Rather Mentor Ties Sam to Gators

How would you imagine that Sam Houston, Hugh Wilson, Hugh Wilson Cunningham, Puny Wilson, Dan Rather, and the 2003 NCAA National Championship Basketball Tournament are all related?

Here's how.

When Sam Houston the general was roaming around Texas in the 1830s and 1840s, winning independence from Mexico in an upset battle more unlikely than a 15th seed beating a number 2, folks were already planning for the new state's higher education needs.

One of those so concerned was Hugh Wilson, the first Presbyterian minister in Texas. He stopped first at San Augustine and then moved to Independence.

The Presbyterians established Austin College at what is now the campus of Sam Houston State University, with Hugh Wilson and Sam Houston on the original board of trustees. Austin College later moved to Sherman, Texas.

Austin College was granted a charter in 1849, held its first classes in the fall of 1850, and began construction in 1851 on Austin Hall. That building is still used by Sam Houston State and believed to be the oldest in-use higher education facility west of the Mississippi.

Fast forward a hundred years.

<=""> Dan Rather was a poor city kid who thought he could walk on and earn a football scholarship at Sam Houston State Teachers College. One of the first people he met on the football practice field was Hugh Wilson Cunningham, a young journalism teacher and the university publicist.

Hugh Wilson Cunningham was the great, great grandson of the Presbyterian minister. He, too, had once tried to play football and had gone into journalism when he, too, was told he was too small and too slow. He knew how Dan Rather felt, because he had been there.

Hugh Wilson Cunningham fed more than Dan Rather's mind. Rather credits Cunningham with helping keep him alive, physically, as well, by paying for meals and finding him odd jobs. These included, eventually, stringing for the Associated Press and working at KSAM radio.

While he never got the full scholarship he sought, it could be said that Rather was once on partial scholarship. His brutally honest coach, Puny Wilson, let him eat with the athletes on weekends until he could get on his feet financially.

Puny Wilson (no close relation to Hugh Wilson or Hugh Wilson Cunningham) told him he was too little. Rather wrote, "I damn near got killed...I lacked speed and couldn't block."

Rather did suit out for the first three games of the 1950 season, according to his book, "The Camera Never Blinks." One of those games involved a long bus trip to Alpine, Texas, to play Sul Ross State.

When James Gaertner, SHSU president, visited with Rather recently in New York, Dan told him that one of his most vivid college memories is of the players tossing chicken bones from the bus as they rolled through the Texas desert.

Hugh Wilson Cunningham, Dan Rather's beloved mentor, left Sam Houston about the same time as Rather, who graduated in August 1953. Dan went on to fame as a journalist, Hugh Wilson Cunningham to teach at--the University of Florida.

Hugh Wilson Cunningham retired from the University of Florida in 1989. He even came back to Sam Houston State to teach journalism for a year, 1991-92, and moved back to the Gainesville area.

Now 81, he said by phone Wednesday that his daughter also works in the university's athletic department as an academic counselor, for the basketball team.

"I won't go to the game," he said. "But I'm a big basketball fan."

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SHSU Media Contact: Frank Krystyniak
March 20, 2003
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