Spencer, Tejas lead 2012 Hall of Fame class

Bill Spencer of Anchorage, whose Mount Marathon records are both enduring and envied, and Vern Tejas of New York, who has stood atop Mount McKinley more often than anyone in history, will be inducted into the shrine during a February ceremony, the Hall of Fame announced Monday.

Also gaining admittance into the Hall of Fame:

• Juneau's Gold Medal basketball tournament, a 66-year-old tradition that draws hundreds of players each March. The tournament, which attracts so many people that it also serves as a venue for job fairs and census counts, will be inducted in the events category.

• The UAF men's basketball team's championship run at the 2002 Top of the World Classic in Fairbanks, a city that was electrified when the Nanooks beat the odds to become the first and so far only Division II men's team to win an otherwise all-Division I tournament. The championship run will be inducted in the moments category.

"I want to impress upon you how much discussion we had yesterday," selection panel chairman Bob Eley of Fairbanks said at a press conference. "It was very robust. It's kind of fun to be in there and hear all of the different opinions.

"I don't think we're ever going to have the problem of running out of people to talk about."

Nine ballots were cast in the selection process. Eight came from selection committee members and the ninth came from the results of online voting by the public. Harlow Robinson, president and founder of the Hall of Fame, said 1,533 votes were cast by the public.

The four selections will make up the sixth class of the Hall of Fame.

Spencer, 55, and Tejas, 58, both hold as legendary status in Alaska and beyond.

Spencer is a multi-sport athlete with strong credentials in cross-country skiing and orienteering -- among other things, he was a member of the 1988 Winter Olympics cross-country ski team and the nordic coach of UAA's ski team -- but he is perhaps best known for his accomplishments in Seward's annual Mount Marathon mountain race.

Spencer owns both the junior and senior records in the race, which is only about 3.5 miles long, but includes a brutal ascent and descent of the perilous, 3,022-foot slope that overlooks Resurrection Bay.

In 1973, he won the junior race, which goes halfway up the mountain and back, in a time of 24 minutes, 34 seconds. The next year, as an 18-year-old first-time entrant in the senior race, he established a new standard for the race up and down the entire mountain, clocking 44:11.

Then, in 1981, he broke his own record with a blazing 43:23. Thirty years later, the record remains. For a measure of this revered record, consider that only one other runner has dipped below 44 minutes and only 13 have finished in less than 45 minutes.

Tejas made his name not by dashing up and down mountains -- although he has done a version of that too -- but by scaling the world's tallest peaks, often in the worst conditions imaginable.

In March 1988, he became both a celebrity and a hero in Alaska when he became the first person to make a solo summit Denali in the winter, a 28-day survival test that riveted Alaskans when, because of fierce winds and whiteouts, he dropped out of sight and contact for six days after his March 7 summit.

Tejas has since earned international recognition as one of the world's most adventurous and prolific climbers.

He has reached the top of McKinley's 20-320-foot summit 50 times, reaching the half-century mark this spring at age 58, and he has climbed the Seven Summits -- the highest peak on each of the world's seven continents -- multiple times.

In 2010, he set a speed record for scaling the Seven Summits in 134 days, reclaiming the record he first set in 2005, when he did in 187 days (in 2008, a Dutch climber set and briefly held the record of 136 days). When Tejas set the record in 2010, it marked the ninth time he had successfully climbed the Seven Summits -- another record.

And he's still at it.

"If he's not already on the road to Antarctica this minute, he will be soon," selection committee member Lew Freedman said.

Freedman and Eley both spoke of the night they sat courtside at the Carlson Center in Fairbanks, watching UAF -- a team filled with Alaska-bred players that had gone 4-23 the previous season -- knock off Wisconsin-Green Bay, Nebraska and Weber State to claim the Top of the World championship, a now-defunct eight-team tournament.

The victories shocked basketball experts and delighted Fairbanks. By championship night, the city was in love with the Nanooks and the Carlson Center was a sellout.

"You couldn't hardly hear in there," Eley said. "The next day, at 20 below, they organized a parade and put the players on the end of a flat-bed truck and drove them around Fairbanks."

If 2002 brought a cherished basketball moment to Fairbanks, every March brings a beloved tournament -- and hundreds if not thousands of players -- to Juneau for the Gold Medal tournament.

Eley told a story about a man who was on leave from deployment in Kuwait faced with a dilemma upon his brief return to Alaska: go see his mother or play in the Gold Medal tournament? He picked the tournament.

Southeast villages like Hoonah and Angoon become ghost towns during the week-long tournament, because everyone is either playing or watching basketball at Juneau-Douglas High School. Games are played 18 hours a day and seats are scarce.

"The tournament is as much about relationships as it is about basketball," wrote Heather Lende of Haines in a 2001 Daily News article. "(T)he tournament has been about more than the universal lessons of sport and life any fan can recognize. Community leaders credit it with lowering the suicide rate of young men, teaching respect for Natives and building relationships between Natives and non-Natives."

Daily News reporter Beth Bragg is a member of the Alaska Sports Hall of Fame selection panel. Reach her at bbragg@adn.com or 257-4335.