calsfoundation@cals.org
January 15, 1959
Hazel Walker became the only woman among the first five inductees into the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame. Recognized as the greatest amateur women’s basketball player of the 1930s and 1940s, the eleven-time Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) All-American was the only woman ever to own, manage, and star in her own professional basketball team. In 2000, CNN/Sports Illustrated named her sixteenth, the highest-ranking woman, on its list of Arkansas’s Top Fifty Athletic Figures of the Twentieth Century. On June 9, 2001, she was inducted into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in Knoxville, Tennessee.