Bobby Pope: Mercer set for homecoming weekend
Mercer celebrates its homecoming thisweekend with the Bears football team playing host to VMI on Saturday afternoon at Five Star Stadium.
Another highlight of the festivities will be the annual Hall of Fame ceremonies, which will be part of the Alumni Awards dinner set for 6:30 p.m. on Friday in the University Center. This year's Hall of Fame inductees are women's soccer player Nancy Fallin (Green), Tom Abbott, a former Mercer golfer who is now with the Golf Channel, and booster Chuck Hawkins.
When you talk about the Mercer Hall of Fame, you have got to think about former Bears basketball head coach Bobby Wilder, who is the father of the Mercer Hall. He started it all back in 1970 when the first class, which consisted of 16 athletics greats to wear the orange and black, were enshrined. Among them were coaching legends Wright Bazemore, who won 14 state football titles and a share of three national crowns at Valdosta High School, Wally Butts, who coached at Georgia for 22 seasons, winning national titles in 1942 and 1946, and Glenn Wilkes, who won more than 600 games coaching at Brewton-Parker and Stetson.
Butts played football for the Bears in the 1920s, Bazemore was a football star for Mercer in the 1930s, and Wilkes was a standout basketball player for the school in the 1940s. All three are, or will be members of the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame. Bazemore and Butts are already in, and Wilkes was chosen recently for induction into the 2016 class.
Wilder is also a member of the Mercer Athletic Hall of Fame. He was inducted into the fourth class in 1974. The Fort Valley native, who was the sixth man on his high school team and later a two-year starter at Brewton-Parker, arrived at Mercer in 1950 and started two seasons, scoring 533 points while playing on two Dixie Conference Championship teams. In 1952, he was the Dixie Conference Tournament MVP and also was a member of the 10-man Georgia State team. In addition, he was voted most outstanding Mercer athlete that year.
After graduation, he served two years in the U.S. Army before coaching in high school at Cartersville in 1956 and for three months at Bass in Atlanta in 1957. He resigned at Bass to take over as the head coach at Mercer, replacing Jim Cowan, who stepped down to go into private business.
Wilder was the Bears' head coach for 13-and-a-half seasons, compiling an overall record of 147-168. Coaching for Wilder was actually a part-time job as he also was a full-time professor at Mercer. His win-loss mark is relatively insignificant when you look at the type of student-athletes he coached and what they accomplished after leaving Mercer.
Among his players you will find one of the top orthopaedic foot specialists in the world, a federal judge, superior court judges, dentists, doctors, lawyers, Herschel Walker's first sports agent, school superintendents, principals, coaches (both college and high school, including one who won 132 straight games), a Harlem Globetrotter, major League baseball players, scouts, ministers, politicians and successful business and civic leaders. Just take a look at his 1965 and 1966 basketball teams, and you will find seven of those players went on to earn law degrees while one other became a medical doctor and another a dentist.
This year's class brings the number to 169 who have been inducted into the Mercer Athletic Hall of Fame.
Contact Bobby Pope at bobbypope428@gmail.com
This story was originally published October 19, 2015 at 3:33 PM with the headline "Bobby Pope: Mercer set for homecoming weekend ."