The accolades and awards that Rockdale native and scholar-athlete James Leroy Wright has amassed during his lifetime can fill the halls of Aycock and Rockdale high schools, and this weekend he’ll be adding another honor to his storied career in sports.
Wright is one of 80 persons being inducted into the Prairie View Interscholastic League Coaches Association Hall of Fame Saturday, at the Hyatt Regency Hotel Riverwalk, 123 Losoya St. in San Antonio.
He was a member of the very first Rockdale Athletic Hall of Honor induction class in 2007.
“Wright is a product of Aycock High School in Rockdale, where he distinguished himself as an outstanding scholar/athlete. He excelled in four sports — football, basketball, baseball and track and won all-state honors for two years in all four,” according to Cleve L. Freeman, a PVILCA Consultant. “Aycock teams were the state champions in football and basketball in 1956.”
Wright was also valedictorian of his senior class in 1956, with a 4.0 grade average. His exploits on the gridiron earned him offers to New Mexico State, University of Oklahoma, Grambling State University and several other institutions.
Wright is retired from Tesa Tape, Inc., after 36 years as a Sales Services Coordinator. He lives in Charlotte, N.C. with his wife of 61 years, Thelma. They have two sons and daughters, Stanley, James, Sharon and Karen and nine grandchildren and ten great-grandchildren.
High school days
As a 6-8, 205-pound quarterback, Wright led the Aycock Tigers to the 1955 state football championship with his passing and running, a Vince Young 50 years before Vince Young came along, and he also led the Tigers to the 1955-56 state basketball title, averaging 30.5 points per game, according to the Rockdale Reporter.
He was inducted into the first Rockdale Sports Hall of Fame class in 2007.
“Wright went to the state track meet three straight years, won the high jump and scored 17 points at state one year. But track and field wasn’t even his main sport,” said a hall fame organizer. “Wright may well be Rock-dale’s greatest living former athlete.”
He holds the Rockdale High School single-game scoring record for 53 years.
College years
He played basketball for University of the Pacific, in Stockton, California, in the late 1950s, where he was compared to future NBA legend Bill Russell, then a star at the nearby University of San Francisco, according to the Reporter.
Wright averaged 21.3 rebounds per game over his collegiate career at Pacific, which is still the fourth highest per-game total in NCAA history.
He led the nation in rebounding his junior and senior years. In 1959 he averaged 25.1 rebounds per game.
“I see now when a guy gets seven rebounds a game, that’s big,” he told The Reporter in 2006. Wright was inducted into the University of the Pacific Sports Hall of Fame in 1989.
Pro career
Before a knee injury cut short his pro basketball career, he was drafted in the second round, 16th overall in 1960, by the Boston Celtics, and eventually become a member of the Pittsburgh Pipers, which won the very first American Basketball Association (ABA) title in 1968. Pro basketball legend Cornelius “Connie” Lance Hawkins
Wright stayed with the team when it moved to Minnesota and became an assistant coach there, the first African-American to serve in that capacity in the ABA.
His professional basketball career originated with the New York Tapers and includes stints with the Washington and Philadelphia Tigers and the Pitts-burg and Minnesota Pipers. He played in the Conn Pro League for a 13-0 season. According to the PVIL officials, Wright holds the distinction of being the first player in the major college sports to shoot the “jump hook,” a shot he developed in 1954 at Aycock.
The PVIL, which existed from 1920 to 1970, was the governing body for academic, athletic, and music competitions for black high schools in Texas during the state’s segregationist era. In its 50-year existence, the PVIL produced numerous outstanding coaches, athletes, students, and citizens like Wright.
- Log in or Subscribe to post comments.