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INSPIRATIONAL E. King Gill was a talented athlete while at
MEDICINE Texas A&M University, playing on the football,
basketball and baseball teams. But he will al-
continued from page 17 ways be best remembered for a game in
which he did not even play.
King Gill specialized as an ear, nose,
throat specialist or ENT, and also There are currently two statues of
worked as an ophthalmologist or eye E. King Gill on display at Texas
doctor. His brother was also a promi- A&M. The first was unveiled in
nent eye surgeon who did some of the 1980, a 6-foot-4-inch bronze
first cornea transplants in South Texas. sculpture that stood at the en-
trance of Kyle Field until 2014. It
King Gill moved to Corpus Christi in has since been moved to a spot
1935 where he continued to practice near the Memorial Student Center
medicine for the next 40 years. He also and replaced with a much larger -
served in the U.S. Army as a flight sur- 12-foot - bronze statue of Gill.
geon during World War II. He was sta-
tioned at Majors Field in Greenville,
Texas and achieved the rank of lieu-
tenant colonel. In 1969, Gill was in-
ducted into the Texas A&M Athletics
Hall of Fame. Despite being best known
for a game in which he did not even
play, Gill was a talented athlete in
school. He played football the following
year and scored a crucial touchdown in
an A&M victory over rival University of
Texas. He earned All-SWC honors as a
member and then captain of the basket-
ball team in 1923-24 and he was a
pitcher on the A&M baseball team.

Gill was frequently sought out by the
media to talk about that one game in
1922. He was always very humble and
deprecating and once said that it was
probably a good thing that he did not
get put into the game because the shoes
he had to borrow were too big and he
might have tripped over them if he had
to run with the ball.

Gill died in 1976 and is buried in San
Antonio at Mission Burial Park South.

Mike W. Thomas is the director of com-
munications for the Bexar County Med-
ical Society.

18 San Antonio Medicine • November 2016