Sooner Sports Legends to Be Inducted into Oklahoma HOF
By Chip Rouse
Two-time Oklahoma All-American linebacker Brian Bosworth is one of two Sooner sports legends who will be formally inducted into the Oklahoma Sports Hall of Fame on Monday.
Bosworth was a two-time consensus All-American at OU and two-time winner of the Butkus Award as the top linebacker in college football. The player known as “The Boz,” played for Barry Switzer at Oklahoma from 1984-86 and was a member of the Sooners’ 1985 national championship team.
Aside from his tenacious demeanor on the football field, Bosworth was also embroiled in quite a bit of controversy at the end of his college career. After he was suspended by the NCAA for steroid use and was forced to sit out Oklahoma’s 1987 Orange Bowl game against Arkansas.
Bosworth appeared on the sidelines at the 1987 Orange Bowl game wearing a t-shirt bearing the inscription: “National Communists Against Athletics,” an obvious derogatory message slamming the NCAA.
A year after leaving Oklahoma to play in the National Football League, Bosworth wrote and released a book, “The Boz: Confessions of a Modern Anti-Hero,” which he co-authored with Rick Reilly of Sports Illustrated. The image of “The Boz” portrayed in the book was not one you would consider conduct becoming of a University of Oklahoma student-athlete – or, for that matter, a widely acclaimed athlete of any institution.
Bosworth’s actions created a giant rift between him and the University of Oklahoma that only recently has been somewhat mitigated.
The two-time All-American linebacker told Oklahoma City Oklahoman staff writer Ryan Aber this week that the hardest part of his fallout with the University of Oklahoma was how it affected his relationship with his coach Switzer, whom he referred to as a father figure.
Bosworth said that if his induction into the Oklahoma Sports Hall of Fame would have happened five or six years earlier, “I wouldn’t have been able to appreciate it the way I appreciate it now.”
Bosworth will join another great Oklahoma football player of the past as part of the Oklahoma Sports Hall of Fame class of 2016. Leon Heath, another consensus All-American who played on Oklahoma first national championship team in 1950 and was the Most Valuable Player of the 1950 Sugar Bowl, is also being enshrined at the Oklahoma Sports HOF in Oklahoma City on Monday.
Bob Barry Jr., son of longtime radio voice of Oklahoma sports Bob Barry Sr., is a third member of the 2016 induction class. The younger Barry was a longtime sports director at the NBA TV affiliate in Oklahoma City and was three times named Oklahoma Sportscaster of the Year. Barry Jr. died tragically in 2015, at age 58, from injuries suffered in a motor scooter accident.