To be cast in bronze is the ultimate indicator of a sports icon.

Athletes, coaches, broadcasters and athletic directors are among those commemorated with life-size figures across the globe. The construction of statues to honor the esteemed used to be a rarity, but since the early 1990s has exploded into the preferred form of highest praise.

“There is a general theme, and it’s trying to create an identity, and brand an organization or a place for authenticity or nostalgia,” said Dr. Chris Stride of the University of Sheffield in England, a statistician and athletic statue expert of sorts.

The city of Louisville currently has statues of five athletes — Johnny Unitas, Paul Hornung, Pee Wee Reese, Pat Day, and Lenny Lyles — as well as the horse Barbaro. Could the University of Louisville’s first Heisman winner, Lamar Jackson, become the next?

Louisville athletic director Vince Tyra says he’s discussed a vision with Jackson, a leading candidate for the NFL's MVP award and arguably the brightest star in the game today, but there is nothing yet planned.

Of the 84 Heisman winners (excluding the recent Joe Burrow of LSU), 30 either have had statues built or have plans in the works to do so by their respective colleges. That’s 35% of all Heisman winners.

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It does not include the first Heisman, U of Chicago’s Jay Berwanger (1935), who has a statue at his high school, but not his college campus, nor Georgia’s Herschel Walker (1982), who was enshrined by an independent artist, but not the university. It does include a trio of mid-century Army players, who are commemorated with a joint statue.

Each school honors their heroes differently. You won’t find a statue of Andre Ware (1989) anywhere on Houston’s campus, but you will see the 11-yard line marked on its football field, a creative homage to the quarterback who wore No. 11.

Oregon State has built a statue in honor of only one athlete on its campus, but it’s not Terry Baker (1962), the West Coast’s first Heisman winner and the only athlete to ever win the Heisman and play in the NCAA Tournament’s Final Four. Instead, the Beavers have enshrined Dick Fosbury, the track athlete who pioneered the Fosbury flop, which changed the high jump forever.

Stride says that college football is unique because of how brief players’ careers are with a school. Professional soccer is the sport with the most statues globally, while professional baseball has the most in the United States. But unlike those two sports, it is the coaches in college football, rather than players, who are more likely to be enshrined because their tenures span decades rather than a couple of years.

Notre Dame has no statues on campus for any of its seven Heisman winners — of course, Hurnung does have one in Louisville — but it does have statues in honor of each of its five national championship coaches.

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Ohio State has no statues for its seven Heisman recipients, not even the only dual winner in Archie Griffin (1974, 1975), but it does for legendary coach Woody Hayes.

UCLA has no statue built for its lone Heisman winner, Gary Beban (1967), but did erect one of legendary basketball coach John Wooden. Former UCLA athlete Jackie Robinson is also honored with statues outside both the school’s football and baseball fields. In fact, the iconic Robinson is the most oft-enshrined athlete in the United States; eight have been built in his image across North America, with two more in the works.

For those curious, Stride, who co-runs The Sporting Statues Project and has co-written dozens of academic papers, book chapters and magazine articles on the subject, says that soccer star Pelé has the most statues (about 13) built of him of any athlete across the world, narrowly edging out baseball's Roberto Clemente. Stride says it’s most common for statues to be built about 20 years after a player’s retirement.

In college football, some players have had to wait generations for their statue. A statue of LSU’s Billy Cannon (1959) was not unveiled until 2018, and at schools like Auburn and Florida, it seems recent winners spurred bronze construction of yesterday's heroes.

Three years after Tim Tebow (2007) won for Florida, the university announced plans to honor him, as well as Steve Spurrier (1966) and Danny Wuerffel (1996). That statue trio was unveiled in 2012.

Auburn presented a trio of their own that same year, following a Heisman win by Cam Newton (2010), who is now honored in larger-than-life bronze alongside Pat Sullivan (1971) and Bo Jackson (1985).

Oklahoma has a Heisman Park, where all seven winners have or will be honored, including Baker Mayfield (2017) and Kyler Murray (2018). Other schools, like USC, Michigan and Nebraska, honor their multiple winners with plaques or framed jerseys and Heisman replicas, rather than statues.

Texas A&M had one built for John David Crow (1957) but not Johnny Manziel (2012), who has been surrounded by controversy since his Heisman win. The school does, however, have a statue of the “12th Man,” which has become a defining symbol of the university's football team, emblematic of fan support.

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Statues are built to honor legendary players, of course, but they’re also built for fans. Perhaps even more so.

“They don’t just remind fans of that player,” Stride says, “they remind fans of a moment, maybe attending the stadium with their dad or their granddad or with their mates.”

Lamar Jackson generated a list of signature moments as an unstoppable dual-threat quarterback during his three seasons at Louisville, including his sophomore year, in which he accounted for 51 touchdowns and became the youngest-ever Heisman winner.

His young NFL career has only helped his cause. He could become only the third player in the past three decades to win both the Heisman and NFL MVP award, joining Newton and Barry Sanders (1988), who has a statue in Detroit, where he played with the Lions, but not at Oklahoma State.

Penn State does not have a statue built for its lone Heisman winner, John Capelletti (1973), and they do not currently boast any of former athletes or coaches.

The school is a rare but prime example of the grave downside to statues, as they built one in 2001 for Joe Paterno, who served as the school’s coach for nearly five decades. In 2012, the school removed the statue following discovery of the child sex abuse crimes of PSU assistant Jerry Sandusky and the ensuing scandal.

Of course, that was an incredibly atypical situation. The vast majority of sporting statues highlight a person or event that a university wants cemented in memory.

It feels almost arbitrary what garners a statue and what doesn’t. Some schools, like Oklahoma, focus on particular standout athletes. Others, like USC, focus on coaches and mascots — its campus has a depiction of Tommy Trojan but not Matt Leinart (2004).

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Dozens of schools have built statues of mascots, like the Wildcat outside Memorial Coliseum in Lexington, or other general concepts, rather than of an individual athlete.

Another approach is to honor athletes for pioneering impact, rather than on-field success. Robinson is a baseball Hall of Famer, but that's not why he's the most oft-enshrined athlete in the United States. It's because he broke Major League Baseball's color barrier in 1947, beginning a culture of progress throughout sports. In Louisville, Reese and Lyles were no doubt honored for their terrific athletic careers, but also for cultural impact. Reese famously stood arm-in-arm with Robinson and Lyles was a trailblazing African-American track athlete and running back.

In the same vein, the only athletes enshrined with statues on the University of Kentucky's campus are the four African-American football players who broke the SEC's color barrier starting in 1967: Nate Northington, Greg Page, Wilbur Hackett and Houston Hogg.

That statue was erected in 2016, which was considerably late in the eyes of Dr. Gerald Smith, a history professor at UK who teaches courses on race and sports. He was also disappointed that the construction process did not include more input from African-Americans, but still finds the statues to be extremely important, if overdue.

"If any athlete that’s come through the University of Kentucky is worthy of this kind of immortalization, it’s definitely those four gentlemen," Smith said. "Not only in terms of the contributions to the University of Kentucky athletic programs, more importantly to what they symbolized and represented in terms of integrating the SEC. We can’t look at college football today without being mindful of the individuals who broke that barrier, so I think it’s a more noteworthy recognition for them than really anybody else quite frankly.”

Like Robinson, the four are enshrined not for their on-field achievements as much as their courageous spirit. Just this year, Althea Gibson — the first African-American to break international tennis's color barrier — was enshrined with a sculpture at Arthur Ashe Stadium in New York.

Honoring pioneers is a driving reason behind statue construction.

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“It has a lot to do with memory and identity construction in terms of how the school wants to be identified and recognized," Smith said.

It’s a big, permanent decision to build a statue, with an assortment of considerations. Lamar Jackson’s memorable Heisman season certainly warrants commemoration, but so have scores of other Heisman winners and culturally important athletes who have not been forever enshrined with a likeness.

In his research, Stride has encountered thousands of sporting statues and the various motivations for their construction.

As such, he likes to recite one truism: “Statues tell you a lot more about the people that put them up than the subject who is depicted.”

Hayes Gardner can be reached at hgardner@gannett.com; Twitter: @HayesGardner; Support strong local journalism by subscribing today: courier-journal.com/subscribe.