Jack “The Shot” Foley was a legend much longer than he was a basketball player.
Jack The Shot died of Parkinson’s disease Sunday in Barre at the age of 81.
Foley was raised in Worcester and set scoring records at Assumption Prep and Holy Cross. A skinny 6-foot-3-inch leaper, Jack The Shot was so good that Red Auerbach picked him in the second round of the 1962 NBA Draft, one round after selecting a kid from Ohio State named John Havlicek.
Bob Cousy, another Holy Cross man, was in the final year of his Hall of Fame career when Jack The Shot reported for duty with the world champion Celtics in December of 1962 (fulfillment of a Coast Guard obligation delayed Foley’s arrival in Boston). Cooz and fellow Crusader Tommy Heinsohn were happy to have another Cross man in the fold, but it was clear that Jack The Shot’s single skill would not be enough in the NBA.
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“He was perhaps the best pure shooter we ever had,” the 92-year-old Cooz said Tuesday. “He could take us one-on-one in a game of H-O-R-S-E and beat the [expletive] out of the whole team.
“The problem is, that’s not what basketball is about. We had eight or nine Hall of Famers and he just wasn’t going to crack into our rotation.”
Foley launched line-drive jumpers over opponents. He averaged 42 points per game in his senior season at Assumption Prep in 1957-58 and got his nickname from a Worcester newspaper reporter after a big game against Holyoke Catholic.
Holy Cross All-American Togo Palazzi was a five-year veteran of the NBA when he encountered a teenaged Jack Foley at a playground in Worcester.
“He ran 33 straight baskets on me and beat me three games in a row,” Palazzi told the Worcester Telegram. “I found out then and there that there wasn’t a guy who could shoot the ball quite like Jack ‘The Shot’ Foley.”
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Heavily recruited, Foley wanted to go to Holy Cross, where his father and brother had gone, but in those days Holy Cross did not offer on-campus housing to scholarship candidates who had homes near the college.
“The president of Holy Cross waived the policy for Jack The Shot,” said the Rev. Earle Markey, a former Holy Cross basketball captain who still serves as a dean in the admissions office.
In three varsity seasons at the Cross, Foley averaged 28.4 points per game, scoring 56 against UConn in 1962 and 55 against Colgate in 1960 (remember, no 3-point shots yet). The Crusaders won at least 20 games and made it to the then-prestigious NIT in each of Foley’s three varsity seasons. He was captain of the 1961-62 squad and a first-team All American.
Heinsohn urged Auerbach to draft Foley.
“Tommy sold Red hard on Jack The Shot,” said Markey. “Tommy kept telling Red, ‘You’ve got to get this guy. He’s the greatest shooter I’ve ever seen.’
“So Red brings him in and they were scrimmaging and Jack The Shot didn’t want to play any defense. Tommy was running up and down the court and he tells Jack, ‘You’ve got to move your ass. You can’t just run around out here as you please.’ ’’
A day after Christmas in 1962, Foley got into his first NBA game, against Wilt Chamberlain and the San Francisco Warriors. According to an account by the Globe’s Jack Barry (the man who invented the basketball term “turnover”), “The ex-Crusader played three minutes but took only one shot, a jumper which rimmed and fell out.”
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A couple of weeks later, in a rout against the Chicago Zephyrs, Foley played 24 minutes, scoring 16 points and making 8 of 17 shots. It was the highlight of his NBA career. In January of 1963, he was sold to the New York Knicks, for whom he played six games before he was released.
Jack The Shot’s NBA career consisted of 11 games and 53 points.
’'He could shoot really well in college with guys hanging all over him, but he wasn’t that good with the ball as far as creating opportunities for himself,” said Cousy. “He was one of those guys with skills that maybe didn’t translate to the next level.”
No longer Jack The Shot, Jack Foley became a husband, father, grandfather, great-grandfather, keeper of the peace, and sculptor of young souls. He was a history teacher for 37 years and coached boys’ and girls’ basketball teams at Boys Trade, Quabbin Regional, and South High in Worcester.
He also helped raise five children, served as a part-time police officer in Barre until 2009, and enjoyed a 28-year marriage to Gail Raney.
That’s the legend that lives forever.
Dan Shaughnessy is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at daniel.shaughnessy@globe.com. Follow him @dan_shaughnessy.