Bufe C. Morrison's trophy room is one of El Paso's great treasure collections, a repository for 5,605 sports trophies, medals, plaques and awards he and his wife Mary have won in long lives competing at all levels, particularly in Senior Games.
The most remarkable item in that room is a 68-year-old baseball, brown with age, in a small plastic protective case. The 85-year-old Morrison, who was 16 back in 1955, bought that ball for $1 at Dudley Field before a game that may have involved the greatest assemblage of baseball talent in the history of El Paso.
There are some notable autographs Morrison collected on that $1 ball: Willie Mays , Joe Black, Don Newcombe, Monte Irvin and Larry Doby.
They were in El Paso as part of a barnstorming team of Black baseball players, taking on a team of locals in an exhibition, which was eventually won by the team full of future Hall of Famers, 6-2.
"That would have to be" the greatest group of baseball players to come to El Paso, said Morrison, who would know: He's a founding member of the El Paso Baseball Hall of Fame. "There was Larry Doby, Willie Mays, John Newcombe, Joe Black, Ernie Banks. I can't remember the rest, but it was an all-Black All-Star team.
"They didn't beat the locals that bad. They were just screwing around; they were better than that. Ernie Banks, he didn't weigh 150 pounds, he hit a ball over the canal, like 450 feet. It disappeared. Willie Mays got in a run-down; they couldn't catch him."
A 21-year-old Hank Aaron played. Mays, who passed away last month, was 24, and Banks was 23. Doby, at 31, was seven years removed from integrating the American League, though still two decades away from becoming Major League Baseball's first Black manager.
They were on a winter tour of the United States, a bit of a throwback to what Black players did before MLB was integrated in 1947. Morrison was one of 2,500 people in the stands on Nov. 4, 1955, and he admits that, given the ages of some of the signers of his ball, he didn't yet know what he had.
"I didn't think much about it then," he said. "Later on, the people on the ball were the real deal. ... There's a sad story to tell about this ball. Willie Mays signed this ball, two years later his autograph disappeared, it faded. The best autograph on the ball and it disappeared."
So what did that do to the value of the ball? That's a hypothetical question because Morrison isn't selling it, but out of curiosity, he took it to a shop to determine its worth.
"The guy indicated it was fake," Morrison said. "Hey, I was standing there watching the guys sign it. I paid for it. Why do you think I'd bring it over here … you're not going to get it anyway. I just wanted it appraised."
At any rate, the vanishing Mays autograph wasn't the only what-if to spring out of that game. Morrison was 16 at the time, a sophomore sports star at Cathedral not too far away from getting a scholarship to play baseball at UTEP (that actually wouldn't come until 1964 after a few gap years), and he figures he would have been on that El Paso team of locals that played against the Black all-stars.
"I still think about that," Morrison said. "I would have loved to play in that game just to be able to get close to Willie Mays and those guys, say, 'Hey, what are you doing?'"
Morrison, though, collected plenty of other stories in an eventful life. A career school teacher, he played baseball for 39 years and fastpitch softball for 15 — that includes 15 years of overlap where he did both — before giving it up at age 53 to concentrate on just about everything the Senior Games has to offer.
He and his wife Mary, also an accomplished senior athlete, traveled around America until the last two years competing in the Senior Games. Morrison said he would compete in 180 events per year a few years ago, most in track. He's also an elite horseshoe player and recently learned that translates to cornhole.
As a concession to age, he's scaled back to 25 Senior Games events this year. In addition to the El Paso Baseball Hall of Fame, Morrison has been inducted into the International Baseball Hall of Fame, the El Paso Senior Hall of Fame (of course), the El Paso Softball Hall of Fame, the Texas Senior Games Hall of Fame and the El Paso Athletic Hall of Fame.
That is enough to pack an amazing trophy room, though it still has room for a $1, 68-year-old baseball.
Bret Bloomquist can be reached at bbloomquist@elpasotimes.com; @Bretbloomquist on Twitter.
This article originally appeared on El Paso Times: El Paso sports legend's collection includes 5,605 awards, historic $1 baseball from 1955
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