SOME GREW UP HERE, toiling long hours at local high schools like Arlington Heights or Paschal in Fort Worth or Lamar in Arlington before breaking through at the Olympic level. Several passed through the area in college, earning all-American honors at TCU in football and golf on their way to long professional careers. And others were born elsewhere but found themselves at home in Fort Worth or surrounding suburbs after starring for the Dallas Cowboys or Texas Rangers.
A common thread runs deep between them, though: They not only won at a high level but did so in a routinely dominant fashion, winning national championships, breaking world records and, in some cases, setting statistical marks that won't be surpassed easily.
by Ryan Osborne
Bob Lilly
NFL Hall of Fame
Bob Lilly's nickname came naturally.
"Mr. Cowboy."
It made sense considering the TCU defensive tackle was the Dallas Cowboys" first-ever draft pick in 1961.
Lilly, 74, lived up to his draft status, putting together a 14-year NFL Hall of Fame career with the Cowboys that included a Super Bowl win in 1971. He played before detailed defensive stats were kept, but he was named to the all-NFL first team eight times and recovered 18 career fumbles.
Born in Throckmorton, Lilly spent his senior year in high school in Oregon before coming back to Texas and playing for TCU. He was a consensus all-American pick his senior year for the Horned Frogs. Photo courtesy Special Collections, The University of Texas at Arlington Library, Arlington, Texas
Oliver Miller
First Round Draft Pick
Oliver Miller went from Southwest High School in Fort Worth to the University of Arkansas to a first-round draft pick of the Phoenix Suns.
Miller, 43, played some seasons for Nolan Richardson's Razorbacks, who made it to the Final Four, Miller's sophomore year.
Miller played nine NBA seasons for six different teams. He finished his career averaging 7.4 points a game and 5.9 rebounds a game.
Miller has seen his share of troubles in recent years, though. In 2012, he was sentenced to one year in prison for pistol-whipping his girlfriend's brother, according to the Baltimore Sun. Miller was living in the Baltimore area at the time. Photo courtesy of the Special Collections, The University of Texas at Arlington Library
Ty Murray
King of the Cowboys
It took less than three years into Ty Murray's professional rodeo career before Sports Illustrated crowned him.
The headline on the magazine's 1990 profile of Murray read: "At age 21, Ty Murray is the best danged rodeo cowboy of "em all."
At the time, Murray, 43, had already won two Professional Rodeo Cowboy Association all-around championships. He would go on to win five more, breaking the all-time record held by Larry Mahan.
Murray was a founding member of the Professional Bull Riders (PBR). His rodeo earnings are close to $3 million, according to his official website.
Murray's hometown is Phoenix, but he has spent extensive time in the North Texas area and currently lives in Stephenville. He has garnered recent attention through his appearance on ABC's Dancing with the Stars in 2009. And he's married to Grammy-nominated singer Jewel.
"I don't care about going down in history as a great bull rider or bronc rider," Murray said on his website. "I hope people will remember me as a great cowboy."
Andy Dalton
Winningest Quarterbackin TCU History
Andy Dalton's TCU career began with a win and ended with a win.
But his legacy was built on the 40 more scattered in between.
Dalton, 25, and now the starting quarterback for the Cincinnati Bengals, earned the starting job for the Horned Frogs before the 2007 season. TCU beat Baylor 27-0 in that year's opener.
But by the time Dalton finished his college career, the Frogs had risen from a little-known – yet successful – mid-major team, to a Rose Bowl-winning program. Dalton completed 15-of-23 passes for 219 yards and a touchdown and led TCU to a 21-19 win over Wisconsin on Jan. 1, 2011, for its first BCS bowl win.
The Frogs finished 13-0 that season, and Dalton left for the NFL as the winningest quarterback in school history, going 42-7 as a starter.
He was drafted in the second round by Cincinnati, where he started immediately and was named to a Pro Bowl his rookie season. Photo by Mark Cohen
PGA Champion
Before J.J. Henry made three straight all-American teams and made a career on the PGA Tour, he was a TCU sophomore, struggling in 1996 for a spot on the Horned Frogs" starting five.
Henry, like the rest of his teammates, struggled that fall through a windy tournament in Hawaii. Henry shot 93. A few days later, TCU coach Bill Montigel gathered his team and held a 10-player qualifier for one spot at the next tournament. Henry won.
Montigel remembers that moment as the turning point for Henry, who redshirted his first year on campus and wasn't spectacular during his first year of competition.
"He won that qualifier, and he was a stud ever since," Montigel said. "He went one day being like everybody else; then he was the best guy we had."
Henry, 38, went on to earn co-national player of the year honors his senior season in 1998 and has earned more than $13 million since turning pro later that year. He has won two PGA Tour tournaments - the Buick Championship in 2006 and the Reno-Tahoe Open in 2012.
He still lives in Fort Worth and heads the Henry House Foundation, a non-profit organization he and his wife, Lee, founded in 2007. It benefits children in North Texas and Southern New England.
One of Montigel's favorite memories of Henry came from the team's conference tournament, Henry's senior year. The Horned Frogs were trailing late in the last round. Henry, though, finished with a hole-in-one and a birdie to push TCU to the win.
"That was a pretty special moment," Montigel said. "He's the guy that's kind of the marquee player for the (TCU) program."
Linda Cornelius
Pentathlon World Record Setter
The track at Paschal High School in the early-1970s was a four-lane, cinder surface.
Linda Cornelius would train there as a teenager. She would dig holes in the track to simulate starting blocks. And she'd mostly practice in the dark, starting late in the evening when her father got home from his job at the GM plant in Arlington.
"Most track and field athletes today probably have never seen or stepped onto a cinder track," Cornelius said. "You do the best with what you have, and often you're better for it."
Cornelius, 52, was a four-time all-American at Texas A&M, competing in the pentathlon. She qualified for the 1980 Olympics but never competed due the U.S. boycott that year of the Moscow games. But during the 1980 Olympic trials, she set a pentathlon world record.
"The road from the workouts in the dark on that old cinder track to competing on the track in Eugene, Ore. is truly a storybook adventure for me," Cornelius said.
Cornelius today lives in Highland Village and works as the town's director of parks and recreation. Photo courtesy of the Special Collections, The University of Texas at Arlington Library
Rayfield Wright
NFL Hall of Fame
Rayfield Wright and Bob Lilly played together with the Dallas Cowboys during the late 1960s and early 1970s. They both were linemen – Wright an offensive tackle and Lilly a defensive tackle. And both ended up in the NFL Hall of Fame.
But the difference between the two All-Pro's careers – or at least how they began – is clear: Lilly was the Cowboys" first draft pick ever, in 1960, while Wright, several years younger, was a seventh-round selection in 1967.
Wright, 68, and now living in Fort Worth, played at defensive end, tight end and offensive tackle his first two seasons. Then starting right tackle Ralph Neely got injured, so Tom Landry plugged the 6-foot-6, 255-pound Wright into the position, where he would have to face Deacon Jones the next game.
According to his Hall of Fame biography, a Cowboys" assistant warned Wright of Jones. "The Deacon is big and strong and mean," the coach told Wright. "Well, so am I," Wright replied.
The Georgia native would go on to make six Pro Bowls from 1971-1976 and win two Super Bowls in 1971 and 1977.
"Some say that patience is a virtue," Wright said during his 2006 Hall of Fame induction speech. "After 22 years of eligibility, God knows that I'm not a saint, but I am a Dallas Cowboy."
Kathy Whitworth
World Golf Hall of Fame
Kathy Whitworth was 15 and just wanted to play tennis. But when a group of friends decided to go to the golf course one day, Whitworth went along.
"I wasn't thrilled about it, but you can't play tennis by yourself," Whitworth said. "I know I did, because I loved tennis, but I don't remember playing tennis again. I was just consumed with golf."
Whitworth, 73, turned pro in 1958 and ended up winning 88 LPGA tournaments. She was named LPGA Player of the Year seven times and became the first LPGA player to surpass $1 million in earnings. She was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 1975.
The New Mexico native worked under the tutelage of the late Harvey Penick, the legendary Austin-based golf instructor whose Little Red Book has sold more than a million copies since its 1992 release.
"You just couldn't help but love (Penick)," Whitworth said. "I don't hardly go a day without thinking about him or talking about him. Every time I had a problem, I went back to him, and he'd straighten me out and off I'd go."
Whitworth, who spent most of her career based in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, lives in Flower Mound and hosts Kathy Whitworth Invitational, an annual junior tournament played at Fort Worth's Mira Vista Golf Club.
Johnny Rutherford
Motorsports Hall of Fame
There's only eight other drivers who have done what Johnny Rutherford has done – win the Indianapolis 500 three times.
Rutherford, 75, was born in Kansas but lives in Fort Worth today and came up racing in Texas. He started his career racing stock cars but switched to Indy Cars in 1963.
"I had a great opportunity to stay in NASCAR with Smokey Yunick when I raced stock cars in 1963, but my passion was to go to Indianapolis, and that's where I went and have been a part of ever since," Rutherford said in his biography on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway website.
But his first nine starts at Indy didn't result in finishes. He placed ninth in 1973 before winning his first Indy 500 title in 1974.
He would go on to win in 1976 and 1980.
Rutherford won 27 IndyCar Series races and retired in 1987. He was inducted into the Motorsports Hall of Fame in 1993.
LaDainian Tomlinson
2006 NFL MVP
This would tell plenty about LaDainian Tomlinson: He rushed for more yards in one college football game than any other college football player ever.
But for a talent like Tomlinson, that just isn't enough.
Yes, Tomlinson, 34, ran for 406 yards against UTEP in 1999. But he also was a Heisman finalist as a senior at TCU in 2000. That was after, of course, he broke the Horned Frogs" all-time rushing list. And that was before an 11-year NFL career that will likely result in a Hall of Fame jacket.
Tomlinson was the fifth-overall pick in the 2001 NFL Draft of the San Diego Chargers. He played nine seasons in San Diego and rushed for more than 1,000 yards in the first eight of those. He scored double-digit touchdowns in all of his NFL seasons except for two – his last two as a New York Jet.
Tomlinson, the 2006 NFL MVP, reflected on his years with the Chargers at his retirement press conference in 2012.
"Those were championship days, for not only myself and my teammates, but my family as well," Tomlinson told the Associated Press. "So I'm OK with never winning a Super Bowl championship. I know we've got many memories that we can call championship days."
Nolan Ryan
Strikeout King
If you had to narrow Nolan Ryan's career down to one statistic, it would be best to start with his most historic: Strikeouts.
No pitcher in major league history had more of them. And Ryan's 5,714 were the most by nearly 1,000. Randy Johnson is second with 4,875.
Ryan, 66, was born in Refugio, raised in Alvin and over the course of his 27-year career played in New York, California and Houston. But his presence in Dallas-Fort Worth has been impactful.
He finished his career with the Texas Rangers in 1993 and was a volunteer assistant coach at TCU shortly after he retired. And currently, he serves as the Rangers president, a post he's been in since 2008.
Ryan threw seven no-hitters in his career and won 324 games.
Yet, the tall, often publicly quiet Ryan is known for his understated manner. In 1980, Inside Sports" Tony Kornheiser profiled Ryan, who was then with the Houston Astros. Ryan was modest with his ability to throw a baseball 100 miles per hour.
"I accept it," Ryan told Kornheiser. "I'm not awed by it. I try to work as hard as I can so I know I did everything I could with it, because I don't want to look back in 10 years and say "well, you know, if I'd worked it, it"d been better," but I don't spend time thinking about it."
Turner Gill
Heisman Trophy Finalist
Turner Gill played college football in Nebraska and has coached in New York, Kansas and Virginia. But his relationship with the game began in Fort Worth, his hometown.
Gill, 51, played quarterback for the Nebraska Cornhuskers, whom he led to three Orange Bowl appearances (and a win in 1983) and a 20-0 Big Eight record over that period. Gill was also a Heisman Trophy finalist in 1983.
He didn't win a national championship as a player, but he was on a Nebraska coaching staff that won three national titles in the 1990s. Gill's first head coaching job came in 2006 at Buffalo. He left for Kansas in 2010, but his stint was short. The Jayhawks went a combined 5-19 in two seasons before Gill was fired.
Gill currently coaches at Liberty University, a Football Championship Subdivision school in Lynchburg, Va. The Flames went 6-5 in 2012, Gill's first year.
Paulie Ayala
World Title Holder andFighter of the Year 1999
Paulie Ayala's mother figured her son had spent enough time in the ring – she was going to let the 5-year-old move on to something else. But Ayala, who started boxing at age 4, didn't want to leave the sport.
"I guess I had that competitive drive at an early age," the Fort Worth native said.
Ayala, 43, would go on to build a career around boxing, winning two world titles and being named Ring Magazine's Fighter of the Year in 1999. Ayala lost his first professional fight in 1992,but compiled a 35-3 career record over his 13-year career.
Ayala said he obviously enjoyed winning a world title, then defending it. But earning fighter of the year was his most memorable career moment.
"Winning that took me to a whole new level," he said.
Today he runs the Paulie Ayala University of Hard Knocks gym in Fort Worth. He works one-on-one with competitive fighters, but he also has classes for those who simply play the sport for fun. He even offers a class for fighters with Parkinson's disease.
Ayala wants to revive the boxing culture that produced him and other good fighters over the years.
"Fort Worth used to be a hotspot," said Ayala, who was born and raised in the city and attended Trimble Tech High School. "Unfortunately, the sport has changed a lot."
William Paulus
Texas Swimming and Diving Hall of Fame
Swimmer William Paulus grew up in Fort Worth and went to high school in the 1970s. He was prevented from an Olympic medal run by the U.S. boycott in 1980.
Paulus was a standout in the pool for Arlington Heights and the University of Texas.
According to the Texas Swimming and Diving Hall of Fame (of which he is inducted to), his times during the Olympic trials that year would have won two gold medals at the games.
But Paulus wasn't short on other achievements. He won two individual national championships at Texas and one team title in 1981. He was also an all-American four straight years. He held the 100-fly world record from 1981 to 1983.
Today, Paulus is a dentist in Fort Worth, working with his wife, Anita, who is also a dentist at Paulus Dental and Orthodontics. Paulus is a member of the University of Texas Men's Athletics Hall of Fame.
Jeremy Wariner
Four Olympic Medals
Jeremy Wariner likely isn't the greatest track and field athlete in Baylor history – but his four Olympic medals still hold up well.
Wariner, 29, joined the Bears" program in 2002, following in the path of another U.S. Track and Field great – Michael Johnson. Johnson won gold in the 200-meter and 400-meter in 1996 at the Atlanta games, and gold in the 400-meter in 2000 at the Sydney games.
Four years later, Wariner made his Olympic debut in Athens, winning gold in the 400-meter and gold in the 4x400-meter relay. He repeated gold in the relay in 2008 at Beijing and took silver in the 400-meter.
Wariner is from Arlington and graduated from Lamar High School. He's still running, winning a USA Indoor championship this year.
