It’s hardly a secret that the University of Texas has accumulated thousands of wins and stocked its trophy cases with heavy hardware from championships. But you might not realize that victory is hard to convert into the highest level of success beyond college athletics.
Just five guys out of the thousands who have put on the pads as UT football players are  enshrined in Canton, Ohio as members of the Pro Football Hall of Fame.  
Five.  The incomparable Bobby Layne.  The cat in the fedora hat, Tom Landry.  The (hardly) complete unknown, Bobby Dillon.  The Tyler Rose, Earl Campbell.  And, as of last summer, Steve “BamBam/Mongo” McMichael, the tough hombre from Freer.
That’s it.  And one more UT grad, Tex Schramm, is in the Hall for off-field achievements, largely with the Dallas Cowboys.

So…the HOF is a rather exclusive club.  A&M has one inductee. Yale Lary, the safety/punter/return man who was a championship teammate of Layne’s in Detroit.  Oklahoma has five men honored in Canton.  Old foes SMU, TCU and Baylor have four, three and one Hall of Famers, respectively.
Texas Tech has one inductee, undersized linebacker Zach Thomas of the Miami Dolphins.
Hell, even Alabama has only eight inductees, and — as is the case with Texas — not one of them touched an NFL field in the 21st century.  The Golden Domers of Notre Dame and the Trojans of USC have the most members in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.  Each has 14 honorees.
 
Back to the Longhorns. When you decide to visit Springfield, Massachusetts, know that Texas has only one inductee in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame.

That would be the great Slater Martin, the basketeer some experts consider to be his sport’s first point guard.  Martin led UT in 1943-44 and 1947-49.  The 5-7 Houstonian played in seven NBA all-star games while leading the Minneapolis Lakers and St. Louis Hawks.

 
From Springfield, hook a short two-hour drive down to scenic Newport, Rhode Island and check out the grass courts — I have — not far from the sea at the fascinating International Tennis Hall of Fame.  That’s where one more Longhorn, Wilmer Allison, has been immortalized.  As a player and later as a coach, the San Antonio native remains the greatest tennis figure in UT history.  Allison won the 1927 NCAA singles trophy while at Texas.  After graduation he teamed with John Van Ryn to win the Wimbledon doubles title in back-to-back years, 1929 and 1930.  He was also a singles finalist in ’30.  Years later, he coached the Longhorn team from 1957-72, leading Texas to four Southwest Conference championships.
 
Go ahead, Longhorn sports fans.  Savor Newport.  Cool seabreezes, lobster rolls and the cliff walk past the 19th century mansions.  It’s a great vacation spot in the summer.  Then you’ll want to double back about five hours in your F-150 and wind your way to Cooperstown, NY,  the impossibly picturesque hamlet nestled in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains.
Ahhh, yeah.   Babe Ruth.  Ty Cobb, the Say Hey Kid and the Mick.
The great Tris Speaker of Texas Wesleyan.
But no Longhorns.
Say whaaaaat?

That’s right.  The nation’s greatest college baseball factory, the one aiming now for a 39^th trip to Omaha’s College World Series, cannot yet boast of a former player enshrined in the most hallowed of all halls of fame. 

 
The Rocket, Roger Clemens, is stalled on the HOF’s launching pad due to steroid accusations.  Clemens, damn good as a Longhorn and almost beyond compare as a pro, might never get the nod for Cooperstown.  That’s in spite of a record seven Cy Young awards.  He’s the only member of the 300-win club not honored.  Voters have gone “scorched earth” on Clemens’s candidacy.  So it goes.

Remember this:  Bibb Falk, the Longhorn who in 1920 replaced “Shoeless Joe” Jackson after the Black Sox scandal in Chicago, batted .314 over 12 major league seasons.
But never mind.  He never sniffed the Hall in C-Town.  Great is frequently not great enough.  Falk did, however, go on to coach UT to 20 Southwest Conference titles and back-to-back national championships in 1949 and 1950.

 
It’s tough enough just to make a MLB all-star team.  Sure, UT has produced a handful.  Besides Clemens, former Horns such as Max Alvis, David Chalk, Greg Swindell, Huston Street and Brandon Belt have achieved greatness by making the July rosters of AL or NL all-star teams.  But the transition from college greatness to big success in the majors is, well, a path paved with land mines and lost dreams.
The odds of any collegian, even a star, of making it in MLB are long, indeed.  Then, to excel and be one-in-more-than-a-thousand…the lotto ticket down at 7-Eleven just might be more promising.  
It’s reality.  Even for the best of the best at the University of Texas.
 

(TLSN’s Larry Carlson is a member of the Football Writers Association of America.  He teaches sports media at Texas State University and lives in San Antonio.  Write him at lc13@txstate.edu)