Paul Blair wouldn't have wanted this honor. Not that he hadn't been recognized in halls of fame before -- first at his alma mater, West Liberty University, in 1991, a year later at the Arkansas Swimming Hall of Fame and then once more in 2008 at the American Swimming Coaches Hall of Fame.
But as daughter Shawna explained, Blair always put his swimmers first.
"He never wanted to be the first person [in swimming] to be inducted into the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame," she said. "He knew that one day with all the success he'd had over the years -- and his swimmers have had -- he felt that recognition would come.
"He'd be incredibly honored."
Almost 16 years after Blair died of prostate cancer at age 57, the revered swimming coach will get his due as part of the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame's 2022 induction class. In nearly three decades running the Arkansas Dolphins Swim Team, Blair trained 26 Olympic qualifiers, six U.S. national champions, served as a U.S. national team coach eight times and led the Dolphins' masters team to five national titles.
Those masters teams were where Doug Martin first got to know Blair. Martin grew up in Little Rock, swimming as a kid before competing in college, but returned to Little Rock at age 28 in 1981, two years after Blair took over the Dolphins.
The hope when the Little Rock Racquet Club hired Blair was that he'd turn a good team into a great team.
What they didn't know was that they were hiring a pioneer.
"When we were growing up, the training regimen for swimmers was to just get in the pool and do thousands and thousands of yards," Martin explained. "Paul was at the forefront [of realizing] that all this long, slow distance swimming didn't help everybody. ... [He] started having his swimmers go fast at practice and not do the volume that was the norm back then."
It helped Martin, who was a sprinter, as well as John Hargis, who trained with Blair throughout his childhood before swimming at Auburn and then qualifying for the 1996 Olympic Games, where he won a gold medal as part of the United States' 400-meter medley relay team.
More than what Blair taught in the pool, it was the way he inspired his swimmers that sticks with Hargis, who took over the Dolphins following Blair's death in late 2006 and also coached at the University of Arkansas-Little Rock.
"He was a molder of youth in all facets of their life," Hargis said. "He helped kids grow and understand what potential they had as an athlete but also as a person."
Marvin Schwartz, like Martin, picked swimming back up well after his competitive college career, joining Blair's masters program.
The three were all only separated by a handful of years, so they shared a different kind of relationship than the one Blair would've had with his age-group swimmers. The masters had a monthly poker game with Blair that rotated between houses.
That didn't stop Blair from providing the same type of inspiration.
"There was once I was training by myself in the 50-meter pool and I saw Paul coming down the steps to the deck," Schwartz said. "I just felt this sense of fulfillment -- here's someone who cares about me, who is willing to work with me to achieve what I felt was important."
In 2003, Blair began to notice some neck pain while at the U.S. Nationals in San Diego. Shawna said her dad didn't think much of it, but upon returning to Little Rock, doctors identified stage IV prostate cancer had metastasized, eating a hole through his spine.
Blair battled for more than three years, displaying his ubiquitous optimism while even adding to his role. UALR added Blair as an assistant to Coach Richard Turner in 2005.
It was yet another entry point for Blair "to give the gift of swimming" to so many in Little Rock and around the state.
Blair died Nov. 8, 2006, but his impact lingers with this induction the latest of several posthumous honors. And while Shawna says her dad would have rather seen one of his swimmers bestowed the recognition before him, the sports fan in Blair would've understood precisely how significant this moment is for his sport in Arkansas.
"He was a fan of swimming, but he was a fan of all sports," Shawna said. "I remember [fellow 2022 inductee] Basil Shabazz and we would talk about him and my dad would say, 'I wonder what I could do with him if I ever got him in the pool.'
"[My dad] would be incredibly proud and I think that it is well past time for a swimmer to be inducted."