Tom Wharton is headed into the Utah Sports Hall of Fame.
He more than deserves the honor, and Utahns everywhere can go beyond just feeling good about the tribute, they can celebrate it.
The man who wrote sports, covering everything from prep athletics to the great outdoors, for half a century at The Tribune will be inducted into the Hall at an annual dinner and ceremony at the Little America Hotel on Sept. 18, joining a group of equally deserving 2023 inductees. They include skiers Stein Eriksen and Ted Ligety, longtime BYU basketball coach Dave Rose, and fencer Julie Thompson Seal.
What’s the big deal about these other folks? How about winning Olympic gold medals, helping build ski resorts, being world champions again and again, winning a gazillion college basketball games after starting years earlier as a teacher and coach at Millard High School, and winning gold medals and national championships and anchoring a fencing club.
If you’d like to join in on honoring these notables, reservations for the event are available at USHOFF.org.
This group will be added to a distinguished collection of Hall of Famers, people from and in Utah who had massive success and influence in their sports, in their realms around sports.
Of which Wharton is one. How about a shoutout not just to the folks who have stood atop podiums and had medals draped around their necks, who have had internationally-known ski lodges named after them, who have coached Jimmer Fredette, who have established clubs that teach students the rudiments and advanced techniques of their sport, but to … take a deep breath … the ink-stained wretches who have brought sports prose and poetry to readers in Utah day after day, month after month, season after season, year after year?
Wharton becomes, then, the fifth writer from The Tribune — there have been significant others from varying Utah publications — to receive such an honor, including John Mooney, Al Warden, Marion Dunn and Dick Rosetta.
Oh, the stories those guys could — and did — tell. Thousands and thousands and thousands of them. Not sure whether any of those inductees could carve through a Giant Slalom course, could accurately shoot a free throw or coach a game, or wield a foil, or even run the 100 meters in less than a minute-and-a-half, but one thing they could do — paint pictures with their words about sports that could create in readers’ minds a scene that made it all feel real. And they could do that on tight deadlines that the ill-prepared and untrained would choke on.
Wharton is one of those scribes who could do it all, or at least most of it, having covered varied events from one end of the state to the other, having written about far-flung places and people, shining a spotlight on games in small towns like Tabiona and locations where readers might want to camp or fish or hike or bird-watch or simply exult in Utah’s spectacular canyons and mountains and deserts.
A tip of the cap then to these honored sports figures and a writer who illustrated some of what they and others like them do or did. The best thing about any Hall of Fame, in this case the Utah Sports Hall of Fame, is that it salutes those who live or lived extraordinary lives, lives that should not be dismissed or forgotten, should not fade from memory once they finish their achievements in and contributions to sports.
In readers’ minds, Tom Wharton, who thankfully all these years later is still around to share his wisdom, will always be bounding through red-rock country, always be setting up camp in some slot canyon, always be standing on a sideline with a notepad in his hand, always be covering the latest basketball game in a tiny gym, packed with townspeople, in Duchesne and Kanab and Trout Creek.
And the Utah Sports Hall of Fame confirms it.
