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Florida's Hall is not famous for its location, visitors, governor's support or corporation sponsorship.
By BRUCE LOWITT
© St. Petersburg Times, published July 28, 2001
LAKE CITY -- It isn't all that easy to miss the Fla Sports Hall of Fame/Welcome Center sign 45 miles southeast of where Interstate 75 crosses into Florida. It is very easy, for a couple of reasons, to bypass southbound exit 82.
"Even if you get off (I-75), you still have to go west about a quarter of a mile on U.S. 90, then make a right turn onto Hall of Fame Drive and go another quarter of a mile. It's not right there. You can't see it from the highway. You have to work at it to get there." -- Joe DeSalvo, former executive director of the Florida Sports Hall of Fame.
"Who from Illinois or Michigan or Ohio -- except for a sports nut -- is going to get off the interstate and walk in and walk around the Florida Sports Hall of Fame?" -- Roger Strickland, Hall of Fame Foundation president.
The Hall of Fame sits behind a welcome center 107 miles east of Tallahassee, 65 miles west of Jacksonville, 52 miles north of Gainesville and 64 miles south of Valdosta, Ga. Lake City is not exactly in the middle of nowhere, but it's close.
Which explains, in part, the nearly empty parking lot.
As noon approaches on a typical weekday, the welcome center's 142 parking spaces are occupied by seven vehicles around the back with local Columbia County plates, plus, in front, two cars from Florida and one apiece from West Virginia, Georgia, Oklahoma and Alabama.
Only Christy Keen and her sons Kameron, 9, and Kristopher, 14, from Cross City, 60 miles to the southwest, have made the Hall of Fame their destination. In a two-hour span they are its only visitors. They visit for about 40 minutes. All agree they enjoyed it. "But it seems like more people would be able to go to it," Mrs. Keen says, "if it wasn't kind of out of the way."
The Hall of Fame is a non-profit foundation, which is $90,000 in debt. Its board meets Sunday in Orlando to consider whether to move to a more desirable location -- if Tampa, St. Petersburg, Orlando or any other community will welcome it -- or to find a way to keep the doors open in Lake City.
The Hall includes a 6,500-square-foot area containing more than 40 exhibits covering every facet of Florida sports, and individual displays on each of its 177 members -- Bobby Allison's fire suit, a Babe Zaharias golf club, Althea Gibson and Chris Evert tennis rackets, a Don Garlits mask, his racing gloves and drag racer; a Bobby Bowden hat, his polo shirt and the game ball from his 200th career win; a Steve Spurrier visor, his football shoe and 49ers football card; a Hal McRae Royals cap and 2,000th-hit baseball (he's not honored as the Rays manager; he was born in Avon Park and attended Florida A&M) ...
There is a 50-seat theater and, of course, a gift shop. Ursula Stuart sat behind its counter most of Thursday morning and sold nothing.
Sandra Dillard, the Hall's executive director, has worked virtually without pay and with a minimal staff the past year just to keep the Hall going. It used to be open every day. Now it is closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays. The toll-free phone line has been disconnected. The 2001 induction ceremony has been called off.
Last month, for the second time in three years, Gov. Jeb Bush vetoed a $250,000 grant approved by the Legislature. The Hall received $250,000 from the state when it opened in 1990; it has received $190,000 in the decade since and has struggled along through donations and ticket sales.
"That's kind of puzzling to me," said Bill Legg, executive director of the Birmingham-based Alabama Sports Hall of Fame, "because Florida has such a great athletic tradition that I don't know why the state doesn't embrace it." The Alabama Hall, like Mississippi's, Georgia's and some others, is state funded.
"I've made an effort to get the Hall of Fame under the umbrella of the secretary of state's office since it is responsible for the state's museums," Strickland said. "I had a meeting scheduled with Katherine Harris the Friday after the general election last November. Not very good timing. And we haven't been able to get together since. We can't get phone calls returned. We've just run into a wall."
Most years the Hall has averaged 30,000 visitors. More recently attendance is half that.
"There should be a million people going through it every year. And that means you have to have it in a destination point, where people are going to be there," said Ron Campbell, president of the NHL's Tampa Bay Lightning and executive vice president for Palace Sports and Entertainment. Moving the Hall to the Ice Palace has been discussed.
The Florida International Museum in St. Petersburg is another possibility. "I'm trying to take the lead in getting the Hall of Fame down here," said Gary Froid, former president of the St. Petersburg Area Chamber of Commerce and a member of its sports council. "I think it could draw enough people to support itself."
Campbell and Froid stressed that talks were exploratory only.
"The Hall's not going to close," Dillard said. "It may move and I hope that if it does the integrity remains the same. Either that or we stay here. We don't expect the state, or anyone, to fund us totally. We do need (corporate) partners."
The lack of a corporate partner, or more, also can be laid at least in part on the Hall's doorstep, or because of where the doorstep is.
Alabama's Hall of Fame receives strong support from HealthSouth Corp., headquartered in Birmingham. The Hall's annual induction ceremony is a major fund-raiser and "HealthSouth vendors, and others, buy tables, very pricey tables," Legg said. "As long as you have people like (HealthSouth chairman and CEO) Richard Scrushy raising money, you'll raise a lot. If you don't, you could have a problem."
A problem is what Florida's Hall has. Strickland said this year's induction ceremony was called off because "the majority of the people who come to it are sports writers, sportscasters and Hall of Fame members, and they're all gratis. That's a $35,000-$40,000 expense."
The Hall has no major companies in Lake City to bank on the benefits of a year-round identity with the hall, no Tropicana, TECO, Lykes, Budweiser or other corporate giant to lend support and fund-raising clout. "The problem is we don't have anything to offer a corporation other than the induction banquet," said Strickland, a 1996 inductee who was a Jacksonville University basketball star.
"We can't say, "This is worth it; you're going to get your money's worth. "The Florida Sports Hall of Fame presented by BellSouth?' " (Strickland is the communication company's retired vice president of marketing). "How many customers do they have in Columbia County? And the people that stop there are tourists, not prospective BellSouth customers."
The Hall of Fame was founded in 1958 by the Florida Sports Writers Association and Florida Sportscasters Association. It had little more than annual induction dinners until 1974, when it was given a physical presence -- space provided at the Jacksonville Coliseum.
In 1975, Cypress Gardens in Winter Haven gave the Hall a home. Ten years later, it had to move when publishing house Harcourt Brace Jovanovich bought the botanical gardens and theme park. It took up temporary residence in Orlando's Mystery Fun House while a new home was sought.
Lake City and Columbia County offered to build a facility. When no other community expressed serious interest, the Hall of Fame Foundation voted in October 1987 to accept the Lake City offer.
Harvey Campbell, executive director of Columbia County's Tourist Development Council and former director of the Hall, said the welcome center and Hall were built to put Lake City on the map. "You say "Springfield, Mass.,' and you think of the Basketball Hall of Fame. There was a feeling the Florida Sports Hall of Fame and Lake City would be a synonymous situation." It hasn't worked out that way.
"It almost comes across that Lake City was the bad guy and it was a bad fit," Campbell said. "Lake City gave this a home when nobody else wanted to. ... We still think the Hall of Fame is a worthwhile endeavor for this state. That it didn't work here in Lake City, is disappointing."
He is speaking in the past tense. It is not inadvertent.
"Lake City promised to run it for five years while the Hall got its funding in place. The sports writers and sportscasters did nothing." They founded it, Campbell said, and have not supported or promoted it. That, along with the absence of state funding and, he acknowledges, its location, have helped lead to this moment.
"It's not going to happen here," he said. "I think you can see the handwriting on the wall."