With the 250th anniversary of the founding of the country with the Declaration of Independence, history is in vogue in 2026.
This is the second of The State Journal-Register’s five-part series of some of the best athletes and/or sports figures of all-time from its coverage area. Though it’s a subjective, compiled by sports reporter Ryan Mahan, feel free to email sports@sj-r.com with your own thoughts and share to social media to foster additional feedback.
Not every single community in The State Journal-Register’s coverage area will be listed, but we think this list will be comprehensive for most of the area’s best all-time athletes or sports figures.
Part two is Christian County, the home to the first undefeated boys basketball state champion: Taylorville’s 45-0 run in 1944 will never be surpassed. From the county seat in the middle of the county to Stonington, Pana and Kincaid, Christian County has a tradition of sports excellence.
Part one was Montgomery County. Read about it here.
ASSUMPTION
Lloyd Burdick
Born in Assumption in 1908, he attended Morgan Park Military Academy, an all-boys’ school, in Chicago, where he played football and basketball. At the University of Illinois, Burdick wrestled and played football on the offensive line. In 1927, he helped the Illini win the Big Ten and National championships. In 1930, he also won the Big Ten wrestling heavyweight championship. He played three years in professional football: 1931-32 with the Chicago Bears, where he started 19 out of 22 games at right tackle, and 1933 with the Cincinnati Reds, starting nine games. One day after his 36th birthday, on Aug. 9, 1945, Burdick died when the train he was on was hit from behind by another train. Thirty-four people died, including Burdick. Burdick still has relatives living in and around Assumption. He also called Blue Mound and Stonington home, at different times.
KINCAID
Chuck Boerio
Boerio, a linebacker from Kincaid, has one of the Illinois football stories of legend with a goal line stand in 1951. At the 1-yard line in the second game, against Wisconsin, everyone knew who was getting the ball for the Badgers in a short-yardage situation: fullback Alan “Iron Horse” Ameche. “Hey, Johnny, send Ameche at me,’’ yelled Boerio to Wisconsin quarterback John Coatta. The former Ponies’ standout tackled future Heisman Trophy winner Ameche for a 3-yard loss on the ensuing play, Illinois held three more times and won 14-10 as the team went on to start 7-0 and finished 9-0-1. Boerio was also a center and took first-team honors from the Newspaper Enterprise Association on its defensive team and was a second-team pick at center by the United Press.
He played one season with the Green Bay Packers, but at 6-foot, 205 pounds, he was too small and appeared in just one game for the 1952 Packers. He was an assistant coach at different times for Illinois, Cincinnati and Colorado.
MORRISONVILLE
Al Unser
No, not the famous racing father-son duo who won six combined Indy 500s. This Unser, however, was another famous half of a father-son pairing, but Al Unser and his son, Del Unser, both had Major League Baseball careers. Al Unser, born Oct. 12, 1912 in Morrisonville, was a catcher and second baseman who played in 120 games from 1942-45 for the Detroit Tigers and Cincinnati Reds. His final season, 1945 with Cincinnati, was his best, with a .265 average (54-for-204), with 10 doubles, three triples, three home runs and 21 RBIs in 67 games.
Unser’s professional baseball career, however, was lengthy, beginning in 1933 with the Buffalo Bisons of the International League and ending with the Decatur Commodores with one appearance in 1957. He returned in 1961 with one game and two at-bats for the Midwest League’s Keokuk Cardinals, which he managed for two seasons.
When Feitshans graduate Bill Cundiff played at Keokuk, Iowa, he was managed by Unser. Of Unser, Cundiff told Larry Harnly of the Illinois State Register in 1964, “(Unser) was a clown. He was always joking around. But if you made a mistake in practice, he’d blow up. You’d work until you got it right.”
He hit 129 homers and drove in 664 runs in his major and minor league career, combined. He died in July 1995 and is buried in Decatur. His son, Del Unser, was born in Decatur, spent 15 seasons in the majors for five different teams and won a World Series in 1980 with the Philadelphia Phillies.
PANA
Warren Amling
An Ohio State University football and basketball player, Amling is the only person in the College Football Hall of Fame to also start an NCAA Final Four game. Born in 1924, he was a football captain and fullback for the Pana Panthers before choosing to pursue a bachelor of science degree in veterinary medicine, which Illinois didn’t offer at the time, but Ohio State did.
In three seasons with the Buckeyes’ football team, he won three letters, was a first team All-America guard in 1945 and first team All-America at tackle the following year after being asked to change positions by coach Paul Bixler. He was seventh in Heisman voting in 1945. He also played for he Buckeyes’ basketball team from 1945-47, appearing in three different NCAA Tournaments. The 1944 Ohio State football team went 9-0 and was second in voting from the Associated Press, behind National Champion Army.
His older brother, Martin Amling, was also a three-sport star at Pana who won the college football national championship with Ohio State in 1942. In 2000, Warren was named to the Ohio State Football All-Century Team. He died in 2001 at 76 in Columbus, Ohio.
STONINGTON
Allison Curtin
The second of three-straight downstate Ms. Basketball of Illinois winners (Carlyle’s Courtney Smith in 1997 and Nokomis’ Molly McDowell in 1999), Curtin reignited Taylorville as a statewide sports name. Taylorville, the second-smallest school in the 1997 Class AA Sweet Sixteen (Taylorville’s 915 only eclipsed Paris’ 810), were 34-0 before losing to Wilmette Loyola Academy 59-40 in the AA title game. Curtin, while just a sophomore, was already one of the best players in the state. In three state games, Curtin scored 63 points. Teammate Alexis Givens posted 34. The following season, Taylorville lost to East St. Louis Lincoln 70-67 in overtime of the AA Salem Supersectional.
As a senior, Curtin averaged 29 points for the 30-2 Tornadoes and had 9.6 rebounds and five steals per game. “She’s had one heck of a career,” Taylorville then-coach Carol Wilson said. “She’s not one to sit back and rest on her accomplishments. Despite being double- and triple-teamed this year, she was to accomplish a lot of her goals.” Curtin also earned first-team all-state honors from The Associated Press, the Illinois Basketball Coaches Association, the Chicago Tribune and the Champaign News-Gazette. She was also an honorable mention Nike All-American.
She went on to have a successful college career. With three seasons with the University of Illinois, she averaged 15.6 points on 46.1% shooting, pulled down 5.7 boards, dished 3.5 assists and finished with 2.8 steals per game. She closed out her collegiate career at Tulsa with an incredible 23.1 ppg, 7.6 boards, 4.6 assists and 3.2 steals in 2002-03. She was drafted 12th by the Houston Comets in the 2003 WNBA Draft before being traded to the Detroit Shock. She did not play that season and retired from playing.
TAYLORVILLE
Johnny Orr
The debate in Taylorville over the school’s greatest of all time usually comes down to Curtin and Orr. Ron Bontemps and Bill Ridley are also heavily discussed and would be finalists on the Taylorville Mount Rushmore list.
But Orr brought excellence … no, he brought perfection to Taylorville. He, along with coach Dolph Stanley and teammate Bontemps, set a standard that cannot be matched with today’s limits on games played. The 1943-44 Tornadoes went 45-0 and won the Illinois’ single-class tournament by beating Elgin 56-33 to claim the state title at Huff Gym in Champaign.
“A lot of people believed we couldn’t go undefeated,” Orr told The State Journal-Register’s Dave Kane in 1994. “But everyone here (at Taylorville) was really supportive. We always had great crowds.”
Orr did just about everything at Taylorville and succeeded: baseball, football and track. At the University of Illinois, he was a three-sport athlete as a freshman but enlisted in the Navy near the end of World War II. After the war, he resumed his playing career at Beloit (Wis.) College and later played in the NBA with the St. Louis Bombers and the Waterloo Hawks.
Orr spent 29 seasons as a Division I basketball coach: 12 at Michigan, where he guided the Wolverines to four NCAA tournament appearances, the national title game in 1976 (an 86-68 loss to Indiana) and 209 wins. Orr then led Iowa State to a school-record 218 wins from 1980 until 1994. He finished 466-346 with 10 NCAA Tournament berths.
“He was my hero,” said Nebraska men’s basketball coach Fred Hoiberg, who grew up in Ames, Iowa, and played three years under Orr.
He died in 2013 at 86.
Contact Ryan Mahan: 788-1546, ryan.mahan@sj-r.com, Twitter.com/RyanMahanSJR.
This article originally appeared on State Journal-Register: Best athletes from Christian County in sports history
Reporting by Ryan Mahan, Springfield State Journal-Register / State Journal-Register
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Ryan Mahan, Springfield State Journal-Register | USA TODAY Network
