Birdsong earns spot
Otis Birdsong, unstoppable on the court, won’t be denied the Hall of Fame either
Elvin Hayes was three-time All-America, dominated inside like no other and led the University of Houston to two Final Fours.
Hakeem Olajuwon is perhaps the greatest center to ever play the game, and was a college player of the year.
Clyde Drexler was on the Olympic “Dream Team” and named one of the NBA’s 50 greatest players during the league’s 50th anniversary celebration, but he averaged only 14 points a game at UH.
Rob Williams was a dynamic superstar who was devilishly good.
But Jim Perry says Otis Birdsong is UH’s best pure basketball player, and certainly the school’s greatest guard. So smooth. So cool. Unstoppable. Aside from tortured opponents, who were drained by Birdsong’s relentless off-the-ball attack, lit up by his deadly mid-range jumper, and frustrated by his unflappable demeanor, Perry is the most qualified to testify to Birdsong’s scoring prowess.
Our expert witness was often given the unfortunate assignment of trying to check his UH roommate at practice.
“He’d light me up,” Perry said. “He was a pain in the ass to guard. I mean, an armed security guard couldn’t stop him. I think Otis could score in a haunted house.”
Birdsong was lights out indeed. But that didn’t stop Houston coach Guy V. Lewis from chastising Perry on occasion for his inability to guard the unguardable.
“I was like, ‘Coach, if (Sidney) Moncrief can’t stop him, and nobody at Texas can stop him, what am I supposed to do with him?’ ” Perry said.
15th all-time in Division I scoring
Lewis threw a chair onto the court and told Perry that maybe it could do a better job. He was right, you know. About the only times Birdsong wasn’t scoring was when he was sitting on the bench.
Birdsong’s last college basketball game was 41 years ago, and he still ranks No. 15 all-time in NCAA Division-I scoring with 2,832 points, 52 points fewer than Hayes’ school record.
Sunday in Kansas City, Birdsong’s greatness will be acknowledged when he is inducted into the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame, joining Hayes, Drexler, and his college coach Lewis.
“I knew how great he was, and I’m glad his peers and college coaches are recognizing it by finally putting him into Hall, because he earned it,” Perry said.
Birdsong and Perry stepped into Hofheinz Pavilion in 1973 from different worlds. Birdsong, the son of a Baptist minister, who passed away when Otis was young, was a black kid from Winter Haven, a small town in Central Florida.
Perry, who is Catholic, hailed from Allen Park, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. That Perry, though white, had the bigger afro wasn’t how the two became roommates as freshmen, co-captains as seniors, and best friends for life.
As was most often the case with Lewis’ players, their diverse backgrounds were never an issue. Lewis recruited players from all over the country, valuing their differences while emphasizing their similarities.
“The only color we saw was the other team’s uniform,” Perry said.
Birdsong’s jersey No. 3 at Winter Haven High School, where he helped the Blue Devils win the 1973 state championship, was retired, as was his No. 10 UH jersey, the second to be placed in the rafters after Hayes.
Birdsong’s reign over UH basketball is an underappreciated stretch between the “Game of the Century” and Phi Slama Jama, during which Birdsong was brilliant.
As it took some time for him to work his way into the starting lineup as a freshman, the homesick Birdsong considered transferring, but his high school coach talked him into staying throughout the season.
Birdsong came back as a sophomore to average 24.6 points a game on 58.3percent shooting, a number typically registered by dunking big men who spend the entire game in the paint.
“He worked harder to use picks to get open than anyone I ever coached,” Lewis told the Chronicle in 1996. “I’d look at the box score and couldn’t believe he had that many points.”
First $1 million-a year guard
Birdsong, who later would be the No. 2 overall pick of the 1977 draft, a fourtime NBA All-Star and the first NBA guard to sign a $1-million-a-year contract, put up numbers all right.
When UH moved into the Southwest Conference, Birdsong immediately made his mark, leading the league in scoring at 26.1 points a game in 1975-76. He topped that the next year when he poured in 30.3 points a night, a SWC record, and was named conference Player of the Year and a consensus All-American.
Birdsong posted 21 30-point games that year, 36 for his career, with one highlight being a 42-point effort in a nationally-televised game at UCLA a few days after he injured his shoulder while the Cougars were playing a holiday tournament in Hawaii.
He spared no foe, though, scorching Texas (43 points), Texas A&M (43), Rice (42), TCU (41) and a host of others that season, as UH finished second in the SWC, and ended the year tied for the most wins in the country, but didn’t make then 32-team NCAA field. UH lost to St. Bonaventure in the final of the NIT. Birdsong scored 38 points in the loss, his final game as a Cougar.
Teams threw every exotic defense they could come up with at him, but Lewis out-schemed them and Birdsong outworked them.
Fitting that he and his coach are back together. This time in the Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame when Birdsong
is inducted on Sunday Jim Molony . “There isn’t a person more deserving,” said Perry, a longtime coach and administrator who himself is in the Allen Park Sports Hall of Fame. “Amazing to watch, fun to play with. You knew you always had a chance at winning.
“He had it all.”