There was an article recently on cleveland.com about Memphis Grizzlies guard Mike Conley, one of two freshman stars on the 2007 Ohio State men’s basketball team that went all to the way to the NCAA Tournament championship game before losing to Florida, becoming the seventh ex-Buckeye to score 10,000 points in the NBA or ABA.
It occurred last Friday night as Conley had 31 points in a 101-88 home win over the New York Knicks. That put him at 10,020 points for his career, all 10 years of which have been spent with the Grizzlies.
The most interesting part of the piece was a list, attributed to Sports Productions LLC, showing all the ex-Buckeyes who have played in the pros and how many points they have scored.
Atop those standings – by a wide, wide margin – is Basketball Hall of Famer John Havlicek, who, in a career that spanned from 1963-78, scored 26,395 points, for an average of 20.8 per game.
Jerry Lucas, also a Hall of Famer and Havlicek’s teammate on Ohio State’s national championship team in 1960, is second with 14,053 (17 ppg). He’s 1,363 points ahead of Jim Jackson (12,690, 14.3).
The four other 10,000-point scorers from Ohio State are, in order, Michael Redd (11,972, 19), Herb Williams (11,944, 10.8), Neil Johnston (10,023, 19.4), and Conley, who is just three points behind him and has averaged 14.2 points per game in his career.
Havlicek was All-Ohio not just in basketball at Bridgeport (Ohio) High School, but also in football and baseball. So when Havlicek was done playing for Ohio State, Browns head coach Paul Brown, who was partial to Buckeyes from having coached the school to its first national championship in football in 1942, took a wild stab in the dark and took him in the seventh round, at No. 95 overall, in the 1962 NFL Draft. This was despite the fact that Havlicek never played football at Ohio State.
In the sixth round, just 14 spots earlier at No. 81, Brown selected Sam Tidmore, who did play football for the Buckeyes and, as it turned out, also for two seasons with the Browns at linebacker.
Havlicek was put at wide receiver in training camp but never made it with the Browns. Assistant coach Blanton Collier told him that he would be better off sticking with basketball as the club released him, so “Hondo” headed off to the Boston Celtics.
The Havlicek story is a great one, but it gets lost with all the other significance of that 1962 draft.
The Browns traded running back Bobby Mitchell to Washington for the rights to Syracuse running back Ernie Davis, who was drafted by the Redskins with the No. 1 overall pick.
Mitchell, the first African American to play for the Redskins, the last NFL team to be integrated, was converted to wide receiver and ended up in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Meanwhile, Davis never played a down for the Browns, or anyone, coming down with leukemia and passing away on May 18, 1963.
Browns owner Art Modell was livid with Brown for not telling him beforehand about the blockbuster deal. That added a lot of negativism to an already frosty relationship between the two men, and served as the beginning of the end for the legendary coach in Cleveland. He was fired about three weeks after the end of the 1962 season – during a Cleveland newspaper strike, thus greatly limiting the coverage of the jaw-dropping move, at least locally, in an internet-less world.
