SOURCE: “History of Sporting Life in Columbus” by Craig Lloyd in Columbus Sports Memories, edited by Joan Emens, Erma Davis Banks, and Callie B. McGinnis, 1996.
Since Columbus's normally benign weather accommodates year-long outdoor activity, sporting has been a marked feature of local life, and many locally developed athletes have risen to national and even international prominence. Doubtless young men competed against one another in impromptu competitions involving speed and strength from the earliest days of the town's existence in the late 1820s and 1830s. In terms of organized sporting, however, the record indicates that horse racing began in 1834 in a race featuring some of the nation's outstanding thoroughbreds. The location of the event was on the South Commons near the Chattahoochee River, the venue on which much of Columbus's athletic contesting – including horse racing into the early twentieth century, but especially baseball and football later – would take place.
Baseball was first played by youngsters on the sandlots of Columbus in the post-Civil War era. By the turn of the century, Columbus High School, then located on 11th street downtown, and teams representing local mills played teams from nearby towns on diamonds on the South Commons and other places such as Wildwood Park (an area on the campus of and adjacent to today's Columbus High). On Labor Day weekends, hundreds of citizens in the bi-city area would take trolley cars from downtown Columbus to watch a game there and enjoy other festivities along the nearby lake which then existed in Weracoba Park north of 17th street. A number of local high school players have gone on to play baseball in the big leagues, several in our own time, including Columbus High's Frank Thomas, the American League's Most Valuable Player in 1993 and 1994. "The Big Hurt" played his Little League Ball in Weracoba, routinely hitting balls into the creek.
Columbus began hosting minor league baseball in 1884. Golden Park, built in 1926 near a previous field on the South Commons, became home grounds to a succession of clubs culminating in today's RedStixx. Major League teams have played exhibition games in Columbus since 1893, and many minor leaguers have sharpened their skills at Golden Park on their way to stardom in the majors.
The first football contest was played at Wildwood in November 1895, a collegiate confrontation in which Georgia beat Alabama, 30-6, in a driving rainstorm. The first high school game was also played at Wildwood, Columbus defeating Industrial High School (later Jordan), 5-0, touchdowns in that era counting only 5 points. The development of strong football programs in the early 1900s at the University of Georgia, Georgia Tech, and Auburn (then Alabama Polytechnic Institute), the University of Alabama, and the University of Florida put Columbus at the center of an area of avid spectator attraction to the sport. From 1912 to 1958, Columbus played host to the annual Georgia-Auburn game, after 1926 contested at Memorial Stadium which was constructed on the South Commons earlier that year.
Since 1935, prominent African American colleges, Tuskegee, Morehouse, Fort Valley and Albany State have competed annually at the stadium. "Game weekends" in these series have brought much festivity and socializing to Columbus, as students and alums carry their school spirit and colors into the locality. Columbus area high school players over many years have become stars on the teams of collegiate powers in our region and elsewhere. A number have enjoyed careers and, in the case of Otis Sistrunk of Spencer and Nate Odomes of Carver, stardom in the National Football League. Although not to as great an extent as in baseball and football, local high school basketball programs, first begun at Columbus and Industrial Highs in 1913, have produced outstanding athletes, successful later at the collegiate and professional level.
Later this year (1996), hockey will compete with basketball as a wintertime indoor sport as a Columbus professional team, the "Cottonmouths," skates against rivals in the new Columbus Civic Center Auditorium now being completed on the South Commons just a bit down the river from Golden Park.
Columbus' favorable year-round weather and the generous teaching spirit of local golf club professionals dating back to the 1920s, has produced many outstanding golfers, some of them such as Hugh Royer and Larry Mize champions in illustrious events such as the Western Open and the Master's tournament, respectively. Given this heritage it is not surprising that the individuals in the local golfing community were able in 1969 to bring to our area the Southern Open, an important autumn stop on the tour of the Professional Golfers' Association.
Since 1984, the Steeplechase, an equestrian event reminding us of the horse racing which lay at the heart of Columbus' early sporting history, has been a major sporting event in the locality. Boxing, tennis, marksmanship, and track and field have produced gifted athletes, some of them such a Phenix City's sprinter Harvey Glance, Olympic medal winners. In the early 1970s, Glance once held world records in the outdoor and indoor 100-meter dash. One must take note of two recent phenomena in this brief survey of Columbus' sports' history: the development of soccer as a major sport played by youth leagues and in high school competitions, and the emergence of female athletes in soccer, tennis, basketball, swimming and softball. Since so much of Columbus's sporting history has taken place on the fields of the South Commons, it is fitting that the national women's collegiate softball championships and the international Olympic women's softball tournament should be staged there this coming spring and summer (1996).
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