The Intimidator—who won 76 Cup races and seven championships—made his black No. 3 a larger-than-life symbol in NASCAR with an aggressive driving style that rattled competitors and enamored fans. Shares the record for most Cup series championships (seven) with Richard Petty. Won his first title in 1980, his second full season. Won the 1998 Daytona 500. Died in an accident on the last lap of the 2001 Daytona 500.

ARCADIA, Calif. - Hall of Fame jockey Ismael “Milo” Valenzuela, who twice won the Kentucky Derby and rode five-time horse of the year Kelso in the 1960s, died Wednesday after a long illness. He was 74. Mr. Valenzuela’s daughter, Diana, told officials at the National Racing Hall of Fame and Museum in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., that her father died at his home near Santa Anita Park surrounded by his children, grandchildren and other family members.

Gene Crane, a former track star at Hermitage High School, will join five others in the latest class selected for the Virginia Tech Sports Hall of Fame. In 1977, Crane set a school record in the steeplechase that still stands when he ran a time of 8:47.2 on the way to a third-place finish in the 1978 State Championships. He also set a school mark in the 5,000 meters that day, finishing fourth. Crane took second place in the steeplechase at the 1979 Metro Outdoor Track & Field Championships. He finished second in the event at the Atlantic Coast Relays and the State Championships that season.

As Rod Woodson goes down the list of those joining him in this year’s Pro Football Hall of Fame class of inductees, the former Pittsburgh Steelers defensive back pauses when he reaches one name. “Derrick Thomas and the tragedy that happened to him,“ said Woodson, referring to the former Kansas City Chiefs’ pass-rushing linebacker whose career was cut short in February 2000, when he died following a car accident. “I wish he was still here to go in with.“

DALLAS Now that Bob Hayes is going into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, people hearing his story for the first time are going to wonder what took so long. After all, he changed the game. Hayes brought a new kind of speed to pro football: Olympic gold-medal speed. “Bullet Bob” won two of them in 1964, tying the world record in the 100 meters and running one of the greatest anchor legs ever seen to bring the United States from far behind in the 400-meter relay.

Hampton University has established an Athletics Hall of Fame and plans to enshrine its first class in November.

MINNEAPOLIS Randall McDaniel still looks as if he could lower his 6-4, 275-pound frame into that strange, off-balance stance and line up at left guard, poised to plow into the guy on the other side. He has other work to do, though. Fitting with his preference to be in the background during a 14-year NFL career along the relative anonymity of the offensive line, he’s now a full-time basic skills instructor at an elementary school in a Minneapolis suburb spending his time with second-graders born far too late to have seen his success with the Minnesota Vikings.

The sun reflecting off the silver dome draws your eyes as you approach downtown Charlotte. Designed to look like sheet metal from a stock car but in the shape of an oval racetrack, it’s the signature element of the NASCAR Hall of Fame. With the opening nearly 10 months away, you still have to dodge the machinery and scaffolding, hopscotch the sticky red clay and block out the constant noise of drilling as you visit the site. But the outer shell is complete and ready to house NASCAR’s long-awaited celebration of its past.

BOSTON The best thing Jim Rice did in a Red Sox uniform probably won’t be mentioned on his Hall of Fame plaque. It doesn’t show up in his statistics or support his stature as one of the dominant hitters of his era. Twenty-seven years ago, the Red Sox slugger climbed out of the dugout and into the stands at Fenway Park to help get an injured boy the urgent medical care he needed. Rice’s quick actions saved the 4-year-old boy’s life, his family and doctors believe, and belied the surly persona that kept Rice waiting for the call from Cooperstown for 15 years.

The newest members of the Hermitage High Athletic Hall of Fame will be inducted in a ceremony tonight at 7:30 in the school auditorium. Admission is free. The inductees are Danny Collawn (Class of 1995), an all-district, all-region and all-state wrestler; Joi Irby (1999), an all-district and all-region basketball player, who went on to play at Georgetown University; and David Boyden (1998), the center on Hermitage’s region basketball runner-up team in 1998. He was all-district, all-region and All-Metro and was an all-conference selection at Western Kentucky University, where he is now an assistant coach.

Retired Lt. Col. Henmar “Gabe” Gabriel, of Richmond’s Thomas Jefferson High School Class of 1954, was inducted into the Hall of Fame of Parachuting on Feb.14 in Felicity, Calif. He was inducted for his vision and fortitude in establishing the West Point Cadet Sport Parachute Team (skydiving) 50 years ago when he was a plebe at West Point.

I am a football guy first and foremost. I spend the months that aren’t September through the first weekend in February waiting for September through the first weekend in February. I also enjoy basketball a good deal, but I’m a guy who follows football. That’s just who I am. And I say all of this to proactively admit that I’m not really a baseball guy. I am a fan of the Boston Red Sox, but that is almost solely out of respect for my best friend. It means a lot to him that the people around him also like the Red Sox, so I do—fervently, even—but that’s more about our friendship than my attachment to the Sox.

The Virginia Communications Hall of Fame will add five names to its roster this year: a print journalist, an educator, a First Amendment lawyer, a former talk show host and a broadcast executive. The 2009 inductees increase the hall’s membership to 112. They are:

NEW YORK—Rickey Henderson sped his way into the Hall of Fame on the first ballot, and Jim Rice made it in on his 15th and final try. Henderson, baseball’s career leader in runs scored and stolen bases, received 94.8 percent of the vote from the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, well above the 75 percent needed, and the 13th vote ever for a player in his first year on the ballot.

Former three-sport standout and volleyball coach Wendy Wadsworth and broadcaster Terry Sisisky will be inducted into the Virginia Commonwealth University Athletic Hall of Fame on Saturday.