Appalachian Figures
On a February night in 1954, the old Textile Hall in Greenville shook like a mountain gym during district finals. Furman was beating Newberry so badly that the score hardly mattered. What people remember is the number beside one name on the scoreboard.
Selvy 100.
It was the first live college basketball broadcast in South Carolina, beamed out by WFBC. Folks in town listened on the radio until, as the Greenville News later recalled, they began turning off their sets and rushing to the hall, crowding the baselines and hanging from the rafters as his point total climbed.
In the bleachers sat a caravan of friends and kin from Corbin, Kentucky, who had driven about 250 miles from the Cumberland foothills to see a coal miner’s son from their town honored as the best scorer in college basketball. Some later remembered at least twenty carloads streaming south for “Frank Selvy Night.”
The shot that pushed him from ninety-eight to a hundred came from near midcourt as the buzzer sounded. Years later Selvy admitted he never doubted it was going in.
For Furman and for national record books, that game is the headline. For Corbin and the Appalachian borderlands, the story begins much earlier, in a crowded house near a coal camp and a local gym packed long before any television truck rolled up to Textile Hall.
Coal miner’s son in a crowded house
Franklin Delano Selvy was born in Corbin, Kentucky, on November 9, 1932, one of ten children in a two bedroom home. His father, John Robert Selvy, spent most of his life in the coal mines, beginning work as a boy and staying underground into his fifties.
Like a lot of mountain kids, Frank’s childhood was a mix of hard work and pick up ball. By age twelve he was leaving the hills in the summer to pick tomatoes in Indiana, migrant farm labor that helped the family scrape by. He learned to shoot in cramped spaces and crooked backyards, and he learned early that work sometimes mattered more than minutes on the floor. Even in high school his playing time could be limited because he had to hold down a job.
Corbin, a little railroad and coal town on the edge of the mountains, had already begun to build its reputation as a place that produced outsized athletes for its size. In later years, local writers would talk about the Redhounds alongside national powers, insisting that the town belonged in the same breath as places like Massillon and Odessa when it came to high school sports. Books like Gary P. West’s The Boys From Corbin: America’s Greatest Little Sports Town make the point plain.
In that world, basketball was not just a pastime. It was a way out of the mines, a claim to dignity, and a winter ritual that brought the whole community into one hot, echoing gym.
Redhound years and the Kentucky offer that came too late
Selvy played at Corbin High School for coach Harry Taylor, following the path of his older brother Curt and, later, his younger brother Edd. He grew into a skinny center with a soft shooting touch, learning to score inside and out long before the jump shot was common in every high school gym.
By 1949 and 1950 he had become one of the best players in Kentucky. The 1949–50 Redhounds won district and regional titles and made a deep run in the Sweet 16 state tournament. In 1950 Selvy was named to the All State team and led Corbin to a third place finish in Lexington.
At that point, he was still considered a bit of a sleeper. Kentucky’s legendary coach Adolph Rupp did not initially see him as a scholarship player. According to the Kentucky High School Basketball Hall of Fame, Rupp finally took serious notice at the East West All Star Game in 1950, when Selvy’s performance forced everyone to rewrite their scouting reports.
By then, though, a different door had opened. A group of Corbin athletes drove to Greenville to look at Furman, mainly for football. Selvy went along, hoping for a basketball tryout. On campus he tore through a workout so impressive that assistant coach Melvin Bell remembered him hitting hook shots effortlessly with both hands and scoring whenever he wanted in a scrimmage. Bell hurried to tell head coach Lyles Alley that Furman needed to sign the kid from Corbin immediately.
Selvy accepted Furman’s offer. That summer he bloomed again, growing taller and starring in all star games in Kentucky and Ohio. Once he was named most valuable player in those games, recruiters from Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee and Eastern Kentucky scrambled to get in the door. They all had one problem.
He had already given his word.
In a retrospective published decades later, Selvy remembered the choice in simple terms. “Where I grew up, if you told somebody you were going to do something, you did it.”
So the boy from a coal miner’s house in Corbin headed to Furman rather than Lexington. In Kentucky’s own Hall of Fame, his biography now calls him “the player who got away” and notes that he found “fertile ground in South Carolina.”
The Corbin Comet at Furman
Freshmen were not eligible for varsity ball in those days, so Selvy spent 1950–51 demolishing freshman competition. Furman’s frosh went undefeated while he averaged better than twenty five points per game. When he finally joined the varsity, the impact was immediate. The Paladins went from three wins before his arrival to 18–6 in his sophomore season, earning recognition as one of the most improved teams in the country.
By his junior and senior years, the nickname “Corbin Comet” had stuck. Furman’s own record book and later obituaries describe the way he streaked through defenses with an almost unguardable game. He could rise from the corners for a high arc jumper, drive past defenders, or post up and hook with either hand.
The numbers remain startling.
In 1951–52 he averaged 24.6 points per game. In 1952–53 he led the nation at 29.5. In 1953–54 he did something no Division I player had ever done, averaging 41.7 points per game and becoming the first to clear 40 a night and 1,000 points in a single season. Over three varsity years he scored 2,538 points in 78 games, an average of 32.5.
He was Southern Conference Player of the Year twice, a three time All American, and the United Press International national player of the year in 1954. One contemporary coach, North Carolina’s Frank McGuire, called the Southern Conference the toughest league in the country and said Selvy was the best player in it. Writers at the time, from the Associated Press to local beat reporters, struggled to find superlatives that felt big enough.
What never left the story was his hometown. Furman publicity always paired “Frank Selvy” with “Corbin, Kentucky.” The university’s own news feature on “The Corbin–Furman connection” later argued that Selvy “put Corbin on the map” athletically and noted that a line of brothers and other Corbin standouts followed him to Greenville.
February 13, 1954: A mountain town comes to Textile Hall
The Newberry game did not begin as an attempt to rewrite the record book. Lyles Alley had declared it “Frank Selvy Night,” a celebration of his senior star, and the athletic department invited his family from Corbin, who drove down together in caravans of cars. Oral histories and later campus pieces remember the whole Selvy clan being escorted in together, a visible Appalachian presence in a South Carolina mill city.
Television cameras from WFBC set up for what the Greenville press later called the first live telecast of a college basketball game in the state. The opponent, Newberry College, had no way of knowing they were about to be cast as unwilling extras in someone else’s legend.
Selvy was hot from the start. By the end of the third quarter he had 63 points. Greenville News coverage, quoted in a Furman library blog, described people who had been listening on the radio abandoning their sets and hurrying to Textile Hall. They spilled along the baselines, peered down from the rafters, and listened as the public address announcer shouted Selvy’s total after every basket.
The primary sources agree on the essentials. He finished with 100 points on 41 of 66 shooting from the field and 18 of 22 from the free throw line. He also grabbed 13 rebounds. Furman won 149–95. The game was played long before the three point line, and Selvy later estimated that several of his makes would have been worth three under modern rules.
The last shot, released on the run from well beyond the top of the key as the horn sounded, is preserved in surviving film and in the kind of memory that becomes folklore. In later interviews he said he never doubted it would fall. One campus writer remarked that on a night when some players might have been overwhelmed by television, family, and a packed house, Selvy seemed entirely unshaken.
In Kentucky, people were watching, listening, and reading. A Corbin columnist would later recall that the game was the first Furman contest ever televised and that at least twenty two cars left town together for Greenville.
If you follow the primary newspaper trail for February 1954 through the Greenville News, the student paper, and radio and television archives, the pattern is clear. Textile Hall that night held a meeting between a rising Southern city and a migrant coal miner’s son whose talent had outrun the limitations of his birthright. The Newberry box score became the moment when those two stories fused into one.
From first overall pick to veteran role player and coach
The hundred point night sealed his place in the 1954 NBA draft. Selvy was selected first overall by the Baltimore Bullets, then shifted to the Milwaukee Hawks in a dispersal draft when Baltimore folded. He averaged 19 points per game as a rookie and would go on to play nine seasons in the league, including stints with the Hawks, Knicks, Syracuse Nationals, and finally the Minneapolis and Los Angeles Lakers.
He made two NBA All Star teams, in 1955 and again in 1962. On the early 1960s Lakers he played alongside Jerry West and Elgin Baylor, helping carry the franchise into repeated showdowns with the Boston Celtics. By then he was no longer the featured scorer but a reliable guard and wing who could handle the ball, run the offense, and score in spurts.
One moment from that professional arc has become its own kind of footnote. In Game 7 of the 1962 NBA Finals, Selvy had an open baseline shot in the closing seconds that could have beaten the Celtics for the championship. He missed, the game went to overtime, and Boston won another banner. Interviews later in life reveal him more haunted by that miss than thrilled by the Newberry century mark, a reminder that even legendary careers are shaped as much by the shots that do not fall.
After injuries ended his playing career, he returned to Furman as an assistant coach and then as head coach from 1966 through 1970. His teams posted mixed records, but they bridged the gap between the Alley era and later Furman successes and kept the Selvy name tied to the program’s bench as well as its rafters.
Later still, he moved into business, working for years with the St. Joe Paper Company while remaining one of Furman’s most visible alumni. Writers in South Carolina described him as quiet, modest, and unfailingly generous with his time. In Corbin he was still the hometown legend, the coal miner’s son whose name ended up on the street signs and on awards given to new generations of Kentucky high school standouts.
Seven halls of fame and a life that never left home behind
When you trace Selvy’s honors, they read like a county by county map of the places that claimed him.
He was inducted into the South Carolina Athletic Hall of Fame in 1960, the Furman Athletics Hall of Fame in 1981, and the Southern Conference Hall of Fame in 2009. Corbin High School’s own Redhound Hall of Fame brought him home in 1982. The Kentucky Sports Hall of Fame followed in 1994, and the Kentucky High School Basketball Hall of Fame added him in 2021 with a biography that explicitly frames him as the great Kentucky player who slipped away to Furman. In 2022 he entered the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame.
Furman’s male athlete of the year award bears his name. His number 28 jersey is retired. At Timmons Arena, where the Paladins play today, video boards and displays still remind new students that long before highlight reels came in high definition, a player from Corbin was averaging more than forty a night in purple and white.
Frank Selvy died at his home in Simpsonville, South Carolina, on August 13, 2024. He was ninety one. Furman’s announcement spoke of him as “Furman’s all time greatest athlete.” Local television in Kentucky and the Carolinas emphasized his Corbin roots, repeating his nickname as “The Corbin Comet.” Obituaries from the Associated Press, ESPN, South Carolina Public Radio, and the New York Times all traced the same line from a coal miner’s house in southeastern Kentucky to a night in Textile Hall and a long professional career.
Why Appalachian basketball remembers Frank Selvy
It is easy to treat the Selvy story as a curiosity in the NCAA record book, filed away with lists of single game scoring leaders and long since overtaken by modern stars in other categories. To understand why his name still carries weight in Appalachia and in border states like Kentucky, you have to place him back in the communities that produced him.
First, he stands as a textbook case of mountain mobility through sport. A coal miner’s son from a crowded house in Corbin used high school basketball to reach a college campus, then used an All American career to reach the NBA. He did so without losing the habits that had shaped him. When larger and more famous programs swept in late with offers, he kept his commitment to Furman because, in his words, that was how people were raised where he came from.
Second, he links two basketball cultures that often look at each other across the ridges. Kentucky high school gyms and South Carolina textile halls might seem worlds apart, yet on that February night in 1954 you could find Corbin families in Greenville stands, young South Carolina kids hearing about Kentucky all state players, and a TV audience watching a mountain town claim space inside another state’s story.
Third, his legacy helped cement Corbin’s identity as “America’s greatest little sports town” and provided a template for later athletes. When historians and sportswriters talk about the Selvy clan and the Corbin–Furman connection, they are also talking about migration patterns, kinship networks, and the ways Appalachian families supported one another as they moved into new regions and institutions.
Finally, Selvy’s life gives us a reminder that even the most spectacular single night does not erase the texture of daily work. The hundred point game came after years of splitting time between jobs and practice, after long drives from a coal town to a small private college, and after a lifetime of carrying those identities with him into larger arenas.
When Corbin and Furman both claim him as their own, they are not fighting over who owns the record. They are recognizing a shared story that stretches from the coal seams of southeastern Kentucky to a gym in Greenville where, for one night, the whole country looked up and noticed a player mountain fans had been cheering for years.
Sources & Further Reading
Furman University, Vince Moore, “Man of the Century,” Furman Magazine (Fall 2003), reprinted in the Furman men’s basketball record book as “Man of the Century” and “Frank Selvy” statistics dossier. Rich narrative built on interviews with Selvy and his coaches, detailed box scores, and contemporary commentary.Amazon Web Services, Inc.
Furman Library News, “From the Archives: Celebrating Selvy – February 13, 1954” (2013). Archival blog drawing on Greenville News coverage of the Newberry game, including radio listeners rushing to Textile Hall, the running point totals, and a play by play of his final baskets.Furman Blogs+1
Furman student publications (The Furman Hornet and The Paladin), various issues in the 1950s and 1960s, especially the December 6, 1958 piece referencing “the shot that Frank Selvy made famous” and later features on the 100 point game and caravans from Corbin.SCDL+1
Video of the 100 point game, “Frank Selvy scores 100 for Furman,” available via Furman and YouTube, drawn from the original WFBC television broadcast and later compilations.YouTube
Associated Press obituaries and national coverage: ESPN, “Frank Selvy, with record 100 points in NCAA game, dies at 91” (Aug. 13, 2024); South Carolina Public Radio, “Frank Selvy, NCAA record holder with 100 points in a game, dies at 91” (Aug. 13, 2024); New York Times, Richard Goldstein, “Frank Selvy, 91, Dies; Scored 100 Points in a College Basketball Game” (Aug. 13, 2024). These synthesize his career from Corbin to Furman to the NBA.ESPN.com+2South Carolina Public Radio+2
Furman University News, Hunter Reid, “Furman basketball great Frank Selvy passes away at 91” (Aug. 13, 2024) and Tina Underwood, “News sources pay tribute to Frank Selvy ’54” (Aug. 14, 2024). Official institutional obituaries listing his seven halls of fame, scoring averages, and memorial statements from Furman officials.Furman University+1
WYMT TV, Armando Barry, “Frank Selvy, ‘The Corbin Comet,’ dies at 91” (Aug. 13, 2024). Eastern Kentucky television obituary framing his life explicitly around his Corbin identity and early Redhound career.https://www.wymt.com
Kentucky High School Basketball Hall of Fame, “Frank Selvy” (Inductee biography, 2021). Short but important sketch of his 1949–50 Redhound years, the 1950 Sweet 16 third place finish, his All State honors, and Rupp’s late scholarship offer that came after he committed to Furman.Kentucky Basketball Hall of Fame
Furman News, “The Corbin–Furman connection” (2016). Overview of the Selvy family and other Corbin natives at Furman, based largely on Gary P. West’s The Boys from Corbin, and arguing that Frank “put Corbin on the map” in college basketball.Furman University+1
Gary P. West, The Boys From Corbin: America’s Greatest Little Sports Town (2013). Book length treatment of Corbin’s sporting culture and its athletes, including the Selvy family, used here mainly for context on the town’s broader sports identity.Completely Kentucky
Jack McIntosh, Frank Selvy: Coal Miner’s Son (2016). Biography built around Selvy’s recollections, expanding on his Corbin childhood, his recruitment, and life after basketball.
South Carolina Encyclopedia, “Selvy, Franklin Delano.” Scholarly entry summarizing his life course from Corbin birth to South Carolina coaching and business career, with bibliography pointing to Greenville News coverage and Furman materials.
Sports Illustrated, Duane Decker, “That Old Kentucky Eye” (1955) and Justin Heckert, “The Loneliest Number” (2012). National long form pieces that revisit his 100 point night, his Kentucky roots, and his complicated feelings about the later missed shot against the Celtics.vault.si.com+1
Basketball Reference, “Frank Selvy” player page and coaching record, for complete NBA statistics and team chronology.Wikipedia
Local and regional memory pieces, including The News Journal (Corbin) columns on Selvy and the 2024 “Remembering one of the greats – Frank Selvy,” which recall the caravans from Corbin to Furman games and situate him in the town’s broader history of family athletics.The News Journal+1