On the afternoon of April 25, 1950, Leon Blevins answered a call from Abe Chanin, sports editor of the Arizona Daily Star.
Chanin asked if Blevins had been selected in that day’s NBA draft.
“I really haven’t given it much thought,” said Blevins. “But I did sign a paper saying I would play pro basketball.”
The Indianapolis Olympians selected Blevins with the 81st overall pick. There was no mock draft, no TV interview, no party, no signing bonus.
Blevins was the first Arizona Wildcat selected in the NBA draft. If you watched him play, you are at least 70 years old, and closer to 80. Leon Blevins? He was the son of Dust Bowl farmers from Black Oak, Arkansas, population 262.
Tucson had never seen a basketball player like him.
“He’s really the first guy to shoot a jump shot I ever saw,” says Bruce Larson, a teammate on Arizona’s 1949-50 Border Conference champions, a club that finished 26-5. “Leon was ahead of his time in a few things.”
Leon Blevins was so good at Arizona that he held the school’s career scoring record (852 points) for 10 years, through the entire decade of the ’50s. He was so good that UA athletic director Pop McKale scheduled a “homecoming game” for Blevins at Phoenix Union High School.
The game, against Santa Clara on Jan. 30, 1950, was sold out, 3,200 strong at PUHS. At halftime, the school band played “Anchors Aweigh” to honor Blevins’ World War II naval service. It gave him a trophy and a standing ovation.
This was not just some maverick ballplayer at some desert outpost. At the time, Arizona was ranked No. 22 in The Associated Press poll, working on a 59-game winning streak at Bear Down Gym. The mania for UA basketball was such that the Wildcats shattered the attendance record of 3,970, drawing 4,607 against then-national power Beloit (Wisconsin) College.
Blevins, who was often the life of the party, scored 26 that night as Arizona improved its record to 23-2. He was a rock star before there were rock stars.
“They put in bleachers under the balcony and bleachers on each end,” says Larson, who became Arizona’s head coach from 1961-72. “There wasn’t space to get another person in the building.”
The NBA of 1950-51 had 11 teams, and when Blevins arrived at Indianapolis he became teammates with two All-Stars, Alex Groza and Ralph Beard, a pair of former Kentucky Wildcat All-Americans.
Blevins was probably paid about $4,000; the top NBA players of ’51 earned close to $15,000. The 6-foot 2-inch shooting guard, who was already 25 (he spent two seasons at Phoenix College after his PUHS days), accompanied the Olympians on their opening trip, to Washington and Baltimore.
He did not play in the opener. But on Nov. 4, 1950, Blevins got off the bench late in a 102-86 loss to the Baltimore Bullets. He shot four times. Made one. They would be the only points he would score in the NBA.
NBA records list Blevins as having played two games for Indianapolis, but if you check all 68 box scores from the 1950-51 season, he is listed only in the game of Nov. 4. The UA’s first-ever NBA draft pick never played another game.
He was back at the UA, completing his education degree, during the winter semester.
“I kind of lost track of him,” Larson remembers. “I know he had a short career.”
There was no guaranteed money for the 81st overall draft pick in 1950, but Blevins had a lifetime plan. He got married, had four children, and became the basketball coach at South Mountain High School. In 1956, the school’s third year of existence, Blevins coached the Jaguars to the state championship.
By 1964, he took a job at his old school, Phoenix College, and became something of a legend. He took the Bears to a 35-1 season in 1969, reaching the NJCAA national semifinals. A year later, a Phoenix group that annually chose the state’s coach of the year, selected Blevins over ASU’s Frank Kush and Bobby Winkles.
Blevins retired from coaching in 1976. Sadly, he died in 1987 as a relatively young man, at 61, after a long illness.
The lasting image of Blevins’ basketball days came late in January 1950. That’s when the UA basketball team made its first-ever airline flight, for games in San Francisco and Los Angeles against St. Mary’s and Loyola Marymount. A Daily Star photographer pictured the team on the stairway to their American Airlines flight.
Blevins, wearing a top coat, smiling and waving to the camera, was in the middle of a team ranked No. 22 nationally.
“They were good times,” says Larson. “We were on top of the world there for a while.”
After 65 years, the view from the top of the basketball world has changed more than a Navy veteran from Black Oak, Arkansas, could’ve ever imagined.
