Former teammates and friends of the late basketball star Billy ‘The Hill’ McGill have been calling the Los Angeles Sentinel newspaper lately.

They were shocked to learn that McGill had died. McGill passed away of natural causes on July 11, 2014. He was 74

McGill was a former Jefferson High School and Utah basketball star. His life is chronicled in “Bill, ‘The Hill,’ and the Jump Hook,” as told by him to Eric Brach.

A 6’9″ center/forward at the University of Utah, McGill was the NCAA scoring leader in the 1961-1962 season with 1,009 points in 26 games (38.8 points per game), a higher one-season average than any previous player except Frank Selvy in the 1953-1954 season. McGill was honored in 2008 as a member of the University of Utah All-Century team.

McGill was selected by the then Chicago Zephyrs with the first pick of the 1962 NBA Draft. He played three seasons (1962–65) in the NBA and 2 seasons (1968–70) in the ABA because of ailing knees just would not hold up. In his ABA/NBA career, he scored a combined 3,094 points.

McGill never accumulated the wealth or notoriety that many of his enormous talents achieved.

By the early 1970s, he was in debt and living on the streets of Los Angeles before sportswriter Brad Pye Jr. reportedly arranged for McGill to be employed by Hughes Aircraft, a job ended in 1995. Pye told the Sentinel recently that he did not recall helping McGill land the job.

I met and befriended McGill a couple of years before his death and he was working on a book that he wanted to have published.

It was a very raw manuscript and he found it difficult to secure the funding for the project.

Even then he was a gentle soul. Almost seemingly aghast as to how his life transformed from a bright star to a quiet cloud.


The fanfare had long since left McGill when the ball stop bouncing. He was not afforded the luxury of stars before and after him. He seemingly never wanted to become a charity case and had enough pride to do things for himself.

While his passing almost two months ago should have been news, simply because of who he was, he went without the celebrity that he once was. That too is sad, and for that I am apologetic for us all.

He deserved more than what he got. We all owed him more than what we gave.