Aug. 13, 2007

When he's not playing golf three or four times a week, Lew Hartzog hunts quail near his home in New Mexico's Gila Wilderness area.

"I really couldn't ask for more," he said.

But the hearty 85-year-old who has everything is about to get more. Hartzog will receive one of the most prestigious honors of an illustrious coaching career when he is inducted into the U.S. Track & Field and Cross Country Coaches Association Hall of Fame.

Joining Hartzog in the Hall of Fame Class of 2007 are Cyrus Jones, Tom Jones, Beverly Kearney, John Mitchell, Irv Mondschein, Jim Sackett and Karl Schlademan.

The induction ceremony will be held Dec. 18 at the USTFCCCA annual convention in Phoenix, Ariz. Hartzog laughed when it was pointed out that he wouldn't have to travel far to receive his Hall of Fame award.

"It wouldn't make any difference it were halfway around the world," Hartzog said. "I'd be there."

Hartzog was the head coach at Northeast Louisiana (now Louisiana-Monroe) from 1958-60 before moving to Southern Illinois. From 1961 until his retirement following the 1984 season, Hartzog's Southern Illinois men's track teams won every Missouri Valley Conference championship meet in which they competed. In fact, after his first season at Northeast Louisiana in 1958, Hartzog never lost a conference meet in his career.

His standouts at Southern Illinois included Ivory Crockett, David Lee and Bob Roggy. Crockett set a world record of 9.0 seconds in the 100-yard dash in 1974. Lee won the 400-meter hurdles at the 1980 NCAA Championships, and Roggy won an NCAA javelin title in 1978 and later set several U.S. records.

At Northeast Louisiana, Hartzog coached the sprinting Styron twins, Don and Dave, and pole vaulter John Pennel.

"I really believe that if Northeast Louisiana could have competed in the 1960 NCAA Championships, we could have won the national championship," Hartzog said. "But we couldn't go to the NCAA meet because all of Louisiana had a rule that its teams couldn't compete against black athletes. It was a stupid, stupid thing."

Hartzog went to Texas A&M on a football scholarship in the fall of 1945 but enlisted in the Marine Corps the day after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. In serving four years as a communications specialist in the South Pacific, Hartzog contracted elephantiasis and was unable to play football again.

He graduated from Southwest Missouri and set out to be a football coach. His first high school coaching job was in Independence, Mo.

"I had to take the track job to get the assistant football job," Hartzog said. "I was going to be the world's greatest football coach."

Instead, he became one of the top track coaches in the country. He was named the NCAA Division I Coach of the Year in 1982 and 1984.

"It's always been a mystery to me," Hartzog said. "I guess it was a combination of luck and hard work. I don't think I knew as much as 150 other coaches in the country, but somehow I could get kids to respond."

For more information on the inductees in this year's USTFCCCA Hall of Fame class, see www.ustfccca.org.