Trio of former NFL players among new North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame inductees

Published 9:50 am Sunday, January 23, 2022

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A trio of former National Football League players, a member of the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame and a holdover from 2021 highlight the new class of inductees for the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame.

The hall, which announced the new class on Wednesday, welcomed former N.C. State and St. Louis Rams wide receiver Torry Holt, who grew up in Gibsonville; Ahoskie native and former Winston-Salem State and Dallas Cowboys running back Timmy Newsome; and the late Sam Mills, a 12-year NFL veteran who spent his last three seasons with the Carolina Panthers.

Also named to the class was Luke Appling, the High Point native who played 20 years in the major leagues, all with the Chicago White Sox, from 1930 to 1950. The shortstop was a seven-time American League all-star and twice was the league’s batting champion.

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Tyrone “Muggsy” Bogues was elected previously, but couldn’t attend the ceremonies, so he will join the current class during the 58th annual induction banquet on April 22 at the Raleigh Convention Center.

After a standout career at Wake Forest, the 5-foot-3 Bogues spent 14 seasons in the NBA and remains the shortest player in league history. Bogues, who became a very popular member of the Charlotte Hornets, ranks among all-time leaders in NBA history with 6,726 career assists and assists per game at 7.6.

Others inducted into the class of 2022 are:

— Missouri Arledge, a star athlete who averaged 31.3 points per game during her senior year at Durham’s Hillside High School. Arledge went to Philander Smith College in Arkansas, scoring 21.0 points per game as a sophomore and becoming the first African-American woman to play in an AAU tournament (1954) and the first to be named AAU All-American the following season.

— Ronnie Barnes, a graduate of East Carolina University’s sports medicine program in 1975 who was an assistant athletic trainer and instructor at ECU and then went to Michigan State, where he was head athletic trainer and earned his master’s. He moved on to the New York Giants in the NFL as an athletic training intern, rising to head athletic trainer in 1980 and now senior vice-president for medical services, working for the Giants for over 40 years.

— Henry Bibby, a Franklinton native who was the starting point guard on UCLA men’s basketball teams that won three straight NCAA championships in the early 1970s, averaging 14.4 points per game for his career and earning first-team all-American honors. He played nine NBA seasons, winning a title with the New York Knicks. As a coach at the University of Southern California, he led three teams to the NCAA tournament, including an Elite Eight trip in 2001.

— Dan Brooks, the 1981 graduate of Oregon State University who has put together 40 years of success as head women’s golf coach at Duke University. Brooks has led the team to seven NCAA national championships and 21 Atlantic Coast Conference titles, and his 140 team victories are the most of any women’s golf coach in NCAA Division I history.

— Tom Suiter, a Rocky Mount native who was a sports anchor for WRAL in Raleigh for 45 years, from 1971 until 2016, although he retired from the newscasts in 2008. He created a popular Friday night high school football highlight show and added an award acknowledging achievements away from the field and court.

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