The Cleo Hill Story: He was Michael Jordan before there was a Michael Jordan

Cleo Hill, one of the best basketball players in Winston-Salem State and CIAA history, died on Monday in Orange, New Jersey at age 77.  As a  head coach at Essex County College in Newark, NJ, Hill would win 489 games with a 79.3 winning percentage, which ranks as the seventh-highest all-time in NJCAA men’s basketball.  He coached his hometown Wolverines 24 outstanding years.

CLEO HILL
6'-1"/185 lbs.
FIRST ROUND DRAFT PICK (#8) 1961 NBA DRAFT
 ST. LOUIS HAWKS,
WINSTON-SALEM STATE UNIVERSITY

WINSTON-SALEM, North Carolina  -- Before there was MJ, there was Cleo Hill. Many consider him one of the all-time greats whose misfortune was to be black and born 20 years too soon. He played college basketball at Winston-Salem Teachers College from 1957-1961 for legendary coach Clarence "Big House" Gaines before ACC schools like North Carolina, Duke and Wake Forest began recruiting black players. Playing at the predominantly girls school, the 6 foot 1 inch Hill averaged 27 points per game as a senior. Savvy basketball scouts considered Hill the best player in the country when he graduated from college. The St. Louis Hawks of the NBA drafted Hill with the 8th pick in the first round--the first African-American from a Historically Black College to be drafted in the first round.

At Winston-Salem, his impact was such that he was recently voted the best player in school history, even ahead of Hall of Famer Earl "the Pearl" Monroe who followed him in the late sixties and went on to star for the New York Knicks.

A little background here: Long time sports commentator Billy Packer, who played guard for nearby Wake Forest became friends with Hill in 1961. The naive Packer, a Pennsylvania native, decided one evening to cross the tracks to the poor side of town to watch a game between Winston-Salem and Tennessee State. He soon found he was the only white guy in the packed gym. Coach Gaines recognized him from a newspaper article and invited him to sit with him on the bench. It didn't take long for Packer to realize that the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association (CIAA) schools played better quality basketball (more speed and athleticism) than the so-called big time schools of the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC).

Packer was later quoted as saying, "Cleo Hill was better than anybody in the ACC. There was nobody close to him. As a matter of fact, of the guys I've seen in this state, Cleo Hill was the forerunner of David Thompson and Michael Jordan. The whole league had guys like that. Out of that Cleo and I became buddies and we used to scrimmage against them. " This came from a man who played on two consecutive ACC champions in 1961 and 1962. Packer organized numerous informal scrimmages between Wake Forest and Winston-Salem on Sunday mornings which were probably against the law at that time in the Jim Crow South. 

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Coach Hill was a star basketball player at Winston-Salem State University before being the 1961 first round draft pick of the St. Louis Hawks. He also played in the old American Basketball League and the Eastern Pennsylvania Basketball League. Coach Hill was profiled in the 2008 ESPN documentary Black Magic, which chronicled legendary African-American basketball players from Historically Black Colleges and Universities.  Born and raised in Newark, N.J.  and a graduate of South Side High School (now Malcolm X Shabazz), Coach Hill returned home following his six-year pro basketball career. He assumed the head coaching job at the fledgling Essex County College,