It is an axiom of journalism that everyone has a story to tell. And then there was Rodney “Hot Rod” Hundley.
The life and times of Hot Rod are so rich with material that if they ever actually made the movie about him that was once planned, they’d have to tell it in installments. It took two books just to tell his life’s story and they still didn’t get it all.
His boyhood alone sounds like a Dickensian tale of a poor West Virginia orphan who was abandoned by his parents, abused by foster parents, taken in by an elderly couple who washed milk bottles for a living, and ran off to live his teen years alone in a hotel, where he cried himself to sleep when he wasn’t entertaining crowds on the basketball court. And then there was the rest of it, the basketball and notoriety and all that followed.
On Saturday, Hot Rod Hundley was laid to rest, having died March 27 at the age of 80, just as Alzheimer’s was pulling a fog over his memory and speech. Let’s just hope they have a basketball waiting for him on the other side.
He’s hardly done anything that didn’t involve the ball and the game. He played basketball in high school, college and the NBA. When his basketball career ended, he sold shoes — basketball shoes, of course. Then he gave that up to become a TV/radio broadcaster, talking about basketball games for a living, more than 3,000 of them, for nearly four decades.
As a boy he liked to tell the basketball, “You’re going to get me out of here,” and it did. “And I’m still riding it,” he told me a few years ago. “Without basketball I don’t know where I’d be.” Sadly, he said the only time he was happy in his youth was when he was playing basketball.
In a lengthy 2003 profile, I noted that basketball gave Hot Rod the love, attention and friendships that he didn’t get anywhere else in his boyhood. "I was lonely," he told me. “I'd walk on the court and I was king. As soon as the game was over it was a letdown. It was back to my room." In many ways he continued to turn to basketball for all of those things the rest of his life.
Hot Rod had such a long career in radio and TV that many either didn’t realize or remember that he was a great basketball player, which is the source of everything else that followed. It was lost on a generation that knew him only as the staccato-talking Voice of the Jazz.
Fans tend to think the basketball moves they see on a court now were created by modern generations. Hot Rod was doing behind-the-back passes and between-the-legs dribbles 60 years ago, as well as a lot of other flashy moves that normally were seen only when the Globetrotters were in town.
Hot Rod was Pete Maravich before there was Pete Maravich (if you remember who he was). He honed his skills alone in a YMCA gym to fill his boyhood hours and then he unleashed them on the public. In high school he averaged 30 points a game — without a 3-point line — and set the state’s all-time scoring record in just three seasons of play. In the Kentucky-West Virginia all-star game he scored 45 points. By the time he was finished he had some 100 scholarship offers.
The rules prevented freshmen from playing in varsity games in college, so Hot Rod had to bide his time for a season while averaging 35 points per game for the freshman team. He became a two-time all-American. He averaged nearly 25 points as a senior. He was the first overall pick of the 1957 NBA draft. He played in two NBA all-star games.
But his pro career didn’t live up to its promise and he played just six seasons. Hundley was too distracted by the Hollywood and party scene and didn’t take his basketball career seriously enough. Later, he regretted it. He believed he had more natural talent than fellow West Virginia alum Jerry West, who became a legendary player.
When he got a second chance to do something with basketball again — broadcasting games — he took it seriously, trying to atone for his playing career. This time he worked hard on his craft. At courtside, he witnessed the rise of new generations of players — Larry Bird, Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Tim Duncan — while describing their games on the air, but in the back of his mind he always wondered what might have been for his own long-ago playing career.
In the end, though, he got out of basketball what he needed most: friendships, society, a living and a way out.
Doug Robinson's columns run on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Email: drob@deseretnews.com