Hayes is a shooting star at the Falls’ Old Timers Hall of Fame
Scoring marks set at Falls High stood the test of time
NIAGARA FALLS — John Hayes has some questions that will never get answered unless someone invents a machine for him to go back in time.
But nobody needs a special contraption to go back in time to discover that Hayes was without question one of the best scholastic basketball players ever to come out of this city.
It is for that reason that the 62-year-old Hayes, a regional sales manager for Enviro-Solutions Ltd., was among the 14 men inducted into the Niagara Falls Old Timers Sports Hall of Fame on Saturday night in the Como Restaurant.
Hayes was honored during a sold-out dinner along with William Bobo, Robin Burns, Phil Kontrabecki, Andrew Syruws, Melvin Metzler, John Ormsby, Harold Shippy, Mike Ventry Sr., Ernie Krell, Neil Gruppo, Paul Klock, Art Fabiano and Bob Brady (Pep Di-Ramio Award).
The Niagara Falls Old Timers organization honors those age 55 and over who have contributed to athletics in their community either as athletes, coaches, managers, organizers, sponsors or volunteers.
“I’m definitely honored to be selected for that,” said Hayes, who played collegiately at St. Bonaventure with Bob Lanier. “It’s always nice to know people remember you and recognize the things that you’ve done.”
Hayes graduated in 1965 as the all-time scoring leader in city history with 1,440 points. Only six other players in the history of Cataract City high school basketball have scored more than Hayes did in just 63 games, including Niagara Falls High School standout and current Minnesota Timberwolves point guard Jonny Flynn (1,735). The other five have ties to old LaSalle or Trott Vocational high schools and Niagara Catholic. Two-time Buffalo News Player of the Year Tim Winn (LaSalle) scored the most points in city history with 1,898.
Hayes was among the many players honored in the Buffalo News’ All-WNY Basketball 50th Anniversary series last winter. It should be noted that the 6- foot-5 forward earned a second-team nod for the All-1960s. Of the five first-team selections, only one—Marty Cott of Buffalo’s Hutch-Tech — had a year that bettered Hayes’ Niagara Frontier League record-setting senior season, in which he averaged a record 29.6 points per game. Hayes averaged 22.8 points for his scholastic career.
Hayes is still amazed his Niagara Frontier League points-per- game mark hasn’t been broken, considering the wealth of talent that has come through the league the past 44 years.
“I’m proud of that [record],” Hayes said. “Jonny Flynn never broke it. Paul Harris never broke it. Nobody that ever went through Niagara Falls High School scored more than that. At the time, I didn’t think anything of it. I just thought, ‘Well [shoot], I had a great year.’ Here I am looking back and saying, ‘Man, it’s amazing no one has ever broken that record.’ ”
Another achievement that won’t be broken is the scoring mark Hayes set at Bona as a freshman. In an era when all basketball recruits played a year of freshmen-level ball, Hayes led the nation with a 34.8 ppg average. Future Naismith Hall of Famer Lew Alcindor (who changed his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) was second in freshman scoring that season at 33 ppg.
“Hayes could do it all,” current Niagara Falls Athletic Director Dan Bazzani said. “He would have had a great career at St. Bonaventure if he hadn’t blown out his knee.”
Hayes did that in his first practice as a sophomore, tearing cartilage in his knee. While he scored 26 points in his varsity debut at Xavier that season, that was his only game. He had season-ending surgery a week later.
“I was looking forward to a great sophomore season,” said Hayes, who ranks 10th all-time in Bona history in field-goal percentage (.513). “Lanier wasn’t on the team then. He was a year behind me so I would’ve played with a couple of other guys that were very good, but I would’ve done well I’m sure. If I could have just played the following three years without any knee injuries I definitely would’ve been in [the St. Bonaventure Sports] Hall of Fame because I know guys that are in the Hall of Fame that didn’t do what I did when I was down there. Yeah, an injury can really screw things up for you.”
Hayes didn’t know why he wasn’t red-shirted that season or his senior season when he had knee surgery a month before the start of the season. If he had been red-shirted either of those seasons, he would have been part of the greatest season in the history of Bona basketball, when the team reached the Final Four in 1970.
“Why I never got red-shirted I can’t imagine,” he lamented. “I don’t know what the hell they were thinking of on the redshirt programs. Now they redshirt people before they even get started. . . . Where were those politics when I was [at Bona]?”
While he’s disappointed he wasn’t a part of that team, the knee problems did have an unexpected bonus. “I did get out of going to Vietnam because of my knee, because I failed the physical twice,” he said.
Injuries didn’t screw up his season as a junior. Hayes averaged 13.9 ppg in helping Bona complete the 1967-68 regular season undefeated. A team that featured Lanier rose as high as No. 3 in the national rankings, as St. Bonaventure’s season ended in the second round of the NCAA Tournament to North Carolina in a game played at the North Carolina State campus.
That year, he scored 19 points in a win over Niagara in helping Bona become the first Little Three team since 1920 to score more than 100 points against the Purple Eagles in a 101-72 triumph.
Hayes also played college hoops in perhaps the greatest era in Western New York history. He was a teammate of Lanier. He played against Niagara’s Calvin Murphy — earning a pair of wins. He played against future Buffalo Brave Jim McMillian when he starred at Columbia.
Hayes played at a time when the Bona-Niagara rivalry was quite heated.
He remembers being booed and harassed by NU fans as a freshman at the Gallagher Center because he was a Falls boy playing hoops for a team perceived by Niagara fans as the enemy.
The atmosphere for games in Olean, especially during the 1967-68 season, is something Hayes still remembers, along with more than 10,000 fans regularly packing Memorial Auditorium for basketball games.
“The spirit was high [then],” Hayes said of the Bona home crowds in Olean. “The noise was unbearable. I’d hate to be an opposing team coming in there because we had the perfect blend of players that year.”
The college hoops scene is quite different now than it was then.
It’s a big-money sport in the NCAA, with top players at major programs leaving early for the big money of the NBA with a reel of ESPN highlights already in their DVD library.
“It’s harder for these [midmajor] schools to compete and get [the players],” Hayes said. “When [Bona] got Lanier and [Niagara] got Murphy, it was like a fluke almost. But what a time for two Little Three teams to have All-Americans at the same time. It probably never happened before, and it’ll probably never happen again.”
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