Carlton Hanta's baseball legacy has come full circle.

The 1948 Mid-Pacific Institute graduate went from Hawai'i to the University of Houston, and onto Japan where he became a professional all-star, and now returns to Houston, where he will be inducted into the school's Hall of Fame in November.

"I was real honored," said Hanta, 77, who was notified of his nomination last month. Hanta played for Houston from 1952-54 and led the Cougars to their first College World Series in 1953. He is the first American of Japanese ancestry to be selected as a collegiate baseball All-American, according to the school, and finished his collegiate career with a school-record batting average of .363.

Hanta will be inducted with eight other greats, including record-setting quarterback David Klingler, Harlem Globetrotter Louis Dunbar, Olympic silver medalists Kirk Baptiste and Rita Crockett, linebacker and current Dallas Cowboys coach Wade Phillips and the 1967-68 basketball team that included Elvin Hayes.

"I couldn't believe there were such great guys that Houston produced," said Hanta, who will be enshrined with Houston's finest, such as golfer Fred Couples, broadcaster Jim Nantz, basketball players Don Chaney, Clyde Drexler and Hakeem Olajuwon, and volleyball's Flo Hyman.

That's pretty good company for a player who taught himself how to play shortstop after Houston coach Lovette Hill told the 5-foot-6, 130-pound Hanta he was "too small to pitch."

"What he lacked in size, he made up in athletic ability," said Houston teammate and longtime friend Foy Boyd. "He was aggressive, and when he did anything, he did it with all his heart."

Hanta learned to play shortstop with Boyd's support.

"Nobody taught me how to pick up ground balls," said Hanta, who pitched at Mid-Pacific and was selected to the Hawai'i Interscholastic High School All-Star Team in 1947 and 1948. "After practice, Foy fungoed me ground balls at shortstop. The balls bounced and hit me all over my body. That's the way I learned. The credit goes to Foy for hitting all those grounders to me. The coach didn't have time to do that. Nowadays, you have three, four coaches. Our days, it was one coach."

Added Boyd: "I admired his ambition. It gave me great pleasure to spend time with him."

PATIENCE PAYS OFF

Hanta flourished under the tutelage of Boyd and Hill, who stuck with his inexperienced, sophomore shortstop in 1952. (Hanta later named two of his three sons after Boyd and Hill).

"If you can imagine, a guy playing Division I shortstop for the first time making errors," Hanta said. "I hit only .211 ... but coach Hill had patience. He saw something in me. Nowadays, if a coach did that at UH, the fans would get on the coach and tell him to get that shortstop out of there."

Hill's patience was rewarded the following season when Hanta hit .354, scored 26 runs and helped lead the Cougars (15-11) to 12 wins in their final 14 regular-season games. That season Hanta became the first player in Cougar history to be selected as an All-American, earning third-team honors.

That season, Houston — the Missouri Valley Conference Western Division champ — advanced to the playoffs where it eliminated MVC Eastern Division winner Detroit in two games, and then won two of three from Oklahoma in the NCAA District 5 Playoffs to earn a berth to the College World Series in Omaha, Neb.

In the District 5 Playoffs, Hanta blasted a game-winning home run in the bottom of the 10th inning to lift Houston over Oklahoma, 8-7, in the second game. In the third game, Boyd, who started in centerfield, came in as a relief pitcher in the second inning and shut out the Sooners in a 5-3 win to clinch a trip to Rosenblatt Stadium.

The undermanned Cougars didn't last long in Omaha, however.

"We went there and played only two games," Hanta said. "We lost to Boston College (4-1) and Stanford (7-6).

"I was looking at the team photo, and we had only 14 players," Hanta added. "You're allowed 25, I think. In the College World Series, you need the pitchers to advance because sometimes you play two games in one day. We had a lot of nerve to go in there with only 14 players."

GRIDIRON DREAMS

Hanta enrolled at Houston with the idea of walking on for the Cougar football team.

"I never played football," Hanta said. "I wanted that challenge."

Hanta said he adapted "pretty quickly" at Houston because of sports, but he was shocked to see racial segregation — "white" and "colored" restrooms — in the early 1950s.

"I'm not white. I'm not black. Heck, I went into the colored side," recalled Hanta, who is originally from Ka'a'awa and now lives in Kuli'ou'ou Valley.

In the fall of his freshman year, Hanta made his mark on the gridiron, playing intramural football — without shoes.

"I didn't have money to buy shoes," Hanta said. "Everyone thought that was a big thing. This poor bastard playing football barefooted."

Hanta eventually made the Houston junior varsity football team, playing sparingly as a running back in his freshman and sophomore seasons. During that time, he met his future teammate Boyd, a scholarship baseball player from El Paso, Texas, who encouraged Hanta to try out for the baseball team as a sophomore.

"When he came to the university, he didn't know anybody," said Boyd, who lives in Midland, Texas, and works as an engineer and consultant in the oil and gas industry. "I kind of took him under my wing."

GOING HUNGRY

The financially-strapped Hanta often went hungry in his early playing days at Houston. Eventually, he earned a meal plan with his scholarship as a junior. Boyd helped with that, too.

"I had 25 cents for lunch," Hanta said. "I could drink a milkshake or buy a pack of cigarettes. If I smoked, I didn't get that hungry. So I had to make that choice. Somedays I would go without lunch to practice. One day at practice, I couldn't hit and coach made fun of me. I got mad and stormed into the locker room. That's when Boyd talked to the coach and told him I wasn't eating. So the coach gave me (a meal plan). That made a lot of difference. I had so many thankful things that happened to me."

After his college career, Hanta played minor league baseball in Texas in 1954-56 where he made $300 a month. Later, he joined the U.S. Army from 1956-58, where he was stationed at Fort Lee, Va., and then played briefly for Asahi, Hawai'i's most storied senior league team that was owned by the late Angel Maehara.

In 1958, Maehara negotiated a pro baseball contract in the Japanese Pacific League for Hanta, who signed a $5,000 bonus to play for the Nankai Hawks. The team advanced to the Japan World Series in 1959 where it swept the powerhouse Yomiuri Giants in four games.

"I couldn't sleep the night before the first game," said Hanta, who missed the majority of the series after sustaining a chest injury on a slide attempt in the first game. "Our pitcher (Tadashi Sugiura) pitched in all four games, and won all four games."

Hanta was selected as an all-star in 1959-60, and later played for the Chunichi Dragons in 1962. Hanta retired from the pros in 1962, and coached professionally in Japan with Nankai, Chunichi and Toei for 10 more years.

To this day, Hanta's best catch in Japan was meeting his wife, Michiko, a former usherette at Osaka Stadium. They were married on April 1, 1960, a week before opening day.

"He was always thinking about baseball," said Michiko, who has accepted her husband's intense love for baseball. "If he lost a game, whoa! He had a habut (grumpy) face."