Lynchburg, Va. -- The stars didn't exactly seem aligned for a special performance that Saturday night in 1966.
Wayne Proffitt was still recovering from a sprained ankle that held him out of the final two games of January, and the Lynchburg College men's basketball team was wallowing in mediocrity, posting a pallid 7-12 record entering the game.
Still, years later, Proffitt can't explain what got into him that night.
"Everything I threw up went in," the Lynchburg basketball legend said earlier this week. "It was just one of those games."
Fifty-five years ago tonight -- February 5, 1966 -- Proffitt scored a Virginia collegiate single-game record 68 points in Lynchburg's home victory over Charlotte.
The record still stands.
***
Even the game began as a pedestrian one for Proffitt. He was his usual prolific self, certainly, entering halftime with 24 points, but there was no buzz around individual heroics in the locker room. After all, he'd carried the Hornets' scoring load all season and was among the nation's leaders in points per game.
Lynchburg led 58-49 at the half, but the 49ers were hanging around.
The Hornets busted the game open early in the second half, starting the period on a 12-3 run. Ten of those points were Proffitt's, but the early minutes also brought on the Hornet star's fourth personal foul.
Despite the foul trouble, head coach Aubrey Moon left his best shooter on the floor. The crowd also began to sense what it was witnessing.
"By midway through the second half the more than 500 fans in [Lynchburg's] Memorial Gymnasium sensed that a record was within reach," The News sportswriter Jim Barrett wrote in his game story that night. "Proffitt had 42 points by then. From then on every point he collected was greeted with a louder cheer than the one before."
It never dawned on Proffitt that the night was becoming a special one.
"Everybody was making points, you know," Proffitt said. "We were up and down the floor a lot, hitting open shots."
With Lynchburg up comfortably in the waning minutes, Moon brought his star man to the bench. But someone must have tipped the coach off that the record was within reach. Before Proffitt knew it, he was back in the game.
Shortly after, he recalled, he made a perfect pass to a teammate for an open look at the basket. The fellow Hornet passed the ball right back. Finally, teammate Loy Smith told Proffitt he had to shoot the ball.
Proffitt tied the previous Virginia collegiate scoring record -- 66 points, set in 1951 by Washington and Lee's Jay Handlan -- with 1:31 left on the clock, according to newspaper reports. He scored again with 32 seconds remaining to take sole possession of the top spot.
***
Lynchburg won the game, 126-87, a mark considered extravagant enough in that era that, at one point, Moon ventured to the opposition bench to explain to 49ers coach Harvey Murphy what was happening.
"I hated to do this to another team," Moon told The News, "but it isn't often that Lynchburg College gets an opportunity to do something like this."
The opponent apparently took no exception.
"Proffitt is undoubtedly the best shooter I've ever seen," Murphy told the paper. "I don't mean to say he isn't a good all round ball player, because he is. It's just that he's worth his weight as a shooter alone."
It wasn't Proffitt's first memorable game against Charlotte. The year prior, Proffitt's first at Lynchburg, he scored a Dixie Intercollegiate Athletic Conference tournament record 45 points to lead the Hornets to a championship win over the 49ers. (In a strange turn of events, he wasn't selected tournament MVP because the committee met at halftime of the championship game to decide that honor; Proffitt scored 27 after the break.) Earlier in the '65-'66 season, he'd dumped in 51 points in a road loss to the 49ers.
In the record-breaking game, Proffitt made 20 of his 26 field goal attempts after halftime and went 4-for-4 from the free throw stripe. He made everything from "twisting reverse layups to 30-foot jumpers," the paper reported. (This was well before college basketball instituted a 3-point line; every basket was worth just two, no matter the distance.) Multiple witnesses have corroborated the long-range display over the years, claiming Proffitt sank as many as 15 or 16 3-point-range shots in the game.
"That's as close as I could get to the basket," Proffitt said this week with a laugh.
If there had been a 3-point line at the time, he likely would have topped 80 points.
Still, Proffitt's final stat line was as follows: 68 points on 29-of-39 shooting, and 10-for-10 from the free throw line.
Though he'd been one of the most prolific scorers in college basketball for more than a season and a half, the record brought unprecedented attention not just to Proffitt the ballplayer, but Proffitt the man.
That story was just as compelling.
***
A prep star for Lynchburg's E.C. Glass High, Proffitt earned a college scholarship to play basketball for Appalachian State in 1959.
He competed as a freshman for the Mountaineers, but life had other plans for the young Lynchburger. Over Thanksgiving break, Proffitt married his high school sweetheart, Betty. She moved to Boone, N.C., so the couple could be together while Proffitt pursued school and basketball, but Betty found herself pregnant in the spring of 1960.
Proffitt dropped out of school, and the expecting couple moved back to Lynchburg to raise a family. He found a job in town with General Electric.
A few years and two more children later, Proffitt enrolled at LC.
By the time of the record-breaking performance, he was a 24-year-old husband and father of three, working four part-time jobs to support his family and put himself through school. Basketball was, in a way, an afterthought. In a February 8 follow-up article on the record-breaking game, Moon, probably jokingly, told The Associated Press' Ed Young that Proffitt "might do even better if he could find the time to practice more than twice a week."
Proffitt -- at the time he labored as a work-study on campus, officiated basketball and baseball, worked for the Lynchburg City Recreation Department, and occasionally pumped gas at a Lynchburg service station on the weekends -- was indeed a busy man. He didn't even take the day after the record-setting game to celebrate. The News sports editor Bill Beck found Proffitt at work (the old Esso service station at the corner of Rivermont and Bedford avenues) Sunday, February 6 for his own follow-up piece.
"I've got to make a living some way," Proffitt told the newspaperman. He also quipped that, while he had never scored so many points in a high school or collegiate game, he certainly had in pick-up games at the YMCA.
But that's Wayne Proffitt in a nutshell: calm, unassuming, matter-of-fact, and undeniably the strongest personality in any room.
Now, at 79 years old, Proffitt looks back at the record-breaking night fondly.
"I really didn't give it much thought at the time," he said this week. "That night was just like one of the other nights, except I played a little longer and shot a little more."
But the longer the record ages, he admitted, the more special it becomes.
Later in 1966, Proffitt led Lynchburg to a second-straight DIAC championship. The Hornets made it a three-peat the following year as Proffitt broke his single-season scoring record again. He turned down professional basketball opportunities to stay in town, work, and raise his family after graduating from LC. Proffitt remains Lynchburg's top single-season and career scorer, among other records.
In 1970, he accepted the head men's basketball coaching job at LC. He coached the Hornets for 16 seasons, accruing 249 wins in that time. In case you're wondering, that's also a Lynchburg record.
Proffitt was inducted into the Lynchburg Sports Hall of Fame with its inaugural class in 1978. In 2018, Lynchburg named the floor in Turner Gymnasium in his honor.
University of Lynchburg archivist Ariel Myers contributed to this story.
--LYN--
