Pictured above: David Bazzel has grown the club into one of the largest of its kind. (Photos by DeWaine Duncan)
Since its 2004 launch, the Little Rock Touchdown Club has grown into one of the largest and most respected clubs of its kind in the country. Now boasting 545 members, its weekly Monday luncheon programs span football season each year and regularly draw capacity crowds.
Sam Pittman spoke to the club on Aug. 22.
The club draws some of the biggest names in sports and kicks off its season each August with the sitting head coach of the Razorbacks. Thus, Sam Pittman opened the 2023 slate last month and drew a full house of more than 600 to the Doubletree Hotel in downtown Little Rock. The next week, popular ESPN broadcaster Laura Rutledge drew another big crowd.
Laura Rutledge during her appearance on Aug. 28.
For week three, the club had to move to the Statehouse Convention Center to accommodate the speaker. Former Razorback player and club founder David Bazzel said the club sold a record 1,300 tickets in less than five hours after tickets went on sale for Peyton Manning, the Super Bowl-winning quarterback who played college ball at Tennessee and is now one of the world’s most recognizable sports celebrities.
Peyton Manning was the speaker on Sept. 5.
“To get Peyton Manning is unbelievable,” Bazzel said. “For our club to get him is remarkable.”
The club seems to raise the bar each year with its lineups of speakers, and last year, it established a high one. Speakers included Jon Gruden, Kirk Herbstreit and Paul Finebaum. The 2021 lineup included Terry Bradshaw.
The club’s first meeting drew a mostly word-of-mouth crowd of 45 back in 2004. Since then, it has realized some impressive numbers, including more than 10 million hits on social media platforms. It has welcomed former coaches and players as speakers who accounted for more than 10,000 wins at all levels, 43 college national championships, 11 Heisman trophies, 18 NFL Hall of Fame inductions and 10 Super Bowl MVP awards.
The big names help draw people to the club, Bazzel said, but the community’s love of sports and support of local athletes attracts them as well. Last year, the club averaged close to 300 attendees each week, and it is the only organization of its kind in the nation to have every meeting and event broadcast live.
At the end of each season, the club hosts an end-of-the-year awards banquet honoring local prep and college athletes and distributing several awards. The awards banquet honors an MVP from each Arkansas college team, coaches and players of the year from each high school classification, as well as a national collegiate player of the year, an SEC offensive and defensive player of the year, and an SEC coach of the year. The club also presents the Dan Hampton Award and Willie Roaf Award to the state’s top high school and college defensive and offensive linemen of the year, respectively; the Cliff Harris Award to the nation’s small college player of the year; the Darren McFadden Award to the collegiate running back of the year in Arkansas; and the Sully Award, named for KATV broadcaster Steve Sullivan and honoring the broadcasting call of the year in the state.
The remainder of the ‘23 lineup will include Arkansas AD Hunter Yurachek on Sept. 18; Peyton Hillis, former Razorback and NFL back with Denver and Cleveland, on Sept. 25; Jim McMahon, former BYU and Super Bowl-winning QB with the Chicago Bears, on Oct. 2; Arkansas State Head Coach Butch Jones on Oct. 9; Jackie Sherrill, former head coach at Pitt, Texas A&M and Mississippi State, on Oct. 16; UCA Head Coach Nathan Brown on Oct. 23; SEC Network analyst Chris Doering on Oct. 30; Alyssa Lang, SEC Network host and sideline reporter, on Nov. 6; Ryan McGee of ESPN’s Marty & McGee show on Nov. 13; and David Cutcliffe, Peyton Manning’s OC at Tennessee and former head coach at Ole Miss and Duke, on Nov. 21 (a Tuesday).
Bazzel is quick to distribute praise for the club’s success and deflects credit to club members for “showing up;” to the club’s team of volunteers, now numbering more than 25 and which Bazzel calls the best volunteer group in America; and to the club’s growing list of sponsors, which now includes AY Media Group and Arkansas Money & Politics.
The club does not turn a profit. All proceeds from ticket sales and sponsorships go to paying speakers’ fees and their hotel and travel costs, securing future speakers and to overhead, such as A/V and security. While not every speaker charges a fee, Bazzel said the club usually pays anywhere from $1,500 to $25,000.
The club, which is the host organization for the Arkansas Chapter of the National Football Foundation, is overseen by a board that now includes Bazzel, Clint Albright, Bob Bomar, Renata Jenkins Byler, Nate Coulter, Ronald Davis, Wally Hall, Tommy Harkins, Judy Henry, Bill Jackson, Bruce James, Rob Janes, Anne Jansen, BJ Maack, Andrew Meadors, Scott Miller, Ark Monroe, Nancy Monroe, Rex Nelson, Kinney O’Conner, David Parker, John Pierron, Jim Rasco, Wes Sutton and Gary Underwood.
Listen to what some of the speakers had to say after the meeting in the video below.
