NBA’s College Draft Started With Ewing, Made Remley Famous

Suddenly, Chris Remley is famous. Friends offer high-fives, strangers extend congratulations. The kid from Warren, N.J., has hit the big time.

“I expect to see headlines like ‘Patrick and Remley go in the draft,’ ” he said.

If Patrick Ewing was a foregone conclusion as the first pick in the National Basketball Assn. draft, Remley simply was the conclusion. He was the last player picked.

June 18, draft day, was a trying one. The Rutgers University senior holed up in his off-campus apartment with friends. He waited by the phone. He watched soap operas. He waited some more.

“I sweated it out,” he said.

He figured it was more than five hours after the New York Knicks drafted Ewing that his wait ended. The phone rang.

“My friend picked it up,” Remley recalled. “Jokingly, he said, ‘this is your call.’ Without answering, he gave it to me.

“The only thing I heard was, ‘welcome to the Boston Celtics.’ I went crazy,” he said of the call from a club official. “There were a couple of high-fives with friends. . . . I got on the phone and called everybody I ever knew.”

It didn’t matter that he was at the bottom of the barrel, the last of 162 players taken. A good but hardly great player on a team with a 16-14 record, he was thrilled just to be chosen.

Days later, the exhilaration continued.

“It’s still there,” he said. “It’ll be there for a while. That was by far the biggest day of my life and you just don’t blow that off in one day.”

Remley said he would have been surprised if the Celtics hadn’t drafted him.

“Boston said they would take me between (rounds) four and seven,” he said. “I don’t think anybody else knew about me. It wasn’t like they (the Celtics) had to pick me in an early round to make sure they’d get me.

“The last month I’ve been telling anybody I’ve seen they’re interested so I had a lot at stake.”

Remley’s college career didn’t attract much notice outside New Brunswick, N.J., where Rutgers’ main campus is located. In fact, the Celtics stumbled upon him while scouting his more heralded teammate, guard John Battle.

Remley is 6-9 and weighs just 198 pounds. He’s a deadly outside shooter, but admits the other parts of his game need help.

As a senior small forward, he hit 56% of his two-point field goal attempts and 93% of his foul shots. Last season, three-point field goals were allowed in the Atlantic 10 Conference, in which Rutgers plays.

He averaged 12.2-points per game, the first time in his four college seasons that he was in double figures, and 4.3 rebounds. Last December, he had career highs of 22 points and 14 rebounds.

“I can hang with anybody offensively,” said Remley, “but when it comes to rebounding and being pushed around, I’m not that big. Defensively, I probably have a lot of problems.”

The Celtics view him as a guard, and he’s honest about his chances of making the team which had the best regular-season record and reached the NBA finals before losing in six games to the Lakers.

“I don’t have any great expectations,” he said.

Remley would like to attend Boston’s rookie camp in August, but thinks he’ll probably play next season in Europe or the Continental Basketball Assn.

For now, he’s still basking in the glow of fulfilling what he called “a lifelong dream to be drafted in the NBA.”

On Tuesday night, he and his friends “hit a few local places” to celebrate. The next morning, he headed for the New Jersey seashore to relax. It didn’t work out quite the way he planned.

“It was phenomenal,” Remley said. “People (were) coming up to me left and right that I’d never seen before and congratulating me. I had Rutgers shorts on.”

The barbs about being the last player chosen have been few.

“There’s only 162 guys taken in the draft and I feel privileged. I was taken. A lot of people can’t say that,” Remley said. “Besides, if I was second to last in the draft no one would know about me.”