Over the years, I remember seeing newspaper sports columns with the caption “where are they now?” Of course, the writer tracked down some sports figure from the past and brought his readers up to date.
In a couple recent conversations with former Glen Alpine High School athlete Wayne Kiser, the name Ralph Hawkins came up. Ralph and his brother Louie were halfbacks on the same Green Wave football teams of the mid 1950s.
I see Louie fairly often, as he still lives in Glen Alpine. He gave me Ralph’s phone number in Durham, and I caught up with him over the weekend. He’s lived in the Triad since he left G.A. in 1957 to play football at UNC.
Like all athletes from the Glen Alpine community, he was a product of coach Jug Wilson, who taught, coached and mentored them in school. Those days were filled with winning football and basketball teams, and I had the good fortune of doing my student teaching under Wilson in the fall of 1954.
Ralph played both varsity football and basketball all four years of high school, and he played them both well. Several of those teams were championship teams, and all of them were winning teams. The ’57 football team played Mebane for the western state championship, and that contest gave Ralph his top career moment — a 96-yard touchdown run.
When I asked him what high school sports meant to him, he had a quick answer: “everything.”
“Everything I accomplished in life was as a result of the things I learned in high school football,” he went on to say. “Coach Wilson made so many things happen for me, from letting me work with the team as an eighth grader, all the way to helping me get a football scholarship to Carolina. I owe so much to him.”
Things didn’t turn out at UNC exactly the way the Burke County boy had planned. Ralph played on the freshman team under coach Bud Carson and suffered his first concussion that year. During spring practices, he was slowed by ankle injury that kept him out most of his sophomore season.
The UNC drive to get back to the glory days of the late ’40s, when the team was a national power, took a huge hit that summer when varsity coach Jim Tatum died of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. Tatum was involved in Ralph’s recruiting, and things were never the same for Ralph again even though he lettered his junior year.
After graduating from Chapel Hill, Ralph earned his masters degree in Hospital Administration from Duke. The Duke University Hospital had a place for him upon his completion of grad school, and he never left again, spending his entire work career there before retiring several years ago.
Ralph and Louie were the starting halfbacks at G.A. in ’55, Louie’s senior year. The elder Hawkins had his greatest game ever against Spruce Pine that season, when he rushed for more than 100 yards for the Wave. Louie also played basketball and started his senior year.
Together, Louie and Ralph were two of the finest young men of the many I’ve known down through the years at Glen Alpine. I was privileged to teach two of their best, Gary and Jerry McCurry, in Sunday School at Pleasant Ridge many years ago.
For a long time, Coach Wilson would remind me we had never sent him a football player from the Ridge, but I never heard that again after Gary and Jerry.
I’m sure the larger high schools gave our youngsters advantages, but for me, I’d take the Glen Alpines and Oak Hills and Salems any day.
Roy Waters is a sports columnist for The News Herald. Waters was baseball and basketball coach at Salem High School from 1955-66, where his teams won 18 championships. In 2007, he was inducted into the Burke County Sports Hall of Fame.
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