By the time Lawrence “Big Daddy” Hunt stepped onto the field at Jack Trice Stadium, Iowa State had already spent a weekend telling him what his younger self had meant to the university.
The school had placed him in its Athletics Hall of Fame, the highest honor awarded by the department. Former teammates had come back to Ames. Family and friends had traveled from different chapters of his life. At halftime of Iowa State’s September 26 game against Utah, Hunt stood before the crowd as one of six members of the 2026 Hall of Fame class.
He signed autographs. He greeted supporters. Then he left.
His grandson had a football game.
It was the kind of decision that could have been explained with a speech, but did not need one. Iowa State had gathered to recognize Big Daddy, the defensive force who made 334 tackles in three varsity seasons and helped the Cyclones reach the first two bowl games in program history. Grandpa, however, had somewhere to be.
That choice is the clearest way into Hunt’s story. The numbers establish why a university honored him. The people who came to see it—and the people he left to go see—begin to explain the man beyond them.
Hunt returned to Ames in late September with more than 60 relatives, friends and former teammates there to celebrate him. The official ceremony took place Friday night at Iowa State’s Sukup End Zone Club, where Hunt received his Hall of Fame ring. The public recognition followed Saturday at halftime.
The weekend began more intimately. At a private dinner Thursday, stories moved around the room among people who had known Hunt as a teammate, a friend, a father, a grandfather and a man who spent his working life trying to redirect young people in trouble. I had an opportunity to speak at Thursday’s dinner. Looking across the room, the best evidence of Hunt’s character was not a statistic or an award. It was the range of people who had made the trip—and the length of time many of them had remained in his life.
Hunt’s path to Iowa began in Delray Beach, Florida. As a young man, he imagined learning a trade and working in his uncle’s paint and body shop. College football was not the plan, even after recruiters recognized what his size, quickness and temperament could become on a defensive line.
His mother changed the plan. Hunt has recalled an Iowa State recruiter telling her that her son was turning down college. She called Hunt into a back room and made clear that he would at least visit Ames. He listened.
In August 1970, he arrived at Iowa State as part of a group of Black recruits from Florida. The move north produced friendships that lasted more than five decades.
Hunt played varsity football from 1971 through 1973, when freshmen were not yet eligible. He became a three-time All-Big Eight selection and a first-team choice in his senior season. He was a sophomore All-American in 1971. His 334 career tackles remain among the highest totals in Iowa State history and are especially striking for a down lineman.
He was there when the Cyclones broke through. The 1971 team reached the Sun Bowl, the first bowl appearance in school history. The next season brought a Liberty Bowl invitation. Hunt played alongside men who became part of his extended family, including Matt Blair, Ike Harris, Keith Krepfle and others whose names still arrive easily when he talks about Ames.
The Pittsburgh Steelers selected Hunt in the 1974 NFL Draft. He did not make professional football the next chapter of his life. In a 2022 interview, Hunt said he had never wanted an NFL career. He had learned how to become the version of himself required to dominate a football game, but he did not want to remain that person indefinitely.
He had written down other goals on his way to college: earn a degree, become the best player he could be, then return to Florida and do something useful in his community.
Hunt earned a degree in child development and went home. He later worked for Eckerd Connects, a nonprofit serving children, young adults and families, and described helping young men involved in the justice system imagine a route toward college or vocational training. Hunt said he helped several young people enroll in college and many more enter vocational programs.
Hunt linked that work to what he had seen growing up as the child of migrant workers. He understood that talent alone did not create options. Somebody had to notice a young person, hold their attention and insist that a different future remained possible.
The morning after friends and relatives spoke about him in Ames, Hunt began talking about his father.
“My dad was not an educated man, but he was a learned man,” Hunt said.
What Hunt remembered was attention. His father did not scan the room while someone spoke to him or look past one person for another.
“If my dad looked at you, he was looking at you,” Hunt said. “He wasn’t looking over there. He wasn’t looking anywhere else. He was looking at you, and he was paying attention to you.”
The lesson was simple enough to repeat and demanding enough to organize a life around: “When you do it, do it well. When you go, go like you mean it.”
“When you do it, do it well. When you go, go like you mean it.”
There is a line between that memory and the young people Hunt counseled. There is another between his father’s undivided attention and the teammates who could still summon decades-old stories over dinner. The inheritance was not a slogan. It was a way of being present with people.
Our friendship began through golf, long after the collisions in the Big Eight and after most of Hunt’s professional work had been done. We played with the Ballstrikers, a group of Black men who gather regularly in Bartow. On those rounds, Hunt became part of another community held together by repetition: the same course, the familiar jokes, the weekend check on the Iowa State score, the small acts of friendship that accumulate when people keep showing up.
The group also plays within a deeper Black golf history in Bartow. That history reaches back to Herbert Dixon, a champion on the segregated United Golfers Association circuit, and Richard “Shine” Lewis. It provides context for Hunt’s present life without turning him into a supporting character in someone else’s.
The story began on a golf course in Bartow. Ames revealed its larger shape.
Across the Hall of Fame weekend, Hunt moved among people from different periods of his life. Former teammates remembered the young defender who could take over a game. His family heard accounts from years before they knew him. He walked through places that had formed him and greeted people who still called him Big Daddy.
The nickname had followed him since high school. Hunt once explained that a cousin gave it to him after a coach found him resting near football practice and pulled him into line. The name traveled to Iowa, where coach Johnny Majors was already introducing him as Big Daddy during his first preseason camp.
But names change depending on who is calling.
During the weekend, Hunt’s granddaughters—young women now—spotted him and ran toward him calling, “Grandpa! Grandpa!” before wrapping him in an embrace. Their ages matter because the moment was not about little children rushing toward a larger-than-life figure. It was about affection that had lasted long enough for children to grow up and still run.
Then came Saturday. Iowa State announced Hunt at halftime. The crowd saw the Hall of Famer: three All-Big Eight selections, two bowl teams, 334 tackles, an NFL draft pick. Hunt received the applause, signed his name and acknowledged the people who had come to honor him.
And then another game pulled him away.
There was no rejection of the honor in leaving. The weekend had already shown how deeply Hunt valued Iowa State. He has kept up with the Cyclones for decades and maintained close relationships with teammates. The departure simply placed the honor in proportion to the rest of his life. A university could celebrate what he had done more than 50 years earlier. His grandson was playing now.
In Bartow, Hunt has said, he is not Big Daddy. He is Lawrence Hunt. The distinction does not diminish the football player. It makes room for the man who returned home, worked with young people, played golf with friends and remained available to his family.
A Hall of Fame naturally looks backward. It collects achievements, fixes them to a name and gives the past a permanent room. Hunt’s weekend in Ames did something else, too. It showed that the relationships built around those achievements were still moving.
Big Daddy had been celebrated. Grandpa had somewhere to be.
Lawrence Hunt’s life was still being well lived.
Photos Credits: Green, Michael H and Iowa State Athletics – CYTV
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