Murry Bowden will become the second person from Scurry County to receive the National Football Foundation (NFF) Outstanding Contribution to Amateur Football Award.
Bowden will be honored during the Dec. 4 awards ceremony in New York. Snyder’s Grant Teaff received the award in 2016.
Bowden, who was a charter member of the Snyder Athletic Hall of Honor, is currently the chairman of Atlanta Hall Management, which oversees the Chick-fil-A College Football Hall of Fame in Atlanta. He is being honored for his role in building the hall of fame in Atlanta.
After growing up on a ranch in Snyder, Bowden headed to the Ivy League to play football at Dartmouth College. Playing for College Football Hall of Fame coach Bob Blackman, Bowden was just as likely to be found at the line making a tackle for a loss as he was deep in the secondary making an interception. His reputation for making plays all over the field earned him the nickname, “The Reckless Rover.”
At Snyder High School, he was a three-year letterman in football, earning all-district honors and being named team captain as a senior.
At Dartmouth, Bowden helped the team win Ivy League titles his junior and senior seasons. Bowden was a team captain and earned first team all-America honors his senior season in 1970. His other accolades included the Sport Magazine athlete of the month award and the Alfred E. Watson Trophy, which is awarded each year to the outstanding athlete at Dartmouth College. Bowden was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 2003.
“You learn leadership qualities in football,” Bowden said. “People are looking for somebody to say, ‘Let’s go take this mountain.’ It is a little bit inspiration, a little bit intellectualism and a lot of brute force. I just think it’s a great sport. It’s a very difficult sport, but it’s played a big role in my development from growing up on a ranch in West Texas all the way to the Ivy League. It helped me get there.”
After graduating cum laude from Dartmouth with a degree in psychology, Bowden worked on his family’s ranch for a year before attending law school at the University of Texas. In 1982, he founded The Hanover Company, a real estate investment firm in Houston where he remains the chairman and CEO.
In 2003, the same year he was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame, Bowden joined the NFF board of directors. He currently serves as director emeritus.
As the NFF prepared to move the College Football Hall of Fame from South Bend, Ind. to Atlanta, Bowden’s experience as a real estate developer and Hall of Fame player gave him the perfect credentials to represent the NFF on the Atlanta Hall Management (AHM) board, the legal entity established in 2011 to oversee the construction of the new hall in Atlanta. Bowden embraced the opportunity, taking on the role of chair of the building committee.
“I had the skill set and had (building experience), so it was very natural,” Bowden said. “I hadn’t ever built anything quite like the College Football Hall of Fame. I had built many apartments, but this was something terribly interesting and unique. It’s a great building.”
The facility opened its doors in August 2014 and in 2015, Bowden extended his commitment to the hall by becoming chairman of AHM. As chairman, he played a key role in securing Chick-fil-A as the title sponsor of the Hall of Fame in early 2018.
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