HALL: GOODWILL, GOOD PEOPLE AND GOOD IDEA

By Art Thiel P-I Columnist

Friday, August 11, 1995

Section: Sports, Page: D1

In a recent column on Steve Largent, I suggested that his selection to pro football's hall of fame was a wonderful achievement, but that his off-field works and gestures ultimately were of greater, if less acknowledged, worth.

The conclusion wondered when we would build a hall of fame for excellence in humanity.

Little did I know.

My general view is the world needs another awards program like it needs more barbed-wire toothbrushes.

I found an exception.

In Boise.

I didn't believe it either.

I believed it even less when I learned that the president of the World Sports Humanitarian Hall of Fame was an earnest gentleman by the name of Myron Finkbeiner.

But after a phone chat with Finkbeiner, and a look at a few newspaper clips, he and the hall apparently are real, if infant.

Since sports news has been so overwhelmingly depressing lately, particularly around here, I'm probably vulnerable to a good con.

I don't care. This idea is the right time and, yes, the right place.

Where else would you have it? New York? Los Angeles? Please.

It could be in Cooperstown, N.Y., Canton, Ohio, or Springfield, Mass., but those towns already had a similar idea.

It needed to be where the idea was, and where it could be seeded in a five-acre plot of ground not far from a freeway and decent-sized airport.

Last fall, Olympic champion Rafer Johnson found it. So did golfer Chi Chi Rodriguez. Also the family of Arthur Ashe.

EXPECTED TO FIND Boise Oct. 27 are the hall's second class of inductees: basketball's Julius Erving, baseball's Dale Murphy and the family of the late Roberto Clemente.

Something tells me that when word of this gets around, a lot more big sports names who wouldn't do Idaho with thick gloves will be thrilled to find an invitation in the mail.

As Rodriguez put it:

``You can win a lot of awards with your ability. Those are good for my ego. But when I got inducted into the Humanitarian Hall of Fame, that was good for my soul.

``There's a difference."

Souls haven't had a lot of feeding from sports in recent years. That bothered Finkbeiner.

``I wondered why we couldn't do something to honor the good people in sports," said Finkbeiner, 61, a longtime coach and athletic administrator in Idaho, Washington and California who then was the alumni director of his old Nampa college, Northwest Nazarene. ``It was percolating a while in my head. Then I talked to some local politicians and business people. They liked it enough to form a nonprofit board and decided to go after it.

``So much has happened in the last 18 months that I have to pinch myself to believe it."

One of his first recruits was Don Simplot of the mega-wealthy potato Simplots. The family donated five acres. By 1997, if all goes well, a $4 million, 50,000-square foot building will be built on the property.

The mayor, governor and local businesses recognized a timely idea when they saw it. Finkbeiner quit his job, hired a secretary and in January 1993 began hitting a national nerve.

He assembled a selection committee of nationally known athletes and media members - Peter Jacobsen, Bobby Rahal, Bobby Orr, Nadia Comaneci, Sam Jones, Stan Smith, Floyd Patterson and Linda Fratianne, among others. The honorary chairman is former President Gerald Ford.

LAST YEAR they winnowed a field of 30 nominees to 10, who were researched for their qualities of sportsmanship and humanitarian efforts during and after their playing careers, as well as their athletic achievements.

``A lot of agents get $25 million contracts for their players and tell them to give a scholarship back to their school," Finkbeiner said. ``That's good, but it's also a tax writeoff. We were looking for people who worked from the heart, not people beating the IRS."

A highlight of last year's awards banquet came when two children from Rodriguez's Florida foundation that benefits child victims of sexual and other physical abuse were flown in to surprise him.

``He was so thrilled he came to tears," Finkbeiner said. ``It was one of the great emotional highs of my life in sports."

The hall also has a team-sports award, won last year by the NBA's Orlando Magic. The Indianapolis Colts, the Seahawks' opponent tomorrow in the Kingdome, received an inquiry about their humanitarian efforts and were so embarrassed to have little to document that the club vowed by letter to install a community program by next year worthy of consideration.

Speaking of tomorrow's game, when Largent's No. 80 jersey will be retired, Finkbeiner figures the congressman and ex-Seahawk star might be the kind of guy who someday might find Boise on his itinerary.

And be thrilled.

--Art Thiel is a P-I columnist.

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