Corky Palmer Inducted into Hall of Fame

From School Reports and The Clarion Ledger

Before Corky Palmer, there was Punchy Palmer, or as the joke around Hattiesburg goes: Corky Palmer is just Punchy Palmer with a college education.
Carlton Van "Corky" Palmer will be inducted into the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame on Friday. Nobody would be more proud than his dad, Carl Milton "Punchy" Palmer, who died in 1972 when Corky, his oldest son, was but 18. Father and son shared a love of all sports, especially baseball and particularly the New York Yankees.
"Dad gave me the best advice I ever got when I was 9 years old," Corky Palmer says. "He told me, Son, 'I know you love Mickey Mantle, but you got Yogi Berra's body. If you're going to play baseball, you gotta be a catcher.'"
Corky Palmer became a catcher, all through the Hattiesburg youth leagues, at Hattiesburg High School and then Southern Miss. Nobody loved baseball more than Corky, unless it was Punchy. And catcher was the perfect position for Corky, who was long on baseball smarts but short on foot speed. The entire game was in front of him. He was involved in every play. He became pretty much a coach while he was playing.
Punchy Palmer had played all sports at Hattiesburg High. He was the football team's quarterback, the baseball team's centerfielder, the basketball team's point guard and the track team's star hurdler.
"I got some of his hand-eye coordination," Corky Palmer says. "The speed part didn't take."
From field to dugout
But Corky Palmer will tell you he had opportunities his daddy, a shift worker at a Petal petroleum company, never had.
"When my daddy finished high school he went right to work to support his family," Corky Palmer says. "I always thought he should have been a coach. Nobody loved it more. Nobody knew how to teach it better. He just didn't have the education."
But Punchy Palmer was a fixture at baseball parks around Hattiesburg. His homespun baseball wisdom, which he dispensed gladly, with a country twang and at length, benefitted any kid who would listen. Nobody listened more than Corky.
Corky Palmer's baseball career has a one-year blank line. That was the 1972-73 school year, the year after his high school graduation when his father died in December of 1972 and, says Corky Palmer, "It knocked me for a loop. It took me a while to get over it."
After taking a year off, Palmer became USM's starting catcher for four straight years. You hear coaches talk these days about how a player is so smart that "he's like having a coach on the field."
Corky Palmer really was. Unlike today's college baseball players, he called all the pitches and set the infield. The signals didn't come from the dugout.
So it was only natural he would go into coaching. He did so immediately upon graduation from USM.
First, he guided Columbus Lee High School to three straight Little 10 Conference titles. Then he moved closer to home to Columbia High, where his 1983 team won a south state championship.
Palmer returned to USM as an assistant coach for the 1985-86 seasons before moving to Meridian Community College, where his career really took off.
Over 10 seasons, his Meridian teams won 409 games, lost just 160 and made three appearances in the national juco world series.

In 1996, Palmer led MCC to its best season in its history with a runner-up finish in the JUCO World Series in Grand Junction, Colorado.
In 1997, Palmer returned to USM as the head coach, succeeding Hill Denson. In 12 seasons, his teams won 458 games, lost 281 and made the NCAA Tournament field eight times.
Storybook finish
There's an old saying about our national pasttime that "baseball finds you."
Despite Palmer's earlier success, well-chronicled regionally, the baseball world discovered Corky Palmer in 2009 after he had already announced his retirement as baseball coach at USM. After a fast start, that 2009 USM team was decimated by injuries and seemingly headed nowhere when Palmer announced his retirement in May. Then, Palmer's last team got blistering hot, finished second to Rice in the Conference USA Tournament, won an NCAA Regional at Georgia Tech and then a Super Regional at Florida. In his last season, Palmer made it to Omaha and the College World Series.
Naturally, his folksy, homespun humor and storytelling were a hit with the national media. Corky Palmer pretty much stole the show at the pre-College World Series press conference, and the other coaches, many famous, seemed to enjoy it even more than he did.
USM took eventual runner-up Texas to the limit before losing 7-6 in the opening round. North Carolina then blistered USM 11-4 in the elimination round.
Said North Carolina coach Mike Fox, afterward: "First of all, I would like to echo everything that has been said about Corky Palmer. He has had a very distinguished career. It was just an honor to be on the field with him today. It was just a terrific ride his team took him on."
It was. And it was a storybook end to a terrific baseball career. So, what would Punchy Palmer say?
"I think what would make him most proud," Corky Palmer says, "is that I was fairly successful at something I loved doing so much. I think he'd tell me I done good."