June 9, 2001

Ashdown (Little River County) native Hazel Walker was inducted into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in Knoxville, Tennessee. Recognized as the greatest amateur women’s basketball player of the 1930s and 1940s, eleven-time Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) All-American Walker was the only woman ever to own, manage, and star for 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.