REMEMBERING BEVO FRANCIS : Shooting Star’s Meteoric Rise Put Little Rio Grande College on the Map in the Early 1950s

Had it not been for the seriousness of the situation, President Charles Davis of Rio Grande College would probably not have listened to the enthusiastic alumnus, John (Newt) Oliver. But Rio Grande was in big trouble in the fall of 1952. Enrollment at the tiny college in the Southeastern Ohio town of the same name had dipped to fewer than 100 full-time students, the faculty was at 15, and the football program had just folded.

Rio Grande was as broke as it could be and still keep the doors open. So, Davis was open to suggestions, even as wild as Oliver’s, for saving the school.

Oliver, 29, was applying for a coaching job and telling Davis that a winning basketball team would put Rio Grande on the map and back in the black.

Beyond the boundaries of Raccoon Township, there were few people who could even correctly pronounce the name of the school--it was Rye-o, not Ree-o, and Grand, not Grand-ee--let alone find it, a small dot on the map, 12 miles northeast of Gallipolis on U.S. 35.

But the beleaguered Davis was desperate. Newt Oliver got the job.

An outstanding athlete while at Rio Grande, Oliver had gone on to become a successful high school basketball coach. But he brought with him from his last prep job at Wellsville High School more than a successful coaching record and boundless enthusiasm. Following him to his new post was one of the nation’s most sought-after high school basketball players, Clarence Franklin Francis.

In a few months, Oliver and the 6-foot 9-inch, 195-pound, slope-shouldered Francis would make good on both of the coach’s promises. They did indeed put Rio Grande on the map, and their team’s gate receipts put the college in the black.

But putting Rio Grande on the map was what Newt and his protege did best.

The lanky, sallow-faced Francis was the son of a poor Hammondsville, Ohio, clay miner. Because of his father’s passion for a prohibition-era drink, he was called Bevo. When Clarence came along, he was called Little Bevo, but as he kept growing, he took over sole possession of the name.

Born during the Depression, Bevo grew up on a diet consisting mainly of raisins, apples and potatoes. Before he was 10, he had been stricken three times with anemia, and fell two years behind his original classmates in elementary school.

When he was 13, Bevo began shooting baskets in a neighbor’s barn. He often spent 8 to 10 hours a day practicing his jump shot.

At 16, Francis was set to enroll in high school at Ironton, Ohio, but before he went out for the basketball team, he was talked into switching to Wellsville.

Bevo’s last-minute change of plans caused a furor. A complaint was filed with the Ohio High School Athletic Assn., and he was suspended from athletics for two years.

During his suspension, Bevo sharpened his shooting skills by playing for independent teams in Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia, and although he played just one year of high school basketball, his 31-point average earned him 63 college scholarship offers.

But Francis chose Rio Grande for two reasons. The school was willing to overlook the fact that he had not graduated from high school--he was 1 1/2 credits short--and he wanted to follow his coach to college. At the time of his enrollment, Bevo was married and the father of a 6-month-old son.

The basketball program was in sad shape when Oliver took over at Rio Grande. Besides coaching the team, Newt also served as athletic director, trainer, public relations man and driver of the school bus. He even washed the team’s uniforms, which had been purchased with money raised from the sale of football team equipment.

As skilled as he was at handling such varied assignments, Oliver was primarily a promoter.

One of Newt’s first moves was to pry $25 out of the school’s nearly depleted treasury and send the money off to the NCAA’s statistical service. He wanted to make sure that Bevo’s scoring figures would be included in the NCAA’s weekly tabulations.

Oliver then put together a 39-game schedule designed to showcase Bevo’s scoring wizardry. Included on Rio Grande’s 1952-53 schedule were such powers as Bliss College, Cincinnati Bible Seminary and Sue Bennett College.

Once the season started, though, it didn’t take Bevo long to grab the basketball public’s attention.

Home court for the Rio Grande Redmen was a dilapidated, 500-seat gymnasium the students jokingly called the Hog Pen. And on Jan. 9, 1953, Bevo really made a pig of himself against Ashland (Ky.) Junior College.

The scoreboard stopped working when Rio Grande hit 99 points, and in the game’s final five minutes, Oliver was screaming from the sidelines at his players to foul so that they could get the ball and feed Bevo. Bevo got all he could eat, scoring a record 116 points in Rio Grande’s 150-85 victory.

A few nights later, against Bliss College, Bevo scored 51 points in a 102-53 win. It gave him a season total of 1,072 and broke the single-season mark of 1,051 set the previous season by the 5-9 Johnny O’Brien of the University of Seattle. Francis had accomplished the feat while still, technically, a high school student, since he didn’t finish his necessary two high school courses for graduation until a week later.

Naturally, there were those who pointed out that O’Brien had set his scoring mark in big league college basketball, not against competition such as Rio Grande was playing.

But Bevo’s baskets kept knocking off records.

On Jan. 24, before a capacity crowd of 2,400 in Zanesville, Ohio, Bevo scored 66 points in a 113-82 win over Mountain State Junior College of Parkersburg, W. Va. His 14 free throws that night gave him a season total of 368, which bettered another of O’Brien’s records, 361 free throws, set during the 1951-52 season.

Originally scheduled at home, the game had to be moved to Zanesville to accommodate the fans clamoring to see Bevo and undefeated Rio Grande.

With the team’s winning streak at 25, Bevo was becoming college basketball’s most spectacular player, and the team was playing all its game on the road, having outgrown the Hog Pen.

Despite the hoopla, though, Francis was having a tough time financially.

Home for Bevo, his wife, Mary Jean, and their 6-month-old son, Frank, was a $25-a-month apartment near the campus. Although he received some financial help shortly after his 116-point game, he had to rush back to his family’s farm to sell a hog for rent money.

Rio Grande’s hapless opponents were now trying anything to stop Bevo. In a game at Troy, Ohio, before a crowd of 7,451, Cedarville Junior College tried stalling to keep the ball out of Bevo’s hands. Irate fans showered the floor with coins and wadded-up paper. Eager autograph hounds took advantage of the slowdown to get Bevo’s signature.

The strategy wasn’t real successful. Francis was held to 38 points, but the team rolled to an easy 66-29 win.

By early February, the hot-shooting Bevo had bettered most of college basketball’s scoring records--most field goals and free throws, highest scoring average, most points for a season and most in a single game.

Francis was far from a complete player. He couldn’t shoot with his left hand, had no fakes, and almost never passed off, but his shooting more than made up for those shortcomings.

Bevo would plant himself at the free-throw line, back to the basket, take the ball, leap, spin in the air and put up a soft, one-handed shot, swishing it about 75% of the time. Fouling him was futile, since he was also deadly at the free-throw line.

The principal, and most vocal, claimer to the scoring records Bevo appeared to be racking up was his coach, but the NCAA withheld official recognition. Then, in mid-February, the NCAA announced that it would not recognize Bevo’s marks.

“Intercollegiate record claims must be based on schedules made up largely of four-year, degree-awarding institutions,” the NCAA ruled.

Oliver was not about to take that lying down. After learning that it was Yale’s basketball coach who had moved that Bevo’s marks not be allowed, Newt fired off a challenge to the prestigious Ivy League university.

“Rio Grande, with only 94 full-time students, is willing to overlook the size of your enrollment to give you the opportunity to back up your statement that Bevo’s scoring records are unworthy of consideration,” he wrote.

He got no reply.

In March, Oliver announced that his school was “severing all ties with the NCAA because of its stripping of Bevo’s scoring records,” adding that he was turning all statistics over to the National Assn. of Intercollegiate Athletics.”

By the end of the month, however, the NAIA had not recognized any of Francis’ scoring marks, either. According to its executive secretary, A.O. Duer, the group was forming a committee to study existing records and standards. Not only Bevo’s, but all records would be given a thorough going over.

For all practical purposes, the case was closed for the 1952-53 season.

Still, it had been a very good season for Newt, Bevo, and Rio Grande College. Bevo and the 39-0 basketball team had indeed put Rio Grande on the sports map, the school’s financial situation had been stabilized, and Francis had become as big a name as Tom Gola, Walter Dukes, or Frank Selvy, college basketball’s premier players.

Among those impressed by Bevo’s scoring was Ned Irish, the basketball impresario of New York City. He figured that Rio Grande had all the ingredients necessary to be a hit in Madison Square Garden and booked the team for an appearance in early December.

For Oliver, putting together a schedule for the 1953-54 season was far easier than it had been the previous year. And he was careful that the entire 27-game schedule would be against schools fully meeting NCAA standards. The junior colleges were dropped.

Newt was confident that Bevo and the team were ready for the big time.

By the time the country boys from Ohio hit New York, their winning streak had reached 40. Their Madison Square Garden opponent was lightly regarded Adelphi.

There was a city-wide newspaper strike going on, but Newt and Bevo were besieged by radio and TV.

Arriving two days early, both coach and star player were interviewed by the major networks’ star sportscasters, Harry Wismer and Bill Stern of ABC, Mel Allen of NBC, and Jim McKay of CBS. Newt and Bevo did 10 interviews in two days.

There also were sightseeing trips to the United Nations, the Empire State Building and a Ranger hockey game, where Bevo took a bow between periods.

Almost 14,000 basketball fans turned out at the Garden for the game. Although he was double-teamed, Bevo bagged 28 points in the first half.

In the second, however, Adelphi put three and at times four men on Francis, held him to just four points, and Rio Grande went down to an 83-76 loss, ending the long winning streak.

“The Garden looked like a pasture compared to our 30-foot-wide gym back home,” Oliver said. “You can’t drop kids from a town of 200 into a place like New York City and not expect them to have stage fright.”

The team left town and headed to Philadelphia for the second game of its three-game Eastern tour.

It took an overtime for Villanova to beat Rio Grande, 93-92, and then it was on to Boston. There, in the Boston Garden, sparked by Bevo’s 41 points, Rio Grande beat Providence, 89-87.

Despite the two losses, the Eastern junket silenced critics who had been saying that Rio Grande couldn’t play with major college teams.

Back at school, however, resentment was smoldering among the administration. Some school officials believed that the basketball team had grown bigger than the school itself. With the squad continually on the road, all that the college administrators knew about Rio Grande basketball was what they read in the newspapers.

With Newt Oliver running the show, there was usually plenty to read.

To put things back in proper perspective, Davis, the man who had hired Oliver, announced in January, 1954 that his school’s team would not participate in any postseason tournaments.

The announcement was a bitter blow to Oliver, who had been hopeful of a bid to the National Invitation Tournament.

Bevo, oblivious to school politics, just kept pouring in the points on the basketball court.

In late January against Alliance College, in Alliance, Ohio, his 84 points set an individual single-game record.

But the best game of all was yet to come.

On Feb. 2, in Jackson, Ohio, Francis rebuffed the NCAA’s snub of the previous year. In a 134-91 victory over Hillsdale College of Michigan, a school that measured up to standards, Bevo scored 113 points, a single-game scoring record that still stands.

Rio Grande wound up the season with a 20-7 record, not bad considering that among its victories were wins over such major schools as Butler and Wake Forest.

It was also the school’s last shot at making it in big-time college basketball.

In April, Rio Grande announced that its Committee of Instruction had expelled Bevo Francis, citing “excessive absences, failure to make up more than half of his missed mid-term exams and failure to attend any classes the last two weeks.”

Oliver said that he also would leave the school. “I came with Bevo and we’ll go together,” he said, and on April 19, he resigned. “There’s no future down here now that Bevo’s gone,” he said.

Before the end of the month, Bevo and Newt had signed a one-year, $30,000 package deal with Abe Saperstein, owner of the Harlem Globetrotters. Oliver would coach and Francis would play for the Boston Whirlwinds, a touring team also owned by Saperstein.

It was 19 years before the school recognized the contributions of Oliver and Francis but finally, in 1973, they and the other members of those great teams of the early ‘50s were inducted into Rio Grande College’s Hall of Fame.

The school, which has an enrollment of more than 1,600, has kicked off the basketball season for the last eight seasons with the Bevo Francis Classic Tournament. When he can make it, Bevo is on hand to present the trophy to the winning team.

According to reports, Newt Oliver is doing OK. He owns a business in Springfield, Ohio, and is active in local politics.

Things haven’t gone so well for Bevo, though. He’s living in Salineville, Ohio, an area hard-hit by unemployment. He was out of work for three years but has a job now at a tire factory.

His legend lives on, though. In the basketball section of the 1986 edition of the “Guinness Book of World Records,” there is a picture of him. He is leaping, ready to launch that beautiful, soft, one-handed shot.

Swish! Never touched the rim.