MOULTRIE — Tommy Tucker was a good enough pitcher to try out for the Georgia-Florida League’s Moultrie Colt .22’s, sign a contract, throw a three-hit shutout in his first game and post a 2-1 record with a 1.27 ERA in his first professional season.

But while he enjoyed baseball, nothing compared to the pure thrill of football Friday nights.

A fiercely competitive linebacker for Moultrie High, Tucker summed up his football philosophy like this: “At 8 o’clock nobody knew who was best. At 10 o’clock, you did.”

And more often than not, it was Tucker and his teammates who came out on top.

The outstanding linebacker and pitcher for Moultrie High from 1959-1962, who overcame back problems and a severe knee injury to have outstanding careers in both sports, will be among the 22 members of the Colquitt County Sports Hall of Fame’s 2003 class to be inducted at the annual banquet scheduled for Thursday, Oct. 16 at the Colquitt County High cafeteria.

No less an authority on Moultrie sports than longtime coach and observer than Tom White says that if an All-Time Packers Fighting Spirit trophy were awarded, it would be found in Tucker’s Atlanta office.

“He was an intense football player,” White said. “And was an outstanding tackler. You just didn’t run to his side. If you did, something was going to happen.”

Dr. Tommy Tucker, now an internist with Sandy Springs Internal Medicine in Atlanta, still remembers the glee with which he played linebacker for the Packers.

“I just loved to hit folks,” he said. “It was like a disease. What I loved to do was get in the hole quickly and unload on a back. There was nothing better than that.”

Not even mowing down opposing batters on a spring afternoon. And Tucker could do that with the best of them too.

“He was a very, very good pitcher,” said Bobby Cobb, his former Moultrie High batterymate, who caught a number of fine Packer pitchers, including Wayne Tucker, Doug Tucker, Bob Montgomery and Johnny Cannon.

“Tommy was like a bulldog. He threw very hard and had good stuff to go with it.”

Born Oct. 22, 1944, in Augusta while his father was a student at the Medical College of Georgia, Tucker played two years of youth baseball in Bainbridge before moving with his family to Moultrie in the mid-1950s.

By the time he was a freshman, he had developed enough as an athlete to contribute to the Packers football, basketball and baseball teams.

Tucker, who was just 13 when he played his first varsity game, joined teammates Wayne Tucker, Sam Freeman and Clyde “Piggie” Isom as being heralded as coach Knuck McCrary’s “Four Freshmen.”

The rest of his promising football career was slowed by Scheurman’s disease, which affected his back, and then, in his senior year, a torn ligament in his knee.

“You still didn’t run directly at him,” White remembers. “You’d get killed. But if he could’ve pursued the ball, he’d’ve been an All-American.

“And he was still a great leader. Whatever he said, people listened to.”

When Tucker was a sophomore, he was able to play on the same Packers team with Don Porterfield, the player he called “the best back I ever saw.”

Porterfield, who also will be inducted into the Hall of Fame next week, rushed for 1,073 yards and scored 101 points, including 14 touchdowns and 17 point-after conversions.

“He’d bounce off of you and he’d be gone,” Tucker said. “He could accelerate with big steps, stop and go.”

Tucker played both ways, but preferred defense, where he called the signals as a sophomore.

“I always thought playing linebacker was the most competitive thing you could do,” he said.

His style of play earned the respect Albany High, which named him to its all-opponent team during his sophomore and senior seasons.

It also endeared him to Tom White and the two have remained close friends since.

“He had no ego as a coach,” Tucker said. “He was the glue that held it all together.”

Tucker credits White with helping develop a long line of smallish, quick “toy guards,” including Danny Hortman, Dewey Cobb, Sam Freeman and Buddy McCoy that helped lead the Packers rushing attack.

Tucker also started on the basketball team as a freshman and a sophomore.

“I was 5-11 in the ninth grade and I’d go to the gym and shoot all the time,” Tucker said.

And when the weather warmed, he was ready to take the hill. Like many other young Colquitt County pitchers, he came under the tutelage of Kurt Scheub.

Tucker also found a book written by St. Louis Cardinals’ Bob Gibson and emulated the great right-hander’s style.

He was coach Ace Little’s opening-day pitcher in 1962 but the knee injury he suffered the previous fall caused his fast ball to flatten out, he said.

So he learned a slider and continued to frustrate opposing hitters.

And a year after graduating from high school, he tried out for the Moultrie Colt .22s, the Houston Colt .45s Georgia-Florida League franchise and was awarded a contract.

In his first outing, in the second game of a July 6, 1963 doubleheader, Tucker shut out the Brunswick Cardinals, allowing just three hits in seven innings, striking out four and walking four.

Tucker finished the season with a 2-1 record and 1.27 ERA. The following season, he played for the Statesville (N.C.) team in the Western Carolina League for manager Rudy York before retiring to concentrate on his pre-med studies.

While studying Emory, he play soccer for four years, two seasons as a fullback and two more as a goalie.

When he was a senior, the Emory team went 11-1.

Tucker also attended the University of Virginia and the University of Mississippi and served in the U.S. Air Force before practicing for three years in Moultrie.

He then joined an internal medicine practice in Sandy Springs and for a number of years served as the Dunwoody High team doctor.

“It was the only way I knew how to give back,” he said.

Tucker also has taught for 20 years in Emory Medical College’s second-year program in medicine.

And despite the bad knee, Tucker became a runner and for a number of years joined White and several other Moultrians in competing in the Peachtree Road Race.

Tucker and his wife, the former Nan Johnson of Moultrie, have two children, Avery and Slade.