Wearing high top Converse All Stars, striped socks and a No. 11 jersey, West was seated in the front row on the far left.
Standing in the back row was a dark-haired 6-foot-6 forward from Yorkville, Ohio, — Hank Josefczyk — who would go on to play for the Dayton Flyers and today lives in Springboro with his wife Sally, a former UD cheerleader.
West would become one of the greatest basketball players ever to lace up sneakers. He was West Virginia’s High School Player of the Year in 1956, became an All American at West Virginia University and was named an NBA All-Star in each of the 14 years he played for the Los Angeles Lakers.
Following his playing days, he was part of the evolution of the league as a successful scout, head coach, general manager and executive vice president.
Even his silhouette is the basis for the NBA logo.
Yet, on that 1956 All Star team — at least by one statistical measure — he was eclipsed by Josefczyk.
That 1955-56 season, West was the leading prep scorer in West Virginia with 926 points.
Josefczyk was Ohio’s top scorer with a whopping 1,097 points.
Over 26 games for the Yorkville Ductillites, he averaged 42.2 points. In his final contest, he scored 76 points against Shadyside.
That prep dominance led to his 2020 enshrinement in the Ohio Basketball Hall of Fame.
In 1956, Josefczyk said West tried to convince him to come to West Virginia, too.
“Back then I had 200 offers for either football or basketball,” the 86-year-old Josefczyk said the other day. “Notre Dame wanted me as a quarterback. Ohio State, Indiana and West Virginia did, too.
“And Army tried to get me in the worst way. When I got picked for the North-South All Star game at Murray State, I had to cancel my trip to West Point so they said, ‘We’ll send a military jet to get you after practice and bring you to West Point. Then we’ll fly you back the next day.’”
Josefczyk wanted to study engineering, but he said Indiana didn’t have an engineering school and suggested dentistry:
“They offered a heck of a deal. I could make the travelling squad as a sophomore and would get three years of dental school free. After that, they had a good dentist, and I could join his practice.
“There was just one problem.
“I didn’t want to be a dentist.”
Josefczyk’s son Mark spoke to me by phone the other morning as he headed from his hobby farm in Colerain Township to his job with a venture capital company in Covington, Kentucky:
“Did he tell you about his (basketball) recruiting trip to Clemson when Press Maravich was the coach?
“They’re in the gym and Coach Maravich says, ‘Hank, why don’t you just shoot some shots and I’ll sit here and talk to you.’
“Then someone walks in the gym and says ‘Coach, you have a phone call.’
“This was before cell phones, so Coach Maravich gets up and says, ‘Hank, I’ll be right back. My son is here. Would you mind babysitting him ‘til I get back? He’s down there in the corner.’
“And there was Pete. He was like 6 years old and Dad said he’ll never forget watching the kid dribble between his legs and do all the drills.
“My dad babysat Pistol Pete when he was six!”
Basketball and love at UD
Yorkville is a small Ohio River town between Martins Ferry and Steubenville and Josefczyk’s dad worked at Wheeling-Pittsburgh steel mill there for 33 years.
Hank gravitated to sports, but in the seventh grade he said his basketball coach didn’t play him much, so he decided, “To heck with this! I’m going sled riding and skating in the winter.”
The next year Earl Davis became the new varsity head coach, and he got a grade school teacher to work with Hank.
“I spent a lot of time shooting the ball after eighth grade practice — I really got motivated ― and freshman year I was on varsity.” Josefczyk said. He would end his varsity career with 2,013 points.
He was a standout in football, even though the varsity had just 17 players.
“We didn’t have enough guys to scrimmage, so the alumni who worked at the steel mill would come over when their shift ended, and we’d practice against them.”
The mill guys were tough, but Dayton coach Tom Blackburn was tougher.
“We liked him when we first came to UD and then again after we left,” Josefczyk laughed. “In between he was a real task master.”
And Josefczyk admitted it didn’t take long for him to get called on the carpet:
“My high school coach’s wife hooked me up with a girl whose dad was president of Armco. But she was a divorcee, and she was a little older than me.
“Well, Blackburn had spies all around town and if you went somewhere, he knew it.
“And soon I get called into the office. He and Herbie (Dintaman, the Flyers’ freshman coach) were there, and Blackburn said: ‘This is a Catholic University. You can’t be dating a divorcee!’”
But the following year, Cupid put on the full-court press. Josefczyk was smitten and Blackburn had no effective game plan to combat it.
Just before the No. 11 Flyers headed to Madison Square Garden for the 1958 NIT, they had a banquet at Suttemillers. That’s where Josefczyk said he first noticed Sally Yenger, who had long black hair and, on that night, an eye-catching red dress.
“UD was a Catholic school and back then the cheerleaders wore those terrible culottes,” he once told me. “No girl ever looked good in them.
“But that red dress!!!
The Flyers headed off to New York City, where they ended up losing the championship game to Xavier in overtime.
One Sunday after that Josefczyk saw Sally again:
“We used to have beer parties at Triangle Park on Sundays, and she was there one Sunday, and we talked.
“Before she left, she invited me to come over to her house sometime — she didn’t live too far off Riverside Drive — but she didn’t expect me to end up at her door just a half hour later.
“Mike Allen drove me over and I met her mother and dad and brothers and, well, it went from there,”
While Josefczyk had some shining moments in his UD career — he hit the game winner against DePaul as a junior and, as a senior, sparked the Flyers past Duke in triple overtime in the title game of the Dixie Classic — he was most impressive in the classroom.
Sophomore year he had the highest GPA on the team and won the John L. Macbeth award for academic excellence.
Two weeks after Josefczyk graduated with an electrical engineering degree, he and Sally married.
On Tuesday they celebrated their 64th wedding anniversary.
Hank got his master’s at Case Institute of Technology and, before working at Intel Corp, he taught graduate digital computer classes at UD.
And yet for as studious as he was, there were a couple of times when he wasn’t so smart.
One day after a Blackburn practice again ran late, he and Allen got to the cafeteria just as it was about to close.
“There was a big line and we decided to cut the line right the door,” Josefczyk said.
“The next day at a team meeting, Blackburn said, ‘We had a couple of prima donnas here yesterday. We aren’t any better than anybody else, so you two are going to run 100 laps every day this week after practice!’
“So, the first day we start, and the gym is dark except for the floor, and we run 30 or 40 laps.
“Finally, we look at each other and said, ‘What are we doing? Nobody’s here. Let’s shower and get out of here!’
“And as we’re walking out, a voice from the top of the Fieldhouse says. ‘Where the hell you guys going?’
“I was like ‘Oh (crap)!’
“Blackburn was up there in the dark, smoking a cigarette and counting our laps.
“He said, ‘OK, now you’ve both got 200 laps a night!’”
Back to Ohio
After living in California from 1982 to 1993, the Josefczyks moved back to Ohio and had a horse farm in Lebanon where they raised and raced standardbreds.
Josefczyk said their most famous horse — Art’s Chip — won over $750,000 on the track, including the U.S. Pacing Championship at the Meadowlands, and then earned another $300,000 in stud fees.
Hank retired from Intel in 1999 and several years ago he and Sally sold their farm. He said he’s been slowed lately by neuropathy in his legs.
While he doesn’t get to as many Flyers games as he once did, he still has a plethora of UD stories, including one about the time he tried to sell Blackburn on a kid he’d played against in high school.
John Havlicek played at Bridgeport alongside the Niekro brothers, Joe and Phil.
“Blackburn asked me about Havlicek and I said he was pretty good,” Josefczyk said.
“Then he says, ‘How many points did you beat them by?’ I said, ‘Well, the last time by 50 points.’ “And he said, ‘Havlicek can’t be any good if you beat them by 50. I’m not offering a scholarship to him!’ “And, well, you know what Havlicek did after that.”
He went to Ohio State, the Buckeyes won the national title, and his number was retired. He was a 13-time NBA All Star, won eight NBA titles with Boston and the Celtics retired his number, too.
“That was Tom Blackburn,” Josefczyk laughed.
And that was Hank Josefczyk, too.
Just like he’d once done with West, he had a knack for eclipsing the great ones.
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