For two local residents about to become members of the next class of the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame, it all started in Cornelia.
It was there, in the middle of Habersham County, that Cliff Kimsey helped lead the old Cornelia High football team to an undefeated season in 1936, jump-starting a career that would take him from the University of Georgia’s first bowl game appearance to high school and college coaching positions, to a career in banking in his hometown.
And it was there, 38 years ago, that Kimsey noticed Sally Smalley Bell refereeing high school and youth basketball games as the first female member of the Georgia Mountain High School Officials Association. Now, after working Final Fours, WNBA games and the 1996 Olympics, Bell, a longtime Gainesville resident who now lives in Dahlonega, is the Coordinator of Officials for the SEC, Sun Belt, Southland, SWAC, OVC and Atlantic Sun college basketball conferences.
Saturday, at the Macon City Auditorium, the two will be honored, along with Georgia swimming and diving coach Jack Bauerle, longtime college and NFL official Bob Boylston, former Georgia Southern and Canadian Football League quarterback Tracy Ham and longtime Braves pitcher John Smoltz, as the 2012 inductees into the Hall of Fame in Macon.
“Sally Bell and Cliff Kimsey are the embodiment of the talent, dedication, and passion that it takes to succeed in and on any field,” said Ben Shipp, managing director of the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame. “The Hall of Fame is undoubtedly a better institution for the addition of these two fine individuals.”
Kimsey, the oldest living Georgia letterman and recipient of the Outstanding Senior Athlete Award in 1942, said he was first nominated for the Hall a few years prior by former Georgia players and assistant coach Bill Hartman.
He said he was pleased, and a little surprised, to be getting the call.
“Well of course I’m pleased, although not nearly as pleased as my family is,” Kimsey said. “I recognize it’s an honor, even though it’s a long time coming.”
The 90-year-old former banker, who was born and raised in Cornelia and has lived there most of his life, served as an infantryman in the Pacific theatre during World War II. He returned and coached high school football in Georgia and South Carolina, in addition to a stint as a backfield coach at the University of Kansas from 1948-1953.
To this day Kimsey, now a great-grandfather 14 times over, still follows Southeastern Conference football, although he admitted that the sport had changed leaps and bounds from his days playing alongside Lamar Davis and Frank Sinkwich in the Bulldogs backfield.
“They’re bigger and faster and more brutal now than when I played,” Kimsey said. “And we played with leather helmets that you could mash in with your hands.
“Put them back in soft leather helmets and nobody will tackle with their head,” he added. “And I never heard anybody getting a concussion. The most common thing was a broken nose.”
He still remembers playing in Georgia’s first bowl appearance at the Orange Bowl, as well as games against other southern schools, like Tennessee, Alabama and Miami.
Even after he got out of football and into banking, he still stayed close to the game, watching his sons play at old South Habersham High and Habersham Central.
He also remembers his wife, Sally, trying to get into tennis, a sport which she eventually excelled at. Kimsey said it was a young Sally Smalley Bell who helped his wife to shift weight from her front to her back foot while playing.
Kimsey likes the fact that, so many years later, both are headed into the Hall of Fame in the same class.
“I know it is exciting for me, and I’m sure it is for her,” he said. “She deserves the credit she is getting now.
“She is really a wonder. She is an incredible official.”
It’s a profession she got into by accident.
After graduating from Georgia, Bell went to work at the Cornelia Recreation Department where she said she wore many hats.
“One night the refs didn’t show up, and I had to ref pee-wee stuff,” she remembers. “That’s what got me started, and I guess I got the bug.”
Little did she know that one of the team’s coaches that she officiated that night, and a coach she asked to leave due to his yelling, was Cecil Huff, who was the secretary of the GMHSOA at the time. The next day Bell got a call from Huff, who eventually became a good friend and even the best man at Bell’s wedding, asking her to come be a referee with the organization.
“It’s somewhat unbelievable how it happened,” she said. “I was hooked from the first time I did it.”
She climbed the referee ladder, from those first days to high school basketball to the state tournament, from small colleges to major colleges to Final Fours, the 1996 Olympics, overseas tournaments and the WNBA.
Along the way she kept ties to the area. She still remembers refereeing games at Auburn in the early 1980s featuring current Gainesville girls basketball coach Brenda Hill-Gilmore. Decades later she officiated a game featuring Hill-Gilmore’s daughter, Tasha Humphrey, when she played in the NCAA Tournament for Georgia.
Along the way, she has been a pioneer for women in the business, and has continued to work her way to the top.
“I’ve had to prove my way,” she said. “I worked really hard, went to camps. It was a marathon, not a sprint, and I just kept doing it.”
She has worked more than 6,000 games, 15 Women’s Final Fours, and in 1991 received the Naismith Award as the Women’s College Basketball Official of the Year.
And yet she never imagined she would have the chance to be inducted into the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame.
“I’m extremely excited, very humbled by the selection,” Bell said. “With all the people that are in the Hall of Fame, it’s even more exciting for me.”