La Vega gradute Larry Pendley drew students to watch the
                                                                                action on Baylor's intramural fields in the 1960s.

A DIFFERENT SORT OF BAYLOR ATHLETIC LEGEND
By Bob Vickrey
                                                    
Waco Tribune-Herald, February 13, 2011

When I first arrived at Baylor University in 1964, the legend of the Bears’ All America football star Lawrence Elkins had already been indelibly written, and had cast his rather significant shadow across that campus after leading the nation in pass receiving. That fall season the future College Hall of Fame member would enhance his legacy even further by virtually rewriting the school record book.

Elkins’ exploits that season led many of us ‘wannabes’ to the intramural fields to participate in the game we loved because most of us had come up substantially short of varsity standards. However, there was a classmate who had also just arrived for his first semester from nearby LaVega High who eventually would create his own minor urban athletic legend on those fields in coming years without ever wearing a varsity uniform of any kind.

Larry Pendley had been a star running back at LaVega, but had the misfortune of breaking his leg in midseason of his senior year. That injury discouraged college recruiters from pursuing him and he entered Baylor as an observer of the game instead of the player he seemed destined to become. His 6’1”, 190 pound frame certainly fit the standards of the college game at that point, and his exceptional speed, strength, and quickness certainly should have had those recruiters in hot pursuit of his talents.

Rumors of his football prowess on display in Minglewood Bowl, the old intramural grounds located in the shadow of Kokernot and Brooks Halls, began to spread across campus and by his junior year, there were small crowds lining the fields just north of Waco Creek. You couldn’t miss him as he wore a yellow polka-dotted welder’s cap and the campus paper began referring to him as ‘The Golden Palomino’. Of course, many of us playfully accused him of hiring a publicist and coming up with that label himself.

What onlookers witnessed during those championship games was truly the stuff born of urban myth. It became somewhat of a routine exercise when Pendley lined up in punt formation facing Waco Creek that the opposing team would forego the kick and just take the ball on their 20 yard line, thereby eliminating the chore of drying the football after it was fished out of the creek. His towering punts were measured at 55 and 60 yards on a very consistent basis and brought oohs and aahs from the assembled crowds.

His dominance on the defensive side of the ball was legendary and the narrow fields at Minglewood forced opposing quarterbacks to throw their passes into the center of the field where he roamed freely. There was one particular game in which I’m quite sure that he caught more of his opponents’ passes than their own receivers had.

In my role as Baylor Lariat sports editor, I mentioned Pendley’s extraordinary talents to (then) head football coach John Bridgers in our weekly interview at his Baylor Stadium office. He showed interest in my story and simply encouraged Larry to come out and visit him for a tryout.

This all happened long before the ‘walk-on’ phenomena hit college football and assistant coaches fanned their campuses looking for undiscovered talent which might uncover a player who could contribute to their team. However, I knew even as I left the stadium office complex that day he would never make his way to the varsity practice field without some strong encouragement from the coaching staff.

If there needed to be some hard evidence of his athletic skills, the verdict was delivered at the Spring intramural meet at Baylor Track Stadium in 1966 when Pendley shattered the aforementioned Elkins’ seemingly unbeatable softball throw record with a heave of 343 feet. If you need to picture that distance, try standing in the end zone of a football field and visualize throwing the ball through the opposite goalposts one-hundred yards away and into the end zone stands.

He also won the high jump competition, finished second in the 100 yard dash, and anchored the record-breaking 440 yard relay team to a title that day. Oh, and he could also hit a softball out of the ballpark as well. He batted cleanup and hit a homerun for the Baylor team that beat the University of Texas in their annual spring game that same year.

In searching for perspective in judging Pendley’s football talent, I remembered playing summer touch football games back in my high school stadium in Houston which regularly featured no less than a dozen players from Southwest Conference teams plus several others who played in the National Football League. There was not a player on that field who possessed any more raw athletic ability than one intramural star quietly making a campus name for himself in Minglewood Bowl.

Legends tend to grow as the years pass, but there seems to have been a strong consensus among Baylor alums of that earlier era who agree that ‘The Golden Palomino’ was the real deal—and one who managed to create his own legacy with his dazzling feats on athletic fields other than the more traditional ones.

Bob Vickrey is a freelance writer whose columns have appeared in several Southwestern newspapers including the Houston Chronicle and the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram. He is a member of the Board of Contributors for the Waco Tribune-Herald. He lives in Pacific Palisades, California.