The Sad Tale of Bevo and His Hometown

It was 32 years ago this week that the game of basketball became convinced God had arrived in the form of Clarence (Bevo) Francis, a 6-foot 9-inch freshman with a rib cage you could see from the top row and a jumper only heaven could inspire.

That was the year that was--1953--when Francis averaged 50.1 points a game--including 116 points one eerie winter night--for tiny Rio Grande College in Rio Grande, Ohio.

Unexplained phenomenons come and go--Chamberlain and Alcindor and Pistol Pete--but those 116 points by Bevo Francis in a 150-85 victory over Ashland (Ky.) Junior College still stand as the most mind-numbing collaboration of boy and basketball in hoop history.

“I remember we’d drive for 100 miles to see Bevo play,” recalls John Lawhorn, age 11 at the time, currently Rio Grande’s head basketball coach. “It was an event, something you just had to see for yourself.”

Indeed, what Bevo could do with a basketball could set an 11-year-old to stuttering. He could run and handle the ball, a la Magic, but it was his twisting jumper that could bring a grown man to tears. For Bevo was the first of the great jump-shooters and it was such a novelty that he was able to befuddle entire teams of men. Newspaper reports of the 116-point game reveal that he spent the final three-quarters of the game triple-covered.

And even when the NCAA besmirched Bevo-mania by voiding the record (it was not made against a four-year school), Bevo simply went out the next year and scored 113 against a school that was (Hillsdale College of Michigan). That still stands atop the diaries of the NCAA, even if it is only Page Two in Bevo’s scrapbook.

It still reads as the box-score line for all time:

FG: 38-of-46; FT: 37-39; REB: 24; F: 3; PTS: 113.

But some considered his legend the most colossal hoax on American newspapers since “Dewey Defeats Truman,” which prompted Rio Grande to take Bevo to the people. An upgraded schedule the next season had Bevo playing teams such as Villanova, Wake Forest, Providence, and Adelphi at Madison Square Garden. Bevo’s numbers came down--all the way to 48.0 points per game.

But just when the world was ready to believe in Bevo, he vanished, suspended from school for excessive unexcused absences. For perspective’s sake, imagine St. John’s booting Chris Mullin and then triple the remorse.

In those days the NBA had a modicum of principles, too, and would not draft kids early--even if it meant passing on the Messiah in sneakers. That left Bevo to either try again in school or sign with the Boston Whirlwinds, part of the touring entourage of the Harlem Globetrotters. Bevo signed.

Bevo became deliriously homesick. After two years’ wear and tear, he quit and came home to Ohio to sign with the ABA’s Cleveland Pipers--owned by George Steinbrenner. When the Pipers folded the next year, Bevo had had his fill. He turned his back on handsome offers from the NBA and went home to Wellsville, Ohio, where he took a job at a steel mill and for the next 19 and a half years, lived happily--if not ever--after.

Today, he is unemployed. Laid off from the steel mill in 1982, he has not been able to find work for three years. Bevo Francis is just another number in eastern Ohio’s 19% unemployment rate.

“I’m not picky,” says Bevo, now 52. “I’ve looked everywhere. Pottery places, plastic shops, the steel mills. There’s no work and it don’t get any better.”

To provide enough food for himself and his wife, Bevo hunts deer and rabbit and fishes for walleye. “Put it this way,” he says. “I can’t remember eating much else lately.”

With his pockets heavy with spare time, Bevo tries not to let his mind get to wondering about forks in the road he never took.

“People ask me about the NBA and I just figure there’s no use thinking about it,” he says. “What’s done is done.”

True, maybe Bevo’s heart was never meant to play for pay--he was not built for insincerity--but college, well, Bevo could have gone back to college had he not jumped so quickly at the shiny trinkets dangled by the Globetrotters. After two more years of college, perhaps Bevo might have been more ready for the evils of the NBA and you and I could be sitting here comparing Birds and Bevos.

“I’ll tell you,” Bevo says. “I do give that a thought once in a while--college--but what are you gonna do? Who woulda thought the steel mill was gonna close?”

Maybe it is all for the better. Maybe the legend of Clarence (Bevo) Francis is best kept just slightly blurred, like a dream you are not sure you had--so bright and brilliant you are not sure it is real, so delicious you do not wish to know.