Gary Ham was born in Roanoke, his parents’ hometown, but spent little time there. “When I was 2 years old, my dad joined the Air Force, and then we started traveling,” he said. “I spent three years in Japan. I spent six years in Minot, North Dakota, three years in Germany. So it was all over the place.”
Ham enrolled at UVA on an Army ROTC scholarship in 1969, with no intention of playing football. He tried out for the team early in the spring semester of his first year. The coaches liked what they saw and invited Ham, a 5-foot-10 cornerback, to join the program as a walk-on.
Not until 1970 did the University enroll its first class of undergraduate women. So Ham arrived at a school that was not co-ed and whose undergraduate student body included “21 or 22” African Americans, he said.
He had experience in similar settings.
“All my life traveling with my dad in the Air Force, there were many situations where I was the only person of color,” Ham said. “So all my life I was accustomed to being a minority. It toughens you up. It really does. It never stops hurting, if you hear somebody say something or somebody does something because of the color of your skin. The pain will always be there, but there’s more resilience after time, and I have to say that when I got to UVA, I never heard anybody call me a name. No one really treated me ill on the team.”
In 1970, when Harrison Davis, Stanley Land, Kent Merritt and John Rainey—the first African American scholarship players in program history—suited up for Virginia’s freshman team whose coach was Al Groh, Ham was the only African American on the varsity. The Wahoos had a new head coach, Don Lawrence, and he “was the one that pretty much kind of recruited me and encouraged me to stay with it,” Ham.
An unconventional path, but one that Ham looks on with fondness.
“There’s four major things that I’m so thankful for about my experience at UVA… First, I got a chance to play Division I football. How many kids get a chance to do that? Second, UVA prepared me for my life’s work. You get four years of college education and it gives you something; it prepares you for life, for work. It helps you learn how to do things that you need to do if you’re going to achieve something in life. And so I went through ROTC and that prepared me to serve our country, which I was very proud of.”
UVA also “was the place where I met my wife. But the most important thing that happened at UVA was that in my senior year, I re-dedicated my life to Jesus Christ.”
After graduating from UVA, he spent four years in the U.S. Army. Then he attended Elim Bible Institute in Lima, New York, and entered the ministry after graduating in 1980. The Hams spent two years in Franklin and then relocated to the Tidewater area.
Apart from the two years (1986-88) they spent in Nigeria as missionaries, the Hams were mostly based in Hampton Roads until 2002, when they moved to the Rochester area. Ham served as the Elim Fellowship’s director of international ministries from 2002 to 2008.
“All the work I have done has been for the Lord,” Ham said. “Every bit of it. It is responding to the call of God upon my life and my wife’s life. It’s taken us to almost 35 different countries, where we’ve served in unbelievable situations and circumstances, and we’re still working.”
