Jan 15, 2010 6:59:35 AM

ATLANTA – An overflow crowd at the NCAA Convention's opening business session Thursday paid tribute to the man that had been their champion for seven years.

Former NCAA President Myles Brand – who established the NCAA President's Gerald R. Ford Award six years ago – was honored with it posthumously during the first official session of the Association's 104th annual gathering.

Georgia President Michael Adams, who chaired the NCAA Executive Committee for the last two years of Brand's tenure, said Brand created the Ford Award to honor individuals who provided long-term leadership to intercollegiate athletics, such as previous winners John Wooden, Birch Bayh, William Friday, Billie Jean King, James Frank, Theodore Hesburgh and Christine Grant.

"Today, we add to the list of those impressive individuals Myles Brand," Adams said.  "Myles was consistently steadfast in setting the highest standards on anything he touched."

Brand's wife, Peg, received the Ford Award on his behalf.

"He was steadfastly proud to serve you," Peg Brand said of her late husband. "If he was standing here today, he would be your biggest advocate – and he might also deliver a 50-minute lecture, since he was trained to speak until the bell rang.

"But the crowning glory of his academic career was his time spent with you."

Brand's son, Josh, also thanked the Association for recognizing his father not only with the Ford Award but with a $500,000 donation to the Myles Brand Chair in Cancer Research at the Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis.

Brand, the first university president to serve as the NCAA's chief executive, was a champion of academic reform, presidential leadership and student-athlete well-being during his nearly seven-year tenure at the NCAA. He was named to the position in January 2003 after having served as president at Indiana since 1994 and at Oregon from 1989 through 1994. He died September 16, 2009, from pancreatic cancer at the age of 67.

The Ford Award, named in recognition of former President Gerald Ford, honors an individual who has provided significant leadership as an advocate for intercollegiate athletics on a continuous basis over the course of their career.

In addition to honoring the late NCAA President Myles Brand, delegates at the opening business session also recognized the athletics administrators and student-athletes who died in 2009. Click here for the complete list.