New Mexico Sports Hall of Fame Class of 2023: Two pros, an Olympian, four coaches and a sportswriter

Feb. 10—The New Mexico Sports Hall of Fame will honor its 50th class of inductees at an event later this year.

The 2023 class of eight people — tied for the largest class of inductees ever — was announced Saturday morning and includes two professional athletes, an Olympian, four prominent college coaches and a sportswriter.

The elite eight will be inducted at a June ceremony the NMSHOF hopes will be its largest in five decades of feting the state's top athletes, coaches and others who have profoundly affected the state's sports landscape.

"We want this (induction ceremony) to be the biggest and best ever; the biggest sports celebrity event that New Mexico's ever seen," Marty Saiz, president of the NMSHOF, said during a news conference at the Albuquerque Convention Center. Saiz said all 83 living Hall of Famers are being invited to attend.

Who's being inducted this year?

Former NFL player Glover Quin and former NBA player Charlie Criss will be in the Class of 2023.

Quin was a three-year starter and All-Mountain West cornerback at the University of New Mexico before the Houston Texans drafted him in the fourth round of the 2009 draft. An All-Pro in 2014, Quin started 162 of 165 games at safety over 10 seasons with the Texans and Detroit Lions.

Criss, the first New Mexico State University basketball player to be named All-America, helped lead the Aggies to the 1970 Final Four. The point guard entered the NBA as the shortest active player at 5-foot-8 and played 418 games over eight seasons with the Atlanta Hawks, San Diego Clippers and Milwaukee Bucks.

Amber Campbell, who grew up in Tucumcari, became a three-time US Olympian in the hammer throw. She excelled at Coastal Carolina University, where she was a five-time All-American in a variety of throwing events (weight throw, hammer throw, shot put and discus) and went on to win 11 national track titles and two medals in the Pan American Games.

George Brooks, who brought competitive collegiate skiing to New Mexico as the pioneer and longtime coach of UNM's ski team, is among four coaches to be inducted. The others are Larry Hays (college baseball and softball), Jim Marshall (college baseball) and Klaus Weber (soccer, tennis and skiing at UNM and high school).

Brooks' 2004 Lobos became the first team at UNM to win a national championship in any sport. A Taos native, Brooks petitioned the university to create a ski team and in 1970, at age 20, he became a member of the team as well as its head coach. He coached the team for the next 37 years. In 2018, UNM eliminated the sport.

Hays, a member of the College Baseball and NAIA hall of fames, has 1,500 wins as head baseball coach at Lubbock Christian (where he won a NAIA national title in 1983) and Texas Tech (where he won multiple conference titles and had 20 winning seasons in 22 years). Hays is a native of Dora, N.M., and played basketball and baseball at Eastern New Mexico University before becoming a baseball coach. He later came out of retirement as a baseball coach to helm the Texas Tech softball team and currently coaches the Colorado College softball team.

Marshall, who died in 2021, won 619 college baseball games as head coach of New Mexico Highlands University and College of the Southwest. His 1967 Cowboys team won the NAIA national championship.

Weber came to UNM in 1976 to be the cross-country ski coach and eventually coached 2,500 games and meets in soccer, tennis and skiing between the high school, club and collegiate levels. He also played club soccer, even competing at the age of 66 in an over 40 soccer match.

Frank Maestas, a former Albuquerque Journal reporter, will also be inducted into the hall of fame. Maestas, lauded as the first four-sport letterman (football, basketball, baseball and track) in the history of West Las Vegas High School, became one of the first Latino sports writers in the nation in the 1960s.

He covered all sports but will be specifically remembered as a champion of high school sports reporting. He died in 2006.

What they said

Quin and Brooks attended Saturday's news conference in person, while Campbell and Hays participated via Zoom. Jim Bob Marshall and Antonio "Moe" Maestas attended in person and represented their deceased fathers. Criss and Weber were unable to attend.

At the podium, Jim Bob Marshall fought through tears as he remembered his father, who he said raised him with "tough love."

"But every kid that I played with and every kid that played before me or after me, they're doing well in the community right now. And I think it all because of his tough love," Jim Bob said.

Brooks, the national-title-winning ski coach, was most proud of his athletes' accomplishments off the mountain.

"I was asked this morning what was the biggest honor (of his career) and that is we had probably 350 or 400 athletes at UNM that graduated, that are going out in the community and are doing great things and that is the most important thing New Mexico skiing did."

Later, speaking to a journalist, Brooks explained how he became a renowned ski coach. He said he joined UNM's non-competitive skiing club in the late 1960s and brought up the idea of creating a ski team.

"The president of ski club turned to me and he said, 'George, I have tried, I couldn't do it, it can't be done.' And that was a challenge. And I said, 'We're gonna have a ski team here.' So we got petitions signed by student athletes, representing the university, and we got recognized as ski team." Brooks said. "I had no intent to be a coach, I had no intent to stay at the university. I just wanted to have a program that myself and my friends could participate in, which we did.

"That's how it started. And, you know, it's the type of thing that I enjoyed every moment of it," he said. "My personality is such that, you know, mediocrity is not acceptable; good is the enemy of great. And I wanted to be better."

Quin, who's from a small town in Mississippi, said he had never heard of New Mexico when he was being recruited to play football for the Lobos.

"I was just a little kid from a small town that wanted to keep playing ball and New Mexico gave me an opportunity," he said. "And ... I'm just gonna make the most of it." After leveraging a chance to play at UNM into an NFL career, Quin said the lesson he tries to pass along: "It doesn't really matter where you start, it's how you finish."

Appearing on a large television screen, Hays and Campbell each said they were grateful for the recognition. Hays is currently coaching and Campbell couldn't be there in person Saturday because she's 39 weeks pregnant and her doctor advised her not to travel, she said.

Moe Maestas, a state senator from Albuquerque, recalled how his father covered prominent sports teams and athletes, such as the Albuquerque Dukes, a Triple-A baseball franchise, and Nancy Lopez, a golfing legend from New Mexico. But his father deferred to writing about high school sports and spearheaded the publication of prep box scores and rankings.

"He reached out to those (high school) players, those coaches, those teams ... and promoted them," Maestas said. "He wrote articles that grandmas and moms would put on the on the fridge and made a tremendous difference to that family, that community, that school at that time."

Frank Maestas was suspended from the Journal amid a gambling probe in 1990 and later pleaded no contest to three petty misdemeanor counts of making a bet.

Saiz said the committee responsible for choosing the inductees was aware of Frank Maestas' alleged involvement in the bookmaking operation — which made front-page headlines at the time — but was swayed in favor of including Maestas in this year's class due to letters written by community members in support of the former journalist.

Phill Casaus, editor of the Santa Fe New Mexican and a former Journal sportswriter, offered his support for Maestas, noting in an email that his former colleague was a "great journalist and an even better man."

Casaus wrote: "There was a three-decade period in which Frank's voice was among the most important and well-respected in New Mexico journalism. A native of Las Vegas, he knew the people, the teams, the coaches and the deep hold sports had on the state.

"He also was a journalist's journalist — fair, dedicated and above all, dedicated to the truth."

Moe Maestas said he was grateful to the committee for considering his father's nomination.

"The allegations, which were newsworthy at the time, would be trivial today, with sports betting being legal," he said. Sports betting is now legal in more than 30 states and in a some tribal jurisdictions, including within New Mexico.

The induction ceremony

The first Albuquerque Sports Hall of Fame ceremony was held March 5, 1974 and nearly 1,000 people attended, Saiz said, making it the largest induction banquet to date.

The hall of fame has since expanded to honor athletes from all over the state and Saiz hopes this year's ceremony, the 50th, will attract more than 1,000 guests to meet not only the current class but all living hall of famers who can attend.

The banquet to induct the Class of 2023 will be June 23 at the Albuquerque Convention Center. Tickets are $50 per person or $500 for a table of 10 through March 31 and then prices go up to $75 ($750 per table) on April 1 and rise to $100 ($1,000 per table) on May 15.

Other events around the celebration weekend will include an autograph signing and a breakfast with New Mexico sports heroes.

For information, visit nmshof.org.