I don’t write about myself that much. But this year I’m making some exceptions. The AC “A” Board announced that I’ll be inducted into the Austin College Hall of Honor in the summer of 2025. My sport is tennis, and Legends Weekend 2025 is igniting a bunch of Marc tennis stories. Here’s one:
I saw my AC buddy Pat Abernathey this weekend at Cooper’s BBQ in Llano. Pat knows; Marc loves the ties. And you’ll find ties in this story about AC’s Carroll Pickett. The AC tennis MVP award is named for this outstanding Roo. After finishing 1st Team All-Conference at line #1 for AC in 1990, I was honored to win the Carroll Pickett Award.
Pickett was exceptional on the tennis court. In 1953, Austin College traveled to Fort Worth to face TCU of the Southwest Conference. The Horned Frogs won easily. But it wasn’t a shutout. At line #1 singles, Pickett defeated TCU’s Bernie Ferguson 6-3, 6-1. TCU tennis? They won an NCAA D1 national championship in 2024.
As Ferguson competed for a Southwest Conference (SWC) title in 1953, Pickett won the 1953 Texas Conference title. The victory allowed the Roo to compete in the NAIA National Tournament, where he advanced all the way to the finals. There, he lost to S. L. Shofner of Central Oklahoma. Carroll Pickett was just one match short of a national championship for Austin College.
Pickett was back in 1954 and repeated as Texas Conference Champion. At the NAIA National Tournament, he fell to the eventual national champion in the semifinals in three sets. Pickett won the 3rd place match 6-1, 6-3 against Shofner, exacting revenge against the competitor who had denied the Roo a national title one year earlier.
The Carroll Pickett tennis ties include Marc. The Royal Oaks Racquet Club in Bryan/College Station was the tennis home for Marc in the 1980s; it was also briefly the home for Pickett. In 1983, Pickett and his partner won the Men’s Doubles title at the Royal Oaks Open. I was competing in the same tournament as a teenager, perhaps on a court right next to Carroll Pickett.
But it is Carroll Pickett’s career after tennis which earns Marc’s respect. A Presbyterian minister, Pickett was the Death House Chaplain of the Huntsville Prison during peak usage of the death penalty in Texas. The experience of consoling the condemned, four of whom were likely innocent, turned Pickett into a national anti-death penalty advocate. His final years in Huntsville coincided with my final years on the tennis court for AC.
In February of 1999, Carroll Pickett visited my hometown of Bryan/College Station. He spoke at Friends Congregational Church, the church of the Parrish family. Friends Church was the site of a death penalty forum that month, in which Pickett was the primary speaker. The Bryan-College Station Eagle wrote an article about his appearance.
It’s likely my parents Linda & Paul were there, as they were both loyal Friends Church attendees and death penalty opponents. They might not have been aware that Reverend Pickett was the namesake of the AC MVP tennis award their son had won just nine years earlier.
But as daily readers of the local Bryan/College Station newspaper, I bet my folks read the B/CS Eagle article about Pickett’s visit the next day. Which is neat. Because that article, amazingly, was written by my Roo bud Pat Abernathey. Hey Pat knows; Marc loves the ties.
Carroll Pickett passed in 2022. I never got to meet him, as my writing about his tennis took place during his final years of decline. How I’d love to invite him to this summer’s AC Hall of Honor induction ceremony, express my admiration for his life as a good & faithful servant, and congratulate him on coming so close to a national title for Austin College.
