Davage T. Minor (February 23, 1922 – March 14, 1998) was a player in the

National Basketball Association The National Basketball Association (NBA) is a professional basketball league in North America. The league is composed of 30 teams (29 in the United States and 1 in Canada) and is one of the major professional sports leagues in the United St ...

(NBA). He played with the Baltimore Bullets before being traded along with Stan Miasek to the

Milwaukee Hawks The Atlanta Hawks are an American professional basketball team based in Atlanta. The Hawks compete in the National Basketball Association (NBA) as a member of the league's Eastern Conference Southeast Division. The team plays its home games at ...

for

Don Boven Donald E. Boven (March 6, 1925 – March 10, 2011) was an American basketball player, coach, and university instructor. He was a World War II veteran who was a standout athlete at Western Michigan University. After playing professional basketball, ...

, Pete Darcey and George McLeod. He began his college career at Toledo, it was interrupted by World War II; following the war, he enrolled at UCLA. In 1947–1948, Minor was honored as an All-Conference guard basketball player at

UCLA The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California ...

. His full name was Davage Minor, but Gary, Indiana sportswriters called him "The Wheelhorse of Steel City." He began shooting the first jumpers seen around the Great Lakes in December 1937 in his high school gym in Gary. By 1941, the shot was so unstoppable he used it to take the Froebel High School Blue Devils all the way to the Final Four of the Indiana state tournament, the "mother of them all." Eventually, he starred with the old Oakland Bittners of the AAU, and he was one of the first five African Americans signed in the NBA. Minor died in 1998. In December 2019, he was announced as a member of the 2020 Class in the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame.

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1922 births 1998 deaths All-American college men's basketball players Amateur Athletic Union men's basketball players American men's basketball players Baltimore Bullets (1944–1954) players Basketball players from Missouri Milwaukee Hawks players Point guards Shooting guards Toledo Rockets men's basketball players UCLA Bruins men's basketball players Undrafted National Basketball Association players {{1920s-US-basketball-bio-stub