Jim Lonborg is a former right-handed starting pitcher. He played for several teams over his fifteen year career but his most notable and successful seasons came while playing for the Boston Red Sox. In 1967, Lonborg would lead the league with 22 wins, 39 starts and 246 strikeouts. At the end of the season he was named the American League Cy Young award, becoming the first Rex Sox player to win the award. he ended his career with 157 wins, 1475 strikeouts, a 3.96 ERA and 2464.1 innings pitched.
Lonborg was inducted into the Red Sox Hall of Fame in 2002 and has worked in the non-profit industry since retiring.
Alex Gibbs is a former NFL offensive line coach and former assistant NFL head coach. He currently serves as an offensive line consultant for the Denver Broncos. Gibbs is a well known proponent of the Zone Blocking scheme and popularized its use while he was Offensive line coach of the Denver Broncos. Denver became famous at that time for its use of smaller, more agile offensive linemen and the success of its running backs, most notably Terrell Davis.
Gibbs was to enter his first season on Pete Carroll’s Seattle Seahawks staff as the Assistant Head Coach and Offensive Line coach in 2010, but announced his unexpected retirement a week before the start of the NFL’s 2010 regular season. In May 2013, he returned to the Denver Broncos in a consultant role for one year.
Eddie Goldman is an American football nose tackle for the Chicago Bears of the National Football League (NFL). He played college football at Florida State University from 2012 to 2014. During his career he had 62 tackles and six sacks. After his junior season, Goldman decided to forgo his senior year and enter the 2015 NFL Draft.
Ken Gorgal was an American football safety who played in the National Football League for the Cleveland Browns, the Chicago Bears and the Green Bay Packers in the 1950s. He played college football at Purdue University. The Browns selected Gorgal in the 1950 NFL draft. He had six interceptions that season as Cleveland finished with a 10-2 win-loss record and beat the Los Angeles Rams to win the NFL championship. He then left the team for a two-year stint in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, returning in 1953. Gorgal was on a Browns squad that won another NFL championship in 1954, but head coach Paul Brown traded him to the Bears after the season.
Harry Peter “Bud” Grant, Jr. is a former American football and Canadian football head coach. Grant served as the head coach of the Minnesota Vikings of the National Football League for eighteen seasons; he was the team’s second (1967-83) and fourth (1985) head coach. Before coaching the Vikings, he was the head coach of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers of the Canadian Football League for ten seasons, winning the Grey Cup four times. Grant is the most successful coach in Vikings history, and the third most successful professional football coach overall (behind Don Shula and George Halas), with a combined 290 wins in the NFL and CFL. Grant was elected to the Canadian Football Hall of Fame in 1983 and to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1994. He was the first coach in the history of professional football to guide teams to the Grey Cup finals and the Super Bowl.
Grant attended the University of Minnesota and was a three-sport athlete, in football, basketball, and baseball. After college, he played for the Minneapolis Lakers of the National Basketball Association, the Philadelphia Eagles of the NFL, and the Winnipeg Blue Bombers of the CFL. To date he is the only man in history to play professionally in both the NFL and the NBA. In 2014 a statue of Grant was constructed in front of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers’ new stadium, Investors Group Field.
John Greene was a wide-receiver on the Detroit Lions for six years (1944 – 1950). John played for the Detroit Lions after being selected in the draft in 1944. John lead the Lions with 26 touchdowns and 173 receptions, totaling for 2,965 yards.
Jack Ham was an outside linebacker for the Pittsburgh Steelers. He was first-team All-Pro six years and was named to eight straight Pro Bowls. He has been called the greatest outside linebacker of all time by a consortium of professional sports writers, beating Lawrence Taylor for this honor.
Ham’s career statistics include 25 sacks, 21 fumbles recovered, and 32 interceptions. As these numbers indicate, Ham had a flair for the big play, guided by some of the best football instincts ever found in a linebacker. Ham was a member of four Super Bowl winning teams during his twelve-year career, all of it spent with the Steelers. His 53 takeaways are the most in NFL history by a non-defensive back.
Ham was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1988 and the College Football Hall of Fame in 1990. In 1999, he was ranked number 47 on The Sporting News’ list of the 100 Greatest Football Players.
Jack Avon Harbaugh is a former American football player and coach, and the father of the first pair of brothers to serve as NFL head coaches and the first pair of head coaching brothers to face off in a Super Bowl: John and Jim Harbaugh.
From 1982 to 1986, Harbaugh served as the head football coach at Western Michigan University and compiled a 26–26–3 record. From 1989 to 2002, he was the head football coach at Western Kentucky University. During his tenure with the Hilltoppers he posted a 91–68 record, including three 10-win seasons. In 2002, the WKU squad won the NCAA Division I-AA national football championship.
After leaving Western Kentucky, Harbaugh served as an associate athletic director at Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where his son-in-law, Tom Crean, was the head coach of the men’s basketball team. Harbaugh has also served as an assistant coach at Morehead State University, Bowling Green State University, the University of Iowa, the University of Michigan, Stanford University, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of San Diego.
Harbaugh retired in 2006, but served as Stanford’s running backs coach in the 2009 Sun Bowl under his son, Jim.
Phi Delta Theta Sports Hall of Fame Inductee
Thomas Dudley Harmon, sometimes known by the nickname “Old 98”, was an American football player, military pilot, and sports broadcaster.
Harmon grew up in Gary, Indiana, and played college football at the halfback position for the University of Michigan from 1938 to 1940. He led the nation in scoring and was a consensus All-American in both 1939 and 1940 and won the Heisman Trophy, the Maxwell Award, and the Associated Press Athlete of the Year award in 1940. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1954.
During World War II, Harmon served as a pilot in the United States Army Air Corps. In April 1943, he was the sole survivor of the crash of a bomber he piloted in South America en route to North Africa. Six months later, while flying a Lockheed P-38 Lightning, he was shot down in a dogfight with Japanese Zeros near Kiukiang in China.
After the war, Harmon played two seasons of professional football for the Los Angeles Rams and had the longest run from scrimmage during the 1946 NFL season. He later pursued a career in sports broadcasting. He was the play-by-play announcer for the first televised Rose Bowl Game in the late 1940s and worked for CBS from 1950 to 1962. He later hosted a 10-minute daily sports show on the ABC radio network in the 1960s and worked as the sports anchor on the KTLA nightly news from 1958 to 1964. He also handled play-by-play responsibility on broadcasts of UCLA football games in the 1960s and 1970s.
Charles Buchanan Hickcox was an American competition swimmer, three-time Olympic champion and former world record-holder in six events. The peak of Hickcox’s swimming career occurred between 1967 and 1968 when he set eight world records in the space of sixteen months.
Hickcox received four medals (three gold and one silver) at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City. He won gold medals in both the 200-meter and 400-meter individual medley events (setting an Olympic record in the 200-meter), and another gold as a member of the world record-setting U.S. team in the men’s 4 x 100-meter medley relay. He also added a silver medal in the men’s 100-meter backstroke.
