Selvy, Francis Immortalized Themselves in 1954 With 100-Point Performances 11 Days Apart

By EARL GUSTKEY

March 7, 1999 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Bevo is back!

Hey, those of you who followed college basketball in the 1950s will recall headlines like these in 1954, the season two players broke the 100-point barrier in the span of 11 days:

“Bevo Scores 113, Rio Grande Wins”

Or:

“Selvy Gets 100 in Furman Win”

College basketball’s all-time, one-game scoring champion is about to do it again, on America’s TV screens.

In development at Disney is a TV movie based on Bevo Francis and his coach-huckster, Newt Oliver, who took obscure, near-bankrupt Rio Grande College from a gym with no seats its students called “the Hog Pen” to Madison Square Garden, Boston Garden and victories over Providence, Miami (Fla.) and Wake Forest.

And whatever became of Frank Selvy, the only other collegian to score 100 or more in a game? The former Laker is 66, retired and living in Simpsonville, S.C.

Selvy is easier to find these days than Bevo.

Finding Bevo is troublesome. Also 66, he’s in the Ohio woods, every day, hunting.

“I got a good coon dog and a good rabbit dog,” he said in a phone interview.

“I do what you’re supposed to do when you retire, go huntin’ every day.”

But he’s not hard to find in the record book.

Feb. 2, 1954, was the night he scored 113 points against Hillsdale College of Michigan, the one-game college scoring record that still stands. Francis made 38 of 70 shots from the field and 37 of 45 from the free-throw line.

Then on Feb. 13, Selvy scored his 100 against Newberry.

The previous season, Francis scored 116 in a game, but because it came against a junior college team, the feat is not recognized by the NCAA.

So in 1954, Oliver eliminated junior colleges and military teams from his schedule and took Division II Rio Grande on the road--for all 39 games.

“Bevo was not the greatest basketball player I ever saw,” Oliver said.

“But he was the greatest shooter who ever played the game. With the three-point shot today, he’d clean people’s clocks. He’d average 60, 65 a game. He was 50 years ahead of his time.”

Francis averaged 46.5 points a game that season, the highest average ever in college basketball.

In 1992, NBA scouting director Marty Blake told Sports Illustrated: “He was one of the greatest shooters who ever lived. It was a gift. He could not only shoot but shoot with range.”

Clarence Franklin Francis was 6 feet 9, a 20-year-old who had spent half his boyhood shooting by moonlight at a basket mounted in a pasture.

The Bevo moniker he inherited from his father, who favored a 1930s near-beer brand of the same name. In time, “Little Bevo” became “Bevo.”

Bevo Francis’ story almost smacks of “Hoosiers,” the 1986 film about rural Indiana high school basketball. But this was southern Ohio, in Raccoon Township, where a college with 92 students was teetering on bankruptcy.

Today, it calls itself Rio Grande University and there are almost 2,000 students.

Many there will tell you the guy who saved the place was Bevo Francis. And some of them are the very ones who turned their backs on him.

The 1954 Rio Grande basketball team actually outgrew the college. The faculty came to resent the team’s acclaim and that players were on the road the entire season, missing weeks, not days, of classes.

Some also resented the college having overlooked one detail in the admission of Francis: He didn’t have a high school diploma.

Finally, the college’s administration ruled the team could not compete in any postseason tournament in 1954--Oliver had sought a bid to the NIT--and Francis and his coach abruptly signed a $30,000 package deal with the Harlem Globetrotters.

They traveled for two years around the United States, for a Globetrotter stooge team, the Boston Whirlwinds. When he signed up, Francis was biding time until the NBA could draft him, when his Rio Grande class was graduated.

The Philadelphia Warriors drafted him in 1956--but by that time, after two years of hotel food three times a day, Francis had gained 40 pounds and was in the end stages of basketball burnout.

“Eddie Gottlieb of the Warriors sent me a plane ticket to Philadelphia to talk about a contract,” Francis recalled recently.

“It was for $13,000. I told him: ‘Heck, I can make that working in the steel mill.’ ”

And so he did, putting in 19 1/2 years at Midland Steel, only to be laid off six months before his retirement benefits kicked in. Then came a series of factory jobs, most recently 10 years as a loading dock supervisor at a Goodyear plastics plant at Carrollton, Ohio.

He lives in the same ranch house in Highlandtown, Ohio, that he and his wife of 49 years, Jean, bought for $9,500 in 1954 with his Globetrotter income.

Burnout, too, barred his way to the NBA.

“At that point, I’d spent two years riding around the country in station wagons, playing every night in a different city for long stretches, living out of a suitcase, eating hotel food all the time. . . . I’d just about had it with basketball.

“And the truth is, in those days the NBA didn’t pay that much.”

Francis and Oliver’s two-year-ride at Rio Grande was too fast for the little school.

Rio Grande College went from a backwoods, small-time intercollegiate sports program to Page 1 in newspapers across the country, and to appearing on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and NBC’s “Today.”

The school’s administrators were blinded by the bright lights.

The president of the college, Oliver maintains, was furious that major media outlets such as Life magazine and the TV networks came to Rio Grande to interview Francis and not him.

Never mind that Oliver’s team was pulling down guarantees of up to $4,000 to play on the road, helping Rio Grande meets its faculty payroll.

And never mind that Oliver’s salary was $3,300 and he lived in a $35-a-month apartment he and his wife shared with Bevo and his wife.

And never mind that the wives laundered the team’s uniforms in the bathtub they shared.

Fourteen times Francis scored 60 points or better, six times more than 70 against all competition.

And he did it, teammates agree, with the greatest-looking jump shot anyone ever saw.

Said Carl Benner, a retired math professor and manager of the ’54 Rio Grande team, “I’ve been a basketball junkie my entire life and I still put Bevo on my all-time top-10 pure shooters’ list, with guys like Pete Maravich and Bob Pettit.

“His jump shot was unstoppable. First of all, he was 6-9 and he could really jump. And it was a natural fadeaway shot and he had a very high release point. I don’t remember anyone ever blocking him, not once.”

Francis has three of the five highest-scoring games in NCAA history.

Said Dick Barr of Canton, Ohio, one of Francis’ teammates who recently retired after 36 years with Goodyear: “I always felt like if he’d played four years of college basketball, Bevo could have written his own ticket in the NBA. During those two years with the Globetrotters, I went to see him once, in Cleveland.

“I didn’t recognize him. He’d put on 40 pounds.

“But he’s still one of the best four or five shooters I ever saw.”

And what of Oliver, the fast-talking salesman-coach who brought Francis to Rio Grande with him from Wellsville, Ohio?

He was briefly the Globetrotters’ publicity chief, then went into business and local politics in southern Ohio. Years ago, he and Francis buried the hatchet with Rio Grande. The Hog Pen, built in 1918, was torn down and a new, 2,800-seat gym was christened Newt Oliver Arena.

For Francis and Oliver, 45 years later, the best of times are the yearly reunions at Rio Grande, when the little college’s most famous team gathers.

“I have great memories of those guys,” Francis said.

Does Francis regret not playing at a major program, like, say, Ohio State?

“Sometimes I wonder what would’ve happened, yeah,” he said.

“But do I regret going to Rio Grande? No, not at all.”

Can he still shoot?

“Well, give me a few warmups and I could put together a string of free throws for you,” he said.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Scoring Machines

The top individual scoring games for the three college divisions and NBA:

DIVISION I

* 100--Frank Selvy, Furman, 1954