Andy Gambucci always has kept good company.
 
The trend continues with the announcement this week that Gambucci emerged as one of six inductees voted to enter the Colorado Sports Hall of Fame on April 17, 2014.
 
Joining him in the state HOF's next class will be Denver Broncos great Otis Armstrong and recently retired Colorado Rockies first baseman Todd Helton, along with legendary University of Colorado basketball coach Forrest B. "Frosty" Cox, former CU football quarterback Darian Hagan and pioneer women sports writer/columnist Dorothy Mauk.
 
One of Colorado College's most outstanding student-athletes of all time, Gambucci lettered in three sports for the Tigers in the early 1950s.  A standout centerfielder in baseball, he ultimately was noted more for his prowess on the gridiron and ice.  He has been inducted twice into the CC Athletics Hall of Fame – individually in 2004 and earlier, in 1998, as a member of Tiger Hockey's 1950 NCAA championship squad. He also became a member of Colorado Springs Sports Hall of Fame in 2010.   
 
In football, he was voted the Rocky Mountain Conference's most valuable player as a senior in 1952 when he rushed for 16 touchdowns to break a school record that Earl "Dutch" Clark had established in the late 1920s.
 
In his four seasons (1949-1953) of hockey, Gambucci collected 91 career points (62 goals, 29 assists) for the Tigers. He was a freshman on the 1950 team that claimed the program's first of two national titles. 
 
A native of Eveleth, Minn., who has remained a resident of the Pikes Peak Region for nearly his entire adult life, Gambucci also skated on the United States' Olympic Hockey Team that won a silver medal at the 1952 Winter Games in Oslo, Norway.  After graduating from Colorado College in 1953, he turned down an opportunity to try out for the NHL's Boston Bruins and instead went to Italy to play and coach.
 
He eventually returned to Colorado Springs to launch his 22-year career as an on-ice official in the Western Collegiate Hockey Association and build a very successful insurance business. He served as senior vice-president and director of marketing for Acordia of Colorado, from 1982 until 1995. After retiring, he continued to work as a consultant for Acordia Mountain West, Inc., a Wells Fargo Company, into the mid-2000s. 
 
Since its inception in 1965, the Colorado Sports Hall of Fame has inducted 228 individuals prior to this week's selection meeting for the Class of 2014.  The first class of inductees featured Clark, Jack Dempsey and former Supreme Court justice Byron "Whizzer" White.  Steve Atwater, Don Baylor, Don Cockroft, Adam Foote, Steve Jones and Stan Williams were inducted last April as the Class of 2013.