MOGC inducting wrestler Henry, Lamar great Fuller at date to be announced
Published 3:38 pm Thursday, June 29, 2017
World Wrestling Entertainment star Mark Henry and former Lamar football All-American Johnny Fuller will soon join recent inductee Elandon Roberts and many other locals into the Museum of the Gulf Coast Sports Hall of Fame.
Museum director Tom Neal said a date for Henry’s and Fuller’s inductions has not yet been set.
Silsbee native Henry, who turned 46 on June 12, rose to national consciousness by 1992, when he made the first of two straight Olympic teams in powerlifting and joined WWE in 1996, earning two world championships (Extreme Championship Wrestling in 2008 and WWE world heavyweight in 2011). The 6-foot-4, 360-pound Henry won two U.S. national championships in weightlifting (1995 and 1997).
As a high schooler at Silsbee, he was dubbed “the world’s strongest teenager” by the Los Angeles Times after winning the National High School Powerlifting Championships in 1990.
Fuller, 71, originally from Beaumont, played eight seasons as a safety with the San Francisco 49ers, New Orleans Saints and Chicago Bears. He was drafted in the fourth round (98th pick overall) by the Niners in 1968 after a career in which he won three straight Southland Conference championships with the Cardinals as a wide receiver and punt returner.
Fuller caught 89 passes for 1,301 yards and 12 touchdowns and returned a school-record 626 yards off punts, including 344 in 1967, in his career at Lamar, according to the university’s Cardinal Hall of Honor biography on him. He became Lamar’s first 15-foot vaulter (15 feet, 3 inches) in 1966, was fourth in the decathlon at the 1968 Drake Relays and ran on 440- and 880-yard relay teams.
— I.C. Murrell