From Olympic champions and trailblazing teams to athletes who overcame injury, racism, and impossible odds, these Kansas legends changed the game forever.

Most of us Kansans are ordinary folk. We set our rhythms by routine. We go to bed, get up, put on our pants and go about our rather ordinary lives. Some of us even trip on sidewalks if we aren’t careful.

Yet this place demands a quiet toughness from us all, and for a lucky few, it has forged something remarkable, almost magical. It has produced Kansans who stared down the odds and won. Through grace and grit—against history, circumstance, and even their own bodies—they have woven their names into the legacy of not just this state, but the world. 

These are some of their inspiring stories.

 

Kansas Flyer

A young boy who would become one of Kansas’ greatest athletes nearly lost the ability to walk before he ever learned to run. But through grit and determination, he forged an enduring legacy. Glenn Cunningham’s story began in the southwest corner of Kansas, on a farm near Rolla, on the morning of February 9, 1917.

One bitterly cold day, 7-year-old Glenn, his 13-year-old brother, Floyd, and two other siblings walked to Rolla Sunflower country school. It was so cold that morning, Glenn writes in his book, Never Quit (Chosen Books, 1981), he could see his breath, and it was his and his brother’s job to get the school’s fire going. As Floyd stacked chunks of coal on top of wood in the potbelly stove, Glenn walked toward him. That’s when Floyd reached for a 5-gallon can of accelerant.

“A blinding flash seared my eyes and made my head swim,” Cunningham said in his book. “An awful force, as if from hell itself, hurled me painfully back against the wall. Dimly I heard Floyd scream, ‘I’m on fire.’ I tried to open my eyes to see what was happening. I couldn’t. Nothing but black-red, stabbing pain raced down the throbbing corridors of my mind. Suddenly I realized it. ‘I’m burning, too!’”

On February 16, 1917, the local newspaper, Hugoton Hermes, reported on the incident: “Mistaking it for kerosene, they put some gasoline in the stove and an explosion followed, the burning gasoline from the busted can striking them on the lower part of the body and the legs; they at once ran to their home 2 miles away but the saturated clothing continued on fire and the burns were deep.”

The burns from the explosion ultimately killed Floyd and damaged Cunningham’s legs so badly the family doctor wanted to amputate. Cunningham and his parents refused and, slowly, he recovered. Through sheer willpower, intensive therapy and creative exercises—he placed himself behind the family cow and used her tail to pull himself along—he built the strength to walk, and eventually to run. Then, he became one of the greatest track stars of all time.

Nicknamed the “Kansas Flyer,” he was a five-time U.S. champion in the 1,500 meter run and, in the 1936 Olympics, won a silver medal in the same event. He also set numerous world records. In the 1930s, he won the Sullivan Award as America’s top amateur athlete, and he won the prestigious Wanamaker Mile at New York’s Millrose Games six times. Later, in the 1970s, he was recognized as the best athlete in the 100-year history of Madison Square Garden.

 

Legendary No. 10

Another world-renowned Kansas athlete with a long list of achievements is women’s basketball star Jackie Stiles, who grew up in Claflin. A prolific scorer from an early age, she capped her high school career by being named a Women’s Basketball Coaches Association All-American and the MVP of the 1997 WBCA High School All-America Game.

She went on to play at Missouri State University, then known as Southwest Missouri State. In 2001, she not only led the Lady Bears on a remarkable run to the NCAA Final Four but also capped off her senior season by becoming the first NCAA Division I women’s player to score more than 1,000 points in a single season. Stiles scored 3,393 points over her collegiate career, becoming the women’s NCAA Division I all-time leading scorer—a record she held for 16 years. A three-time WBCA All-American, two-time first team All-American and a three-time Missouri Valley Conference player of the year, among other accolades, Stiles also claimed the 2001 Wade Trophy, the Honda Sport Award for basketball and the Honda-Broderick Cup, a sweep that recognized her as both the nation’s top women’s basketball player and its top female collegiate athlete. She left the program as one of the most decorated players in school history.

Selected as the fourth overall pick in the 2001 WNBA Draft by the Portland Fire, Stiles was named WNBA Rookie of the Year and selected as a WNBA All-Star, establishing herself as one of the league’s premier young guards. But her professional career was soon complicated by a string of serious injuries. Over the next several years, she underwent numerous procedures and worked hard to return to full strength. Despite her determination and repeated rehabilitation, the injuries ultimately shortened her time in the league.

Even so, her impact on the game endured. In 2016, Stiles was inducted into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame, cementing her legacy as one of the sport’s most dynamic scorers. Today, she channels her lifelong passion for the game into basketball camps, clinics and personal training, sharing her love of the sport with the same drive that once carried her from a small Kansas town to the national stage.

 

Wichita Monrovians

Then there were the Wichita Monrovians. On June 21, 1925, this all-Black semi-pro baseball team took to the field against an opponent that stood for everything that Kansas is not: the Ku Klux Klan.

The 5,000-seat stadium was packed as the Monrovians played against the Wichita Ku Klux Klan No. 6 at Island Park along the Arkansas River in downtown Wichita. The summer heat was a broiling 102 degrees by the time the first pitch was thrown. Local newspapers had advised spectators to leave their weapons at home—fears of violence as oppressive as the heat hung in the air.

The game took place five years after Andrew “Rube” Foster founded the Negro National League at a Kansas City, Missouri, YMCA, and 20 years before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in the major leagues. At the time, sustaining a Black league was a struggle, but there was no doubt that the Monrovians were good. Their 1922 record stood at 52 wins with only eight losses. But how did this game against the KKK even come about?

According to Wichita State University history professor John Dreifort, writing for the Wichita Eagle on June 18, 2021, the klan did not schedule the game out of the spirit of sportsmanship.

“The KKK was under heavy pressure from politicians in the state to begin behaving a little bit more appropriately,” Dreifort said. “They were not nice guys. But they were in danger of losing their charter. It wasn’t that they were eager to play the Wichita Monrovians. They needed to show themselves as being a bit more civil than they had been. Keeping in mind, the KKK was anti-Black, anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant.”

In some ways, Wichita was the perfect place to hold the game. Henry J. Allen, publisher of the Wichita Beacon and governor of Kansas, was adamantly opposed to the klan. Along with his journalist friend William Allen White, Allen helped break the political and economic grip the organization had held on Kansas. Earlier that year, the klan had lost its charter to do business in the state. They needed a win, not just on the scoreboard but in the court of public opinion.

Although much of the game’s detail has been lost, we know this much for certain: The Monrovians defeated their opponents, 10-8. A few days later, the Wichita Eagle called it “the best attended and most interesting game in Wichita.”

Much of the Monrovians’ history has faded with time, but we remember that for one sweltering June afternoon, they took a stand against intolerance and won. In that historic moment, they proved that hate has no home here.

 

Kansas Whirlwind

Wrestler Pete Mehringer is another Kansas athlete who refused to be ordinary. Twisting and turning in a style all his own, competing like no one had seen before, he earned the nickname “Kansas Whirlwind.”

Growing up in Kinsley in the 1920s, Mehringer wanted to wrestle. Because his school did not have a wrestling program, he subscribed to the “Frank Gotch and Farmer Burns School of Wrestling and Physical Culture,” a correspondence course that taught him the necessary moves.

He studied hard and, as only a high school sophomore, was appointed the school’s wrestling coach. He formed a team and taught his fellow students how to wrestle with some success—at the 1928 state tournament, he won his first individual title and his team placed fourth. Two years later, he claimed his second state title, though getting there proved challenging; according to Dave Webb, author of 399 Kansas Characters (Kansas Heritage Center, 1994), Mehringer had to hitchhike to the meet.

He qualified for the Los Angeles Olympics in 1932, a time of great uncertainty as the Great Depression gripped the nation, and went on to win the gold medal in wrestling.

Afterward, Mehringer returned home to pursue a career in football. He played for teams in Los Angeles and Chicago before working as a stuntman in Hollywood, where he appeared in more than 40 movies. In 1983, four years before his death, he was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame.

 

McPherson Globe Refiners

Four years after Mehringer claimed gold in wrestling, another group of Kansans set out to prove themselves on the world’s biggest stage.

Basketball made its Olympic debut at the 1936 Berlin Games. The American team that swept the competition, defeating teams from 21 other countries, included six players from an amateur basketball team in Kansas called the McPherson Globe Refiners.

In the 1930s, local businesses and industries often sponsored amateur teams to promote their products and build name recognition. The Globe Refiners were coached by Gene Johnson, an innovative leader who developed strategies for faster, more exciting basketball. He helped develop such tactics as the fast break, full-court zone pressure, and something the game had never seen before: the dunk.

The term itself was coined by a sports journalist watching the Globe Refiners warm up. “They left the floor, reached up and pitched the ball downward into the hoop, much like a cafeteria customer dunking a roll in coffee.”

The Olympic team members from Kansas included Joe Fortenberry—the world’s first dunker—Tex Gibbons, Francis Johnson, Jack Ragland, Willard Schmidt and Bill Wheatley. Gene Johnson served as the assistant coach.

The championship game against Canada was played in heavy rain on a clay court, a surface choice that betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of the sport. The conditions turned the court into a slippery, mud-caked mess that made dribbling and passing next to impossible. But the Americans still found a way, grinding out a low-scoring, hard-earned 19-8 victory. 

James Naismith, the inventor of the sport and the first-ever coach of a Kansas basketball team, presented the Olympic gold medal to the U.S. team that day in a fitting full-circle moment for the man who started it all 45 years earlier.