Softball community in Macon lost pair of stalwarts recently

Slow-pitch softball sure ain’t what it used to be.

Macon/Bibb County Recreation Department officials say the sport has seen a steady decline in recent years. In the past 10 years or so, the number of teams playing in the church, industrial and open leagues has dropped from around 90 to less than half that figure.

There was a time from the 1970s to 1990s when the Flag City Shootout was held at Central City Park and attracted upwards of 400 teams from around the Southeast.

In today’s environment, tournaments usually have a field of 60 to 70 teams.

We lost two men back in December who were very much a part of the sport during its heyday. One was coach Marvin Maddox, who died Dec. 9. The other was player Tom Beall, who died on Christmas Eve.

Maddox, who was an excellent athlete at Dodge County, turned to coaching after suffering spinal cord injuries in an automobile accident on Upper River Road in Macon as an 18-year-old that left him confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. The wreck resulted in two broken legs at the thigh and a broken neck, leading to paralysis from the chest down.

After being urged on by his high school and local friends, he began his slow-pitch coaching career around 1970, and from the success he experienced in the next two-plus decades, you would never know he was disabled. After coaching teams in Cochran sponsored by Lake View Furniture and Rozier Brothers, he took over a team sponsored by Bobby’s of Chester, Georgia. That squad ran off an unbelievable 11 straight tournament wins and had a 55-game winning streak with four state championships.

In the late 1980s, he became the coach of a squad sponsored by Wayne Williamson and Sunbelt Plastics, and two more state championships followed.

When the Sunbelt men’s team folded in the early 1990s, Maddox moved to women’s slow-pitch with more positive results, including a national championship in Daytona Beach, Florida.

As a coach/manager, his teams won more than 2,000 games, not counting the non-sanctioned games, and he recorded 18 state championships and two Southeastern regional championships to go with the national title. Maddox, who coached until the mid 1990s, was inducted into the ASA Hall of Fame in 1995.

Beall, a native Maconite, was one of slow-pitch softball’s superstars, playing professionally for the Reed Nuts team of Pinehurst and also for Howard and Carroll of Sheriffs Ford, North Carolina, plus Howard’s Western Steer of Denver, North Carolina in a 9-year career from 1975-84.

Beall, a giant of a man at 6-foot-5 and 250 pounds, was on the ASA champion Reed Nuts team in 1976 and on the ASA Super Division champions from 1979-81 and 1983.

His offensive totals for Howard’s were staggering. He had 995 home runs, 2,065 RBI and a six-year batting average of .662. In 1980, he led the ASA national slow-pitch tournament in home runs with 17. During his nine-year playing career, he was honored as an All-American five times.

Beall, nicknamed “BellRinger,” was chosen to the 1980 ASA all-decade team and was inducted into the ASA National Hall of Fame in 1990 and the Macon Sports Hall of Fame in 2003.

Maddox and Beall both played major roles in the success of slow-pitch softball in Middle Georgia and in the Southeast.

Contact Bobby Pope at bobbypope428@gmail.com

This story was originally published March 23, 2015 at 10:30 PM with the headline "Softball community in Macon lost pair of stalwarts recently ."