Dave bauman newton kansan5/21/2023 Though softball has evolved into several forms, the game that was all the rage nationwide in the postwar era was what is now known as fastpitch. In August 1947, before Evans’s final football season at KU, the Knights of Columbus in Newton hosted a softball tournament, and through some means of persuasion, Bowersock brought in the college star Evans, now remembered as one of the best all-around athletes ever to play for KU, to pitch for his sponsored team, Sox Super Service. Bowersock was one of many people at the time driven to contend for bragging rights in the local softball leagues and tournaments that were ubiquitous in the postwar United States. Bowersock, owner of a gas station in Newton, Kansas, a railroad town situated some 150 miles southwest of the university in Lawrence. Along the way, even the New York Yankees threw in an offer to play professional baseball, which Evans declined (Just 2017 SB Nation Rock Chalk Talk 2014).Īmid this wealth of recruitments came an invitation from a Mr. As a veteran, he returned to KU and led the Jayhawks to the Orange Bowl, and in 1948 he played a season of football with the Pittsburgh Steelers. His feats garnered recruitment attention from both the New York Knicks and the Chicago Bears before he interrupted his college athletic pursuits to go to war in 1944. After enrolling in 1941, Evans went on to become the only KU athlete to be named All-American in both basketball and football and the only one to have his jerseys retired in both sports. RAY EVANS WAS A STANDOUT ATHLETE at the University of Kansas (KU), an institution that has produced its share of legends.
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