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Profile: Hot Rod Hundley
By John Antonik
 New Minneapolis Lakers owner Bob Short was looking for a gate attraction to help generate ticket sales for the 1958 season.
He had a pretty good player in 6-foot-9, 250-pound center Clyde Lovellette from Kansas, who replaced NBA legend George Mikan
and led the Lakers to the Western Division title in 1954.
But by 1957 the Lakers slipped to 33-39 and owner Ben Berger was ready to sell the team to a pair of Missouri businessmen.
A civic drive led by local attorney Short ultimately came up with enough cash to keep the team in Minneapolis. Short, who admittedly knew next to nothing about professional basketball, was looking for an
exciting player to help put people in the Minneapolis Auditorium seats.
Short went to his first winter league meetings with some sound advice from the editor of the local newspaper Charley
Johnson, "Whatever you do, don't trade away your center because everything in this game starts with a good
center," he said.
Armed with that piece of wisdom, Short ran into Rochester Royals owner Les Harrison, whose team was moving to Cincinnati that year. Harrison told Short his team would go broke if they didn't get a big-name college player.
"The right player to put people in the seats was Hot Rod Hundley of West Virginia," Harrison
whispered. "If you give us Lovellette, we'll give you the number one pick and you can get Hundley."
Short took the bait and made the trade. He picked Hundley with the first pick of the 1957 NBA draft. Lovellette played a total of 11 professional seasons from 1953-64, averaging 17.0 points and 9.3 rebounds per game in a career that eventually led him to the
Pro Basketball Hall of Fame.
Hundley's professional career didn't quite end up of the same way.
Perhaps Short began to realize his error when Hundley, called into the Army that spring, got a medical discharge later that summer because of two bad knees. If his aching knees were too bad to serve his country, how would they hold up over a 65-game NBA season?
There was nothing ordinary about Hot Rod Hundley, one of the most colorful players in the history of college basketball.
He never had much growing up in Charleston, W.Va., being raised by strangers in bare room in a small hotel and then later in a boarding house.
"I never knew my folks, not as a kid," wrote Hundley in his first
autobiography. "My dad was a meat cutter by trade, but he spent a lot of time around the pool room. My parents split up and my mother went to Washington, D.C., to get a job and left me behind. Maybe she came to see me a couple of times all those years, I don't really remember, but not often."
Hundley had two loves as a kid growing up: shooting pool and playing basketball. The latter turned out to be his way out of
Charleston. In junior high he set the state scoring record with 441 points for a season and 37 for a game.
In high school he broke the state's four-year scoring record in three years, averaging more than 30 points a game. He was a high school All-America
and was offered scholarships by most of the major schools in the country.
"The most convincing bid came from North Carolina State," Hundley once said. "Two summers they took me down to live on campus. They took good care of
me."
During the summer before he was to enroll in school, North Carolina State was leveled with recruiting
violations
by the Atlantic Coast Conference so Hundley instead decided to go to West Virginia University, where Coach Red Brown patiently waited him out.
Hundley proved to be a handful. He left school twice, once as a freshman when he was going to return home to play at Morris Harvey College, and a second time
before his sophomore season when he left to try out with the Philadelphia Warriors of the NBA.
The Warriors, by NBA rule, couldn't sign a college graduate but did offer him a spot on one of their farm teams. In the meantime, West Virginia had spent money on a knee operation for Hundley between his freshman and sophomore years and
the school wasn't too anxious to see its star player leave.
Brown, who became athletic director following the unexpected death
of Roy Hawley, got Hundley to return to school once again. In the
meantime, Brown knew he needed a coach who could handle Hot Rod and he found
the right man in former Mountaineer standout Fred Schaus, who
had just ended a five-year professional basketball career.
Schaus got Hundley straightened out and the two set out to put West Virginia
University basketball on the map. The Mountaineers made their first NCAA tournament appearance during Hundley's sophomore year and made three straight trips between 1955-57. Hundley took the Southern Conference by storm, scoring more than 20 points per game each season.
His best year came as a junior in 1956 when he averaged 26.6 points and 13.1 rebounds per game. Hundley scored
easily against everyone but he had particular success against Furman, scoring a school record 54 points in one game in 1957 and
adding 42 in
another game against them in 1956.
Six times he scored more than 40 points in a game and nine times the Mountaineers scored more than 100. West Virginia spent most of Hundley's three years in the Top 20, reaching as high as No. 4 in the country in December of 1956.
West Virginia, with Hundley leading the fast break and Schaus
directing his soon-to-be-emulated "zone press" defense, began playing an exciting brand of basketball. Hundley's star
was rising, the old Field House was packed for every game, and Hot
Rod was beginning to enjoy the attention. He soon began to play to the crowd. His act included hanging from the basket and calling for a pass, lining his teammates up in the T-formation,
and faking free throws while eager players jumped forward in
surprised confusion.
Hundley was good enough to get away with the antics but a few times it backfired. Once came in a game against Duke when he tried to roll the ball up his arm and a Blue Devil player stole the ball and scored a basket to tie the game.
Another time, Hundley's clowning cost him a chance at breaking Dick Groat's Southern Conference scoring record.
He needed to make
two points to break it. With the title game wrapped up, Hundley was fouled and awarded two free
throws. His first attempt was a hook shot and the second he
flung from behind his back. Both missed everything.
Hundley was a campus hero and a national celebrity at a time when the college game was recovering from a national gambling scandal that nearly brought down the sport.
"Houdini ... Magician ... Dazzling ... Refreshing," were some of the adjectives sportswriters used to describe him.
When his West Virginia career was over in 1957, he became just the fourth player in NCAA history at the time to score more than 2,000 points for his career. He was a two-time first team All-American and holds eight school records that still exist today.
Hundley, a 6-foot-4, 185-pound forward in college, was soon to become a
guard in the pros. Many around the league
were sure then that Hundley was going to be a star.
Ned Irish of the New York Knicks called Hundley a "great all-around player."
George King of the Syracuse Nats and later a coach at both WVU and
Purdue, thought Hundley might "possibly
become one of the true greats in pro basketball."
Bob Short had his gate attraction in Hot Rod but unfortunately, the
team around him was downright awful.
"We weren't a good team," Hundley recalled in his first autobiography. "In fact, it was the worst pro team I've ever seen."
The Lakers record bears that out. Minneapolis lost 21 of its first 30 games and finished the season with a dreadful 19-53 record. Hundley wasn't much better, averaging 7.0 points per game and shooting 31.8 percent from the field.
Seattle University star forward Elgin Baylor helped the team improve
dramatically in 1959 and two years later, Schaus and his star West Virginia player Jerry West joined the franchise
after its move to Los Angeles.
Hundley's two best professional seasons came in 1960 and 1961 when he averaged more than 10 points per game and made the all-star
game twice. In the 1961 all-star game Hundley scored 14 points off the bench to help the West team to a 153-131 victory. Hundley's other professional highlight was his record-tying 15 assists in one playoff game.
In six pro seasons, Hundley averaged 8.4 points and handed out
almost 1,400 assists.
Four years after his playing career was over, the outgoing Hundley began
a broadcasting career in 1967 as Chick
Hearn's sidekick. Hundley later worked for the Phoenix
Suns before developing a niche calling New Orleans Jazz games.
He also picked up college and professional games for CBS but the network decided to end his contract in 1980.
"It's a crying shame," said broadcast partner Jim Nance at the time. "He's the best basketball analyst I've ever heard."
For almost 25 years Hundley has been the radio voice of the Utah Jazz. In 1994, Hundley was honored with the Distinguished Broadcaster Award, given only twice before.
He was also honored in the broadcast wing of the Naismith Hall of
Fame.
Hundley was inducted into the West Virginia University Sports Hall of Fame in 1992 and
eight years later, Hundley, at 65, returned to WVU for his diploma more than 40 years after leaving
school.
Hundley, asked to address his 2000 classmates, spoke graciously and
emotionally, "I'm overwhelmed," he said. "I never thought this would happen. I love the
program and I love West Virginia University. God bless West Virginia and the Mountaineers forever."
Rodney Clark Hundley wasn't the greatest player in West Virginia University history
... Jerry West owns that distinction ... but
he does come in a close second.
And like West, Hundley is one player who will never be forgotten
-- there is no way that could ever happen.
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