Better late than never.
That’s the likely feeling of hundreds of basketball fans from the Lehigh Valley and North Carolina who will be happy to hear that former Catasauqua High and University of North Carolina star Larry Miller will be inducted into the College Basketball Hall of Fame on Nov. 20 in Kansas City.
In 1968, Miller was a consensus first-team selection on one of the greatest All-America teams ever, a squad that included future Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Famers Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Pete Maravich, Wes Unseld and Elvin Hayes.
The 76-year-old Miller set the ABA single-game scoring record with 67 points for the Carolina Cougars in March 1972, but is best remembered on a national level for his career playing for Dean Smith at North Carolina.
At UNC, Miller was the ACC player of the year in both 1967 and 1968 and also earned back-to-back ACC Tournament MVP awards, the only one in UNC history to accomplish those feats. As a sophomore in 1965-66, he averaged 20.9 points and 10.3 rebounds per game. As a junior, he averaged 21.9 points and 9.3 rebounds and helped the Tar Heels win the ACC tournament title and reach the Final Four.
As a senior, Miller averaged 22.4 points and 8.1 rebounds per game and scored in double figures in every NCAA Tournament game to help UNC reach the national title game where theTar Heels lost to UCLA.
He scored in double figures in 64 consecutive games, the most in North Carolina history. Even more than 50 years after he played his last game for UNC, he’s still seventh in program history with 1,982 points and fifth in scoring average at 21.8 per game.
He scored 30 or more points 11 times, tallied 20 or more 60 times with a high of 38 at Virginia in 1967.
Among his other highlights according to goheels.com, Miller scored 32 points on 13 of 14 shooting in an 82-73 victory over Duke in the 1967 ACC Tournament title game. His UNC teams went 70-21, including 32-10 in ACC regular-season play and 54-10 overall, 24-4 in ACC competition in his final two seasons.
Miller will be the 13th player or coach from North Carolina to be inducted into the College Basketball Hall of Fame, joining coaches Ben Carnevale, Frank McGuire, Dean Smith, Larry Brown and Roy Williams and players Billy Cunningham, Bob McAdoo and James Worthy,
Area fans will get an opportunity to congratulate Miller in person since he will be doing a signing for his book “Larry Miller Time” between 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. Saturday at the North Catasauqua’s Playground as part of the borough’s J4 Celebration that will also feature a Catasauqua High Mega-Reunion.
Miller, arguably, is the most famous Catty alum of all-time.
Miller was the No. 1 recruit in the country as a senior at Catasauqua in 1964, when he led the Rough Riders to Lehigh Valley League and District 11 championships. He ended what many consider to be the greatest scholastic career in Lehigh Valley history with 2,722 points and 2,062 rebounds and in the state playoffs in 1964 he scored 46 of Catty’s 66 points and added 20 rebounds in a 66-62 win over Steelton.
“We have had a lot of good players over the years, but no one has come close to Larry,” Whitehall High grad Fred Rummel said at one of Miller’s first book signings last August. “I am not knocking the other players because some were great, but no one could dominate a game at the high school level like Larry. One year it was Larry and four other so-so players and he took them to the state semifinals basically by himself.”
He obviously had the same impact at the college level.
He will be one of nine new inductees into the Hall of Fame in November.
The others are former players Richard “Rip” Hamilton of Connecticut, Frank Selvy of Furman, and the late Jimmy Walker from Providence. Former coaches being inducted include former Michigan coach John Beilein, who led the Wolverines to the national finals with Allentown Central Catholic graduate Muhammad Ali Abdur-Rahkman in the starting lineup, former Eastern Washington coach and Gonzaga assistant Jerry Krause and former Florida, Illinois, UNLV and Oklahoma coach Lon Kruger.
Perhaps the biggest names in the induction class are national championship-winning coaches Jim Calhoun and Williams, who will be formally honored in the Class of 2022 after initially being recognized as part of the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame’s Founding Class in 2006.
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