SFO is home to one of the country’s strangest Hall of Fames

For as illustrious as the sports history of the Bay Area is, it’s more likely that you’ve seen a celebration of the many names behind that history by accident rather than on purpose.

Since its inception in 1979, the Bay Area Sports Hall of Fame has enshrined greats such as Joe DiMaggio, Barry Bonds, John Madden, Joe Montana and Billie Jean King. Those names, along with many others, have been engraved on individual bronze plaques with an image of the athlete — or, in World Cup winner and Bay FC owner Brandi Chastain’s case, an approximation of that image — and a description of their accomplishments, career highlights and the year they were inducted.

Yet, in order to see those plaques, you have to make your way to a rather nondescript part of the San Francisco International Airport. They reside in a post-security walkway between a yoga room and Gates C2-11 in Terminal 2. Believe it or not, SFO is where those plaques have (almost) always been, or at least where they’ve always first appeared. This is not simply a temporary measure, although that wasn’t always the case.

The Hall of Fame itself was the brainchild of former 49ers president Lou Spadia. The football executive turned into a public servant after he was tapped to be the manager of the Bay Area Sports Department under the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce in May 1979. The Hall of Fame concept had been in development for some time, but really hit the gas when Spadia got involved, according to one official’s account at the time. 

The rules to qualify were rather simple: The notable athlete had to be born or raised in the Bay Area, or had to make “outstanding contributions to Bay Area sports,” according to a Nov. 5, 1979, story in the SF Examiner. The athlete also had to have been retired for five years, and a class can’t include more than two athletes from the same sport.

For its inaugural class, announced on Oct. 12, 1979, and enshrined in 1980, the Hall’s 46-person selection committee chose DiMaggio, Willie Mays, Bill Russell, Hank Luisetti and Ernie Nevers. At the time, it was decided their plaques would go up in the main rotunda of United Airlines in SFO, but the airport was not its intended forever home. The original goal was to have an actual establishment where all of these plaques would reside. In the meantime, they’d not only spend time in San Francisco, but in the airports of Oakland and San Jose as well.

“Remember it took pro football 20 years to establish its hall in Canton, Ohio,” Spadia told the S.F. Examiner in November 1979. “What we are looking for is a site that will be easily accessible to the public.”

Though Spadia preached patience, there was little doubt he’d find a suitable site, along with the funds required, in due time. As the Chronicle wrote at the announcement of the first class, “Knowing Spadia’s ardor for this task, such a building will surely take shape.”

Spadia eventually changed his tune when, after a slate of enshrinement dinners and hundreds of thousands of dollars raised, the Hall of Fame still lacked, well, a hall. Any potential for widespread outrage over this failed promise was mitigated because of a public relations master class. Instead of a physical location for the Hall, the money the organization had raised would go to youth sports programs around the Bay Area. 

“Spadia has a philosophy that a kid who is thinking about how to improve his batting average is not thinking about stealing a car,” the Examiner wrote.

He continued this message while speaking with the Chronicle in 1988.

“We’re a Hall without a hall,” Spadia said. “We’d rather spend our contributions on athletic gear to help need kids, not on maintaining a building.”

Another part of Spadia’s argument against a hall would be that, according to the Hall of Fame’s website, “the gloves and spikes of Joe DiMaggio and Willie Mays were already in Cooperstown; the prized memorabilia of others would likely be in national halls.”

Spadia also had a cruder way of making that point back in 1988.

“We don’t collect jock straps like the rest of them do,” he told the Peninsula Times Tribune.

While there’s plenty of explanation for why BASHOF does not have a permanent home, there does not seem to be any proper explanation for why it has resided in the airport all this time. At this point, it simply appears as though it’s remained because of its history there. BASHOF did not respond to multiple requests for comment at the time of publication.

It is certainly strange that an exhibition loaded with so much history, and behind so much philanthropy, has been relegated to something a busy traveler could easily miss running to catch their flight. However, to those enshrined, the location does not do anything to diminish the honor.

When Y.A. Tittle made the Hall in the Class of 1988, he went past the three-minute allotment for speeches, but stood his ground to share his life story.

“I’ve waited a long, long time for this honor,” Tittle said in 1988, “and with apologies to Lou Spadia, I want to talk. I have a lot to say. I must thank some people.”

George Yardley, the former Stanford basketball star from 1947 to 1950, told the Chronicle in 1997 that he always stops for the Hall of Fame because he “used to go through the airport all the time, and miss myself on the stands.”

In 2015, a “thrilled” Dusty Baker told the Chronicle, “My son wants to know if I’m going to be in the airport now.” Baker had seen the display before at SFO, and still said his enshrinement “lets you know that you’ve done some things right in your life.”

While the honor begins at the airport, it does not have to remain there. As the Hall of Fame states, “After several years on display the plaque is moved to a location of the inductee’s choosing.” Bill Russell’s, for instance, is at the University of San Francisco.

However, many of the big names — like DiMaggio and Madden — remain, with more joining them year after year. It goes to show that the Bay Area Sports Hall of Fame could be anywhere in its namesake region, and the honor still wouldn’t go away because the actual building blocks of the Hall itself come from the names of the extraordinary enshrinees that line an otherwise ordinary airport hallway.