OSU Set to Unveil Permanent Statue of Boone Pickens

Oklahoma State announced on Thursday that it will unveil a permanent bronze statue of T. Boone Pickens on Nov. 28 prior to the football team’s game against Texas Tech.

The statue is 9-feet-tall and will serve to memoralize the OSU legend, who died last year at age 91. An Oklahoma A&M alum, Pickens donated upwards of $600 million over the years and helped transform the football program as part of a dynamic tag-team effort with Mike Holder and Mike Gundy. His $165 million gift in 2005 to OSU still stands as the single largest gift for athletics in NCAA history.

“We could never thank him enough for all that he did for our university,” Mike Holder, OSU’s athletic director, said in a release announcing the news. “He gave us everything he had and all that he asked in return was that we play by the rules and dream big.”

Only two people are memorialized on OSU’s campus with a statue, per The Oklahoman: Henry Bennett, the former school president, and Nancy Randolph Davis, OSU’s first African-American student.

Pickens did more than just donate to Oklahoma State’s athletic department, though he did plenty of that, too. He gave $1 million to OSU in 1982 to help build a $4 million geology building; it is now the Boone Pickens School of Geology. In early 2008, he also donated $100 million to endow major faculty chairs and professorships. Later that year he donated $63 more million for stadium renovations at the football stadium that was by then already named in his honor.