching."
The next new member named was Joe Lynn Dodson. In 38 years of coaching, mostly at Savoy, Dodson's teams won 32 district titles.
The fifth new member of the Fannin County Sports Hall of Fame is Randy McFarlin, a 1973 graduate of Bonham High School that has went on to a very successful coaching career at Mt. Pleasant and Daingerfield. McFarlin's team at Daingerfield snapped Celina's national winning streak in the playoffs in 2002.
