(This is the fourth part in a series profiling this year's inductees for the Baylor Athletics Hall of Fame and Wall of Honor, which will be posted every week at baylorbears.com.)

By Jerry Hill
Baylor Bear Insider
            In the real estate industry, the rule of thumb is that location is everything. 

            Location also played a big part in Gary Kafer eventually earning spots in the Gatesville High School and Baylor Athletics Halls of Fame. 

            When a young coach named Lowell Bishop moved in next door to the Kafers in Gatesville, Texas, he took young Gary under his wing as the football team manager and then in the spring said, "We need to find you something to do on the track."

            That turned out to be jumping over a bar into a sand pit (foam padding would come along later), an event called the high jump. While Bishop left after Kafer's sophomore season to continue a long coaching career, Gary won back-to-back state championships at Gatesville High School, clearing a state meet-record 6-9 ¼ in 1971. 

            As a Baylor freshman in 1972, he became the first athlete in Southwest Conference history to clear the 7-foot barrier, winning the Fort Worth Coaches Indoor Games with a mark of 7-0 ¼. Fifty years later, he still ranks sixth on Baylor's all-time list of high jumpers. 

            "That was everybody's target," said Kafer, part of the 2022 induction class for the Baylor Hall of Fame that will be enshrined on Nov. 18. "If you were a high jumper, you were shooting for 7 feet. And if you were a pole vaulter, you were shooting for 17, 18 feet, I guess. Those were the big milestones."

            Kafer considers meeting Coach Bishop in the eighth grade as one of the major forks in the road in his life. 

            "Sometimes you take the right one, sometimes you don't," Kafer said. "But, the good Lord always throws options out there. It just so happened, my next-door neighbor was one of the junior high coaches at the time and needed a football manager."

            Under Bishop's tutelage, Kafer cleared 5-11 as a freshman to finish sixth in district and earn his first varsity letter. The next year, he won the first of three-consecutive district and regional championships and finished fourth at the Class 3A UIL state track meet with a mark of 6-2. 

            "Lowell thought that my body type would be perfect for going to a straight-leg style," Kafer said. "At the time, I was using a bent-knee leg, as most everybody was. Valeriy Brumel, the Russian world record-holder, would swing up there with a straight leg, and it just gives you more momentum swinging yourself up. 

            "Rather than trying to mess with my form during the season, Lowell thought it was a good idea to try to initiate that change after the state meet. And, of course, that was about that time he moved to Monahans. But, I got the film clips of Valeriy Brumel and all the training books."

            Kafer also got a leg up that summer from longtime Gatesville native and eventual Baylor assistant football coach Cotton Davidson. 

            "He somehow finagled for me some foam pads to put in my back yard so that I could practice high jumping after my sophomore season. And it was during that time that I worked on changing from a bent knee to a straight leg. And by the time summer was over, because of Cotton and having a foam pit in my back yard jumping off grass, I was jumping 6-6."

            Kafer went 6-8 as a junior the next spring and won the first of back-to-back 3A state championships. And with it, the scholarship offers started flooding into Gatesville, including one from Stanford coach Payton Jordan, who was coming off the 1968 Olympics in Mexico as the USA head coach. 

            "I was just shaking in my boots when that guy called," Kafer said. "But, they had different entrance standards and needed a commitment right then, in December, so they could get me in school. But, I wasn't ready to do anything like that."

            After making recruiting visits to TCU and Texas, Kafer picked Baylor without even making a campus visit because of "C-L-Y-D-E, that's it. Period." That would be legendary Baylor track and field coach Clyde Hart. 

            "I didn't know if they had a track or what anything looked like," he said. "When my parents visited Waco to shop or whatever, I'd see the (Veterans Administration) buildings, the red brick. And in the back of my mind, I thought that was Baylor University. But, as far as an official visit, nothing like that happened. It was just Coach Hart. He was persistent, and everything just clicked."

            More than living up to the hype, Kafer won his first collegiate meet at the Tarrant County Convention Center, clearing the bar with a school and SWC-record 7-0 ¼. 
"I was just ecstatic," he said. "I cleared it, and just bounced out of the pit, arms up in the air, pumping. It was unbelievable. I was terribly excited."

            Kafer cleared 7 feet twice more as a freshman, winning the Border Olympics in Laredo and the Texas Relays in Austin. But, those would be his last at that height, a knee injury at the Southwest Conference Outdoor Championships in Fayetteville, Ark., putting a damper on the rest of his career. 

            In an Olympics year, Kafer was ranked among the top 20 vaulters in the country, but suffered a small tear in his patellar tendon when the high jump event was moved to the football field at Arkansas. 

            "My sophomore year, we just went ahead and went through it, and I'd get frequent steroid shots in the knee," he said. "After that year, I had minor surgery and they tried to clean it up, but it just never was good again. In fact, my senior year, I might have actually taken practice jumps on the field maybe a half dozen times, as I recall."

            Still, he came back as a senior in 1975 to win the SWC Indoor Championships with a mark of 6-9 ¼ and was a consistent scorer at meets. 

            "It wasn't a 7-footer or anything like that, but it just felt so good to be able to salvage something out of my senior year," he said. "Clyde Hart was one of the most influential guys in my life. The guy stuck with me. He could have written me off and thrown me in the trash, but he didn't. I always appreciated that."

            Returning to Gatesville after graduating from Baylor, Kafer coached track and girls' basketball from 1975-85, the last six years as the head varsity coach, compiling a record of 107-61. He was inducted into the Gatesville High School Hall of Fame in 2019. 

            "I spent 10 years teaching and coaching. And by that time, I'd gotten married and was wanting to start a family," said the 69-year-old Kafer. "Coaching takes up a lot of time, so I just started teaching"

            Despite his history-making moment as a freshman, Kafer said he "never even dreamed that (being inducted into the Hall of Fame) was a possibility."

            "That thought never entered my mind," he said. "The call from (Baylor Associate AD Walter Abercrombie) was clear out of the blue. I was flummoxed, to say the least. I'm hoping Clyde will be there, because I would sure like to ring his bell and (Coach Bishop's) bell while I've got the chance. Those guys have meant so much to me."

            Joining Kafer in the 2022 Hall of Fame class are Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback Robert Griffin III and Doak Field from football, Quentin Iglehart-Summers (track and field), Jeremy Alcorn (men's golf), Taylor Barnes Fallon (volleyball), Tweety Carter (men's basketball and Josh Ludy (baseball). 

            The Hall of Fame banquet is scheduled for 6:30 p.m. Friday, Nov. 18, in the Cashion Building Banquet Room on the Baylor University campus. Tickets are $50 per person, with table sponsorships also available at the green ($600) and gold ($800) levels and can be purchased by contacting the "B" Association at 254-710-3045 or by email at tammy_hardin@baylor.edu.