Hall of Famer Heyward Dotson, a Rhodes scholar, and the first Staten Island basketball player to score 1,000 points in both high school and college, passed away May 1.
Dotson, who attacked life on and off the court with a singular intensity, and always on his own terms, was 71.
He showed an inclination to forge his own path at an early age. After graduating from Markham Intermediate School – where he failed to make the basketball team as a seventh-grader – Dotson spent the next four years commuting by bus and ferry from Mariners Harbor to Stuyvesant High School in lower Manhattan, one of the city’s most demanding academic programs, where he was an All-City player as a senior, averaging 34 points a game, and playing mostly as a center.
At Columbia, he morphed into a 6-foot-4 point guard who could muscle his way to the rim or find Columbia’s other scorers where they were most effective; and a relentless defender who savored the personal battles with stars like Niagara’s Calvin Murphy, Louisville’s Butch Beard, and Princeton’s Geoff Petrie.
Paired in the backcourt with another sophomore from the city’s public housing projects, Jim McMillan, they brought a swagger and toughness that drove the 1967-68 Lions to the first – and still the only – Ivy League championship in school history.
Along the way, they won the Holiday Festival, finished in the top 10 nationally; and, in a city increasingly divided over an unpopular war on the other side of the globe, managed to unite a cosmopolitan campus behind its basketball team.
Drafted by the NBA Phoenix Suns and the Indiana Pacers of the American Basketball Association, Dotson deferred his pro ambitions to accept a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, the oldest institution of higher learning in the English-speaking world, where he studied assorted foreign languages and English Literature, and found time to lead the Blues to an All-England championship.
Back in the States, he had a tryout with the Knicks and brief stints in the ABA and the Eastern Basketball League, went to law school, and spent the rest of his adult life in private and public practice, teaching, and championing community causes.
Inducted with the Staten Island Sports Hall of Fame’s second class in 1996, and the Columbia Hall of Fame in 2018, Dotson is the second SISHOF inductee to pass in the space of a few weeks, following the death of Brenda Jordan, the first women’s basketball player to score 1,000 points, on April 16.
To the end, blessed with a keen intellect and a quick tongue, he could be prickly around opponents and teammates alike.
Pressed about his relationship with his own college coach in a 1968 interview with the Columbia student newspaper, he acknowledged that Jack Rohan was “a competent coach … extremely competent.”
And off the court?
“We’re courteous to each other,” Dotson said.
