On this day in Boston Celtics history, seven-time champion small forward Frank Vernon Ramsey Jr. was born in Corydon, Kentucky in 1931. The young Ramsey would play multiple sports at the collegiate level, which he did with the nearby University of Kentucky Wildcats.
The Corydon native would play baseball as well as basketball under famed Kentucky coach Adolph Rupp and would help his Wildcats win an NCAA championship in 1951 over the Kansas State Wildcats. Kentucky would get the so-called “death penalty” due to a point-shaving scandal (Ramsey and Lou Tsioropoulos were not among those accused) the following season which in turn removed the senior season for the Kentuckian and his future teammates on the Celtics as well, Cliff Hagan and Tsioropoulos.
The trio graduated in 1953 and were all drafted by Boston, Ramsey going fifth overall.
With a year of eligibility left, the trio then returned to Kentucky despite having been drafted by Boston (Hagan never played for the Celtics, his rights dealt for Bill Russell), winning all 25 of their regular-season games and finishing the campaign ranked No. 1 nationally.
The Wildcats declined their NCAA invite however — rules in that era forbade graduate students from playing in the tourney.
Ramsey’s career with Boston was interrupted by military service after his rookie campaign of 1954-55, but he won his — and the Celtics’ — first title in 1957.
He would win six more consecutively beginning the season after the next spanning 1959-64 in what he would help pioneer as a role in the NBA — a sixth man — and would garner a Hall of Fame nod some years after retiring from the sport as a player in 1981.
Ramsey tried his hand at head coaching briefly in the NBA’s chief rival league at that time, the American Basketball Association (ABA — it would merge with the NBA in 1978).
At the helm of his hometown Kentucky Colonels, Ramsey’s squad would make it to the ABA Finals, where the Colonels would fall to the Utah Stars, coached by Ramsey’s former teammate Bill Sharman.
The Celtics star would pass away at the age of 86 at home after a post-basketball career as a bank president.
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