In 1980, when a graceful 7-foot-4 giant named Ralph Sampson famously patrolled the basketball court for the University of Virginia on his way to three national player of the year awards and a place in the Basketball Hall of Fame, a friend mailed Bob Mortell a newspaper clipping.
According to the report, Sampson had broken one of Mortell’s school rebounding records.
That came as news to Mortell. “He didn’t know he had any records,” his wife, Caroline Mortell, said through smiles and tears this week, as she prepared for her husband’s memorial visitation in Charlottesville. Robert Bruce Mortell, age 83, died Jan. 4 after a long and successful career in the mining industry.
Somewhat surprisingly, two of Mortell’s UVA records survived the statistical onslaught of Sampson and the many other tall and talented players who followed in his wake.
During the 1959-60 season, Mortell averaged 14.6 rebounds per game, easily the highest average ever posted by a Cavalier. And he has the two highest single-game rebound totals in UVA history: 25, in an 86-59 victory over Washington & Lee University on Feb. 27, 1960 – his last home game in Memorial Gymnasium as a fourth-year player; and 24, in an 83-71 win over Virginia Military Institute nearly two months earlier.
Alas, in between those two record-setting games were 13 consecutive losses, as the Cavaliers posted a 6-18 overall record and a 1-13 mark in Atlantic Coast Conference play. Needless to say, it was a different era for UVA basketball, a full decade before Al Drummond became the first African-American player to receive a basketball scholarship at UVA and 16 years before the Cavaliers won their first ACC Tournament championship.
“I think it is a totally different game than when we played,” said former teammate Tony Laquintano, among the many teammates who remained close with Mortell. “The guys are so much bigger, so much stronger, so much faster – and so much rougher.”
At 6-foot-8, Mortell might have been UVA’s tallest recruit to that point in its history, Laquintano recalled. But he didn’t play much before his senior season, with an all-conference center named Herb Busch entrenched in the lineup ahead of him.
When Busch graduated, Mortell – by then a senior – inherited the starting spot. At the last practice before the 1959-60 season tipped off, head coach Billy McCann sat the players down on the court and predicted what would be in store for them.
