A young boy and Bevo’s 116-point game
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — The other day, while scrolling through Facebook awaiting West Virginia’s basketball victory over Colorado, a post popped up celebrating a moment from the sports history that I’d carried forward from childhood.
On Jan. 9, 1953, Bevo Francis scored 116 points in a college basketball game — a year after being an All-Ohioan at Wellsville High School. He was a 6-foot-9 freshman center at Rio Grande College facing Ashland (Kentucky) Junior College.
I was awaiting my final year of Little League baseball, having just turned 12 a month and three days earlier, living in the New York suburbs, my head buried daily in the city’s tabloids such as the Daily News, the Post and the Mirror.
For some strange reason this bit me like a summer mosquito. Would it have itched as much and as long that 72 years later it still carried a certain charm with his name had been Ralph Francis instead of Bevo and if he’d attended Illinois or Wake Forest instead of what I assumed was a Texas school at the time, only to learn many years later it was a small college?
I don’t know. But that was a different era, one without Internet. It barely had television.
But was a wonderful time to 12 years old and to be in a New York City suburb without any threat of terror, when the city had just been introduced to Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle, long before there was a World Trade Center, let alone the buildings had been brought down in a dastardly and cowardly attack that would wipe out the leftover innocent I and my generation had brought with us from the 1950s.
Now you may be wondering at this point what this has to do with anything in a sports column written in West Virginia about a basketball moment that predated by a day a 92-55 Mountaineer basketball victory at Virginia Tech in a season and pre-dating the arrival of Hot Rod Hundley by two years.
But as things worked out in the Colorado game they would play the weekend item appeared on Facebook, it was meaningful in putting sports, be they college or professional, be they basketball, football or baseball, into the American culture.
Superstars, of course, have always been with us, be they Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Tiger Woods, Red Grange, Muhammad Ali or whomever and they stood as high or higher back in the days of Ruth or Jack Dempsey or Grange as they do today, even though in the early days you could not see them play and seldom heard them speak.
But to that 12-year-old youngster about to enter his “Happy Days” era, this guy named Bevo grasped him by him by the nape of his neck and carried him through the 72 years of his life that have followed right along with Wilt and West and Williams and DiMaggio, with Jim Brown and Joe Montana and the Bobby Thomson home run that won a pennant and Franco Harris’ “Immaculate Reception.”
It changed as we got older, but somehow it has always been there for the 12-year-olds to grasp and that Facebook item planted a seed of thought in an old mind that it really hasn’t changed and that somewhere, somehow what transpired in Boulder, Colorado, probably put that same hook into a 12-year-old somewhere in West Virginia.
See, you never really know as an athlete when your team will come and whether you be hero or goat.
Yes, Javon Small scored 26 points in that game and had seven assists and, but every 12-year-old knew he would.
What they wouldn’t know is that a reserve in his only year at West Virginia would save the game with a magnificent second-half performance, perhaps capturing a young boy or girl’s imagination for a lifetime.
And if it wasn’t him, perhaps it would be a bigger than life figure of Eduardo Andre, a Brit by birth who has grown to 6-foot-11 and was brought to WVU as a big man to protect the rim but who stood much taller in the Colorado game when he shook off a dismal showing against Arizona to play as big a game as Small and Yesufu, scoring points, blocking shots and make a couple of crucial steals down the stretch.
No, he did not score 116 points but WVU didn’t 116. It needed only what he offered and any 12-year-old watching on ESPN+ had to be captivated by his performance.
And maybe all that this is a player who did not score a point, a walk-on named Jake Auer. Auer’s role to date had been to light up the student section coming off the bench to hit a couple of late 3s in games that already had been decided, drawing the walk-on ovation that comes with things.
But this time coach Darian DeVries, faced with a roster shrunk by injury, pushed Auer’s button early, in the first half, with a meaningful five minutes of playing time. He didn’t score and he didn’t hurt the team.
It was the kind of thing that maybe a 12-year-old didn’t even recognize, but maybe his dad or grandfather told him about the heroic moments Auer gave, moments that could even be forgotten when DeVries tried the same thing and Colorado attacked Auer’s defense and exposed him with quick baskets.
Still, he’d earned his keep in the first half and even if he did score 116 fewer points than Bevo Francis did on his big day, he still gave that 12-year-old from 72 years earlier the same kind of feeling he’d had, knowing that the unexpected had happened again.