LOGAN — He was his wingman when he was alive, and now that the late, great Wayne Estes is going into the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame, 60 years later, he’s doing what good friends do: applauding the selection while also musing, “Wonder what took them so long?”
Eighty-one-year-old Del Lyons is relaxing in a meeting room at the Logan Country Club — a comfortable place for an interview with a man who jokes “I only play golf on days that end in y” — to talk about Estes and “the night.”
He confesses to a certain wariness about talking to the media, again, on account of the many interviews he’s done over the past six decades that have resulted in stories that have elevated fiction above fact, sometimes leaving him “wondering if I was really there.”
There’s the myth about Estes stopping to see if he could help others who were in a car accident, and the one about Estes complaining that his arms “didn’t feel right” playing basketball that night, suggesting some sort of premonition or predetermined fate was at work.
Nonsense.
But the records that were set in the Nelson Fieldhouse on Monday, Feb. 8, 1965, the electrocution accident that happened hours later and the notion that Wayne Estes was as good at being a human being as he was at being a basketball player — those are not myths. Those are absolutely true.
• • •
The two met at Utah State University as freshman basketball recruits in the fall of 1961, Estes from the small mining town of Anaconda, Montana, Lyons from the even smaller farming town of Dingle, Idaho. “We lined up to shoot for sides to play three on three, winner stays,” remembers Lyons. “I made my shot and then Estes made his, and I’m thinking, oh great, I get to play with this fat kid.
“Then we started to play and I watched him shoot and we never left the court.”
At 6-foot-6, 260 pounds, Wayne Estes, a state champion discus thrower in Montana, came to Utah State on a track scholarship. Basketball was an add-on, a bonus. They called him “Baby Huey” (after the overweight cartoon character). But put a basketball in his hands and he was, as Del says, “the best shooter I’ve ever seen.”
Del and Wayne became fast friends. They both liked to hunt, both liked to play ball, both majored in P.E. They were even born on the same day (May 13, 1943). At the start of their junior year they moved together into an apartment off campus. With their basketball scholarships, their monthly $15 laundry stipend (“our NIL money,” quips Lyons), and the guy at the movie theater who let them watch all the movies they wanted for free, they pretty much owned Logan.
By their senior year, Del was helping Ev Sorenson coach the freshman basketball team and Estes, now a svelte 225, was turning heads all around the nation.
With a virtually unstoppable hook shot — similar to the one Kareem Abdul-Jabbar would later make famous with the Lakers — and a soft touch belying his size, Estes assaulted the stat sheet nightly. An off night was when he scored less than 30. In the 10th game of the season, at the Rainbow Classic in Honolulu, Estes broke the USU single-game scoring record when he scored 52 points against Boston College. After the game, the BC coach, Celtic legend Bob Cousy, confided to Aggie coach Ladell Andersen, “I’d trade all my starters for Estes.”
As the season progressed and Estes became the second-most prolific scorer in the country — behind only future NBA Hall of Famer Rick Barry of Miami — Los Angeles Lakers scouts became a fixture in the stands. In those days, draft rights were territorial. It had become a foregone conclusion that the USU star was headed to LA.
The season’s 18th game, against Denver University, was played in the George Nelson Fieldhouse, the Aggies' home court. To that point, Estes had scored 1,953 points in his career. With seven games remaining, he was a cinch to become just the 19th player in major college basketball history to surpass the 2,000-point barrier (with the advent of freshman eligibility and the 3-point shot, the gold standard would later become 3,000 points).
No one was surprised when he did it that night.
He had 24 points at halftime, then added another 24 in the second half, connecting on a jump shot with five minutes remaining to give him 48 points for the game, a new fieldhouse record, and 2,001 for his career — at which point the game stopped, 4,972 fans erupted in a lengthy standing ovation, and Andersen took Estes out of the game.
After that? Del Lyons remembers it as clearly as he remembers the names of his six grandkids.
• • •
After first driving back to their apartment on 300 North, Estes and Lyons went to eat at Fredrico’s, a popular pizza place (then and now) located on the east end of campus. On their way, they passed an auto accident on 400 North. It was hard to miss. A Ford Falcon was T-boned around a power pole.
After eating, they passed the mangled car again on the way back to their apartment.
Curiosity then took over. They decided to get back in the car and go check out the wreck.
It was at this point that Lyons made a decision he swears saved his life.
“I was wearing Florsheim leather shoes and it was kinda snowy and wet and I didn’t want to ruin them, so I changed and put on my rubber-soled Converse shoes.”
At the accident site, power company crews were already at work. The occupants and driver of the Falcon, a USU freshman, were long gone, taken to the hospital, where all would recover.
Lyons and Estes and two freshman basketball players who had joined them got out of their car and walked past the wreck, keeping their distance. But on the sidewalk on the way back to their car, they passed underneath dangling power lines knocked loose by the collision.
“The wire was hanging down right at my eye level,” Del remembers, “I saw it and ducked under and turned to Wayne and said, ‘Watch that wire, it might be hot.’”
Wayne did duck, but not low enough. “It hit him in the forehead, causing him to reach up and grab the wire, like you’d do if a bee had stung you.”
As he fell to the ground clutching the 2,300-volt wire, Wayne reflexively reached out for his friend with his left hand, sending a jolt of electricity through Del that launched him over their car into the middle of 400 North.
Del staggered to his feet and ran back to kick Wayne’s arm off the wire and administer CPR, but to no avail. Paramedics soon arrived and took them both to the ER, where the doctors who examined Del told him that the current that came out of his feet “made it look like I’d been shot by a .22 in both heels.”
But he was soon released, and his friend, teammate and roommate was not.
“I’m the only one in the world who knows what happened to Wayne,” says Del. “When we went to the mortuary afterward to help with the hair, he had a burn right on his hairline.”
The story broke like wildfire. Radio stations throughout the state interrupted their broadcasts to deliver the breaking news. UPI and AP wired the story across the country. Reporters at the Logan Herald Journal and the Deseret News, evening papers at the time, stayed up late to prepare multiple stories for their Feb. 9 editions. “Freak Mishap Kills Star Athlete” was the headline on the front page of the Deseret News.
Coaches and players from around the country praised Estes (Bob Cousy, reiterating his remarks in Honolulu, said, “He’s the best man I’ve seen in basketball all year”). The Utah Legislature hurriedly passed a resolution honoring Estes “as an outstanding and dedicated athlete, student, scholar and sportsman”; in Provo, at BYU’s weekly Tuesday devotional the next morning, 8,000 students stood for a moment of silence. Memorial services were held in Logan at the Episcopalean Church and the Nelson Fieldhouse, in addition to services in Anaconda, where by order of the mayor all businesses closed during the funeral.
The myths began almost immediately. Incorrect reports that Estes had stopped to see if he could assist people in the wreck were printed the next morning in Salt Lake City and Logan newspapers, as were stories about the numbness Estes complained about before his record-setting game, casting an eerie glow on the tragedy.
The mythologizing and exaggerations annoyed Del. Ask him if the Wayne Estes he knew was the all-American boy everyone painted him out to be and his answer today is the same as it was then: “He was probably more than that. I doubt you could have found anybody in the valley who could have said a bad thing about Wayne Estes. He was not arrogant, he was not cocky, he was such a good guy, just a darn good guy.”
End of story. No need for embellishment.
The years have been good to Del. At 6-foot-2 and 180 pounds, he’s the same height and weight as his playing days, “although I was more muscly back then.” After coaching high school basketball for three years after graduation, he became an insurance agent, specializing in insuring teachers, a job that, as he says, “I thought would last a year and ended up being 38.”
He married Betty, his childhood sweetheart, the summer after the accident and they moved back to Logan a few years later to raise their three children, and have remained fixtures in the community ever since.
When a friend forwarded him the announcement last month that Estes will be part of the posthumous inductees in the College Basketball Hall of Fame’s Class of 2025, joining Kansas State coach Jack Hartman and UCLA forward Dave Meyers, among others, he was pleased for his good friend.
“Well deserved and long overdue,” he says, before adding, “I really have no idea why it’s taken this long.”
Like so many, he thinks about what might have been if they hadn’t stopped to look at that wreck 60 years ago, but he hasn’t dwelled on it. “It hasn’t destroyed my life,” he says. His own life was spared and he gratefully moved on.
Maybe not sugarcoating things helps.
“We didn’t stop to see if we could help anybody that night,” he says, “and when Wayne said his arms felt numb before the game, well, I’ve analyzed that and if you had a chance to break a record and do something nobody had ever done, I think you’d be a little hyped up too.”
The truth was, they were just a couple of curious college kids.
“I was talking to a church group one time about making decisions,” says Del, “and I said that was the night we made a bad decision. We made a bad decision just to stop, that’s all it was.” And that’s a fact.
