Of all the great basketball players from Kentucky, Wes Unseld may have been the best
With regard to the great Westley Sissel Unseld, who passed away Tuesday at the age of 74, there is only a slight disagreement.
“He is without a doubt the best big man to ever come out of Kentucky,” Bob White, who for 50 years covered high school sports for the Courier-Journal, said Tuesday. “Jim McDaniels (out of Allen County) came along later and was really good, but Wes was the best.”
David Cosby would go one better.
“He was the best basketball player to come out of the state,” said Unseld’s high school teammate at Louisville Seneca. “No doubt about it. Who else could win Rookie of the Year and MVP of the NBA (1969) at the same time?”
Answer: Unseld and Wilt Chamberlain, only Unseld did it at 6-foot-7, 245 pounds.
“Giving away 5 and 6 inches to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and players like that,” Cosby said. “And Wes would do it every night and get the better of those guys. He has to be one of the best players of all time.”
A member of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame who averaged 20.6 points and 18.9 rebounds per game in college at Louisville, Unseld was the No. 2 overall pick of the Baltimore Bullets on the way to a 13-year NBA career. Unseld was a basketball icon, the epitome of grit and class.
“He was an extremely hard worker and fundamentally sound,” Cosby said. “He was fundamentally sound in every part of his game. And he invented the outlet pass.”
Indeed, Unseld was the master of the outlet pass. An undersized center, he would repeatedly use his wide frame to gain perfect position and after having secured the defensive rebound, release a two-handed chest pass to mid-court or beyond that would lead to an easy layup.
His start came at Seneca High School, founded in 1957 and coached by Bob Mulcahy, a former Lafayette High School star under Ralph Carlisle.
“We all grew up in Newburg and knew each other,” Cosby said. “Wes, he was just a man among men.”
“He could dominate the defensive backboard,” White said. “And he was a great team player. He did score 50 points in one game at Seneca, I believe. But he was a great rebounder, played great defense and he hardly ever fouled.”
Unseld’s sophomore season, Seneca lost in the 1962 7th Region finals, 57-56, to Mike Silliman and St. Xavier, who went on to win the state championship.
“Coach Mulcahy was good friends with Earl Cox,” said White of the late Courier-Journal sports editor. “Mulcahy told Earl that if he had one more week of practice with Wes they would have beaten St. X, that Wes was really coming on as a sophomore.”
“We should have beaten them anyway,” said Cosby, a senior on that team who went on to play at Cincinnati. “Don’t get me wrong, St. X was a great team. But I’ve still got the yearbook and I show my grandkids. They made 17 free throws in that game and we took four. You do the math.”
Seneca won back-to-back state titles in 1963 and 1964, establishing itself as one of the state’s all-time great teams, one that also included Mike Redd, himself a Mr. Basketball.
Recruited by Adolph Rupp to be the first black basketball player at Kentucky, Unseld decided to stay close to home, where his father, Charles., a semi-professional baseball player, was dealing with health problems.
Pre-Unseld, said White, U of L would give two tickets to every member of the sports staff at the Courier-Journal, trying to drum up interest. Once Unseld arrived, “The staff didn’t get those tickets anymore,” said White with a laugh.
“The thing about Wes, as good a basketball player as he was, he was an even better person,” Cosby said. “You never heard anyone say anything negative about Wes. He was a class act and a great basketball player. He really was.”
This story was originally published June 2, 2020 at 5:32 PM.
