Fred Schaus moved through downtown Cowen in Webster County — past the restaurant, the movie theater, the gas station, the pool hall and the grocery and dry goods stores and continued up the hill to the high school. The West Virginia University basketball coach had made the trip from Morgantown and wanted to chat with Don Svet, one of Cowen High’s 150 students.
It was the spring of 1955, school was in session, but Svet, alas, was nowhere on the premises.
Svet’s laser-like shooting and the toughness cultivated as an All-State football player had caught Schaus’s eye. And his 40.3-point scoring average as a senior in 1954-55 was the highest in West Virginia high school basketball history, a feat that had likewise caught the eye of countless other coaches, including Kentucky’s Adolph Rupp, the most famous basketball coach in the land.
At the school, Schaus struck up a conversation with Cowen basketball coach Jim Hinkle, who pondered Svet’s possible whereabouts and quickly concluded that he most likely was at the pool hall, a half-mile down the hill. He then assigned a student to search him out. “Get Svet up here!’’ he said. “Coach Schaus wants to talk with him.’’
And sure enough, Svet was shooting pool when word arrived. “I ran up that hill as fast as I could,’’ the 83-year-old Svet recalled 66 years later, speaking from his home in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
It’s safe to say that his presence in the pool hall that afternoon reflected questionable off-the-court choices and foreshadowed an abrupt halt to a promising college basketball career.
The abrupt halt, however, did not derail an otherwise productive and satisfying life as a policeman, police sergeant, lawyer and federal magistrate judge. And in 1991, President George H.W. Bush appointed him U.S. attorney for the district of New Mexico, making him the state’s top prosecutor.
In his Cowen years, Svet was not only a superb athlete but also an outstanding student and a member of the national honor society, despite his pool hall leanings, and would graduate third among the school’s 43 seniors. But those off-the-court choices did not always lend themselves to playing good basketball.
Indeed, he was a potential jewel strewn about, temporarily, in roadside gravel.
“I raised hell, if you want to describe it that way,’’ he remembered. “I was hard to discipline. That might be the way to put it. I might take a drink or two when I shouldn’t have, and I smoked cigarettes.’’
In their conversation at the school, Schaus told the 6-foot-1 Svet he might give him a WVU basketball scholarship in an era, keep in mind, when the Mountaineers were headed toward national prominence. He suggested, though, that he first spend a year at Greenbrier Military School, a suggestion that did not appeal to a young man admittedly prone to raising hell and not partial to discipline. Svet declined.
Schaus, however, persisted. Not long afterward, a WVU representative phoned Svet and said a scholarship awaited him and that he need not attend Greenbrier Military. But he already had committed to West Virginia Tech coach Neal Baisi.
Meanwhile, Svet’s football talents were not being overlooked. Marshall coach Herb Royer sought his services as a receiver/running back.
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Svet lived along State Route 20 in Camden-on-Gauley and rode the school bus in the mornings but, by the time football and basketball practices ended, the buses already had completed their runs, forcing him and Cowen’s other athletes to find other ways to get home.
Not a problem. Many of them hitchhiked. It was a safe and reliable means of transportation in Cowen’s small-town bonhomie of the 1950s where everybody knew everybody and the townspeople kept an eye out for the Bulldog athletes, aware that maybe they needed a ride home after practice.
In those days, every little town in the state, it seemed, had its own high school, which served as its social center and, more than anything, gave the community an identity. Cowen was a coal and railroad town with a population of about 550. Whenever the Cowen Bulldogs played home games, several hundred fans would shoehorn their way in to the school’s WPA-era gym.
The fans would watch the Bulldogs play the Marlinton Copperheads, Gauley Bridge Travellers, Rupert Crimson Tide, Crichton Wildcats, Frankford Pirates, Burnsville Bruins, Nuttall Generals, Sutton Blue Devils, Smoot Bobcats, Webster Springs Wildcats, Richwood Lumberjacks and Nicholas County Grizzlies.
On Feb. 7, 1955, Svet went for 64 points against Burnsville in a 101-83 victory. Afterward, coach Hinkle presented him with the game ball, which is still stashed away in a trunk in his Albuquerque attic, along with letters from Rupp and other coaches. In that same season, he scored 61 points in a game against Sutton. In a two-game stretch, he totaled 111 points.
His record of 40.3 points per game stood for just three years. Paul Popovich of Flemington in Taylor County, who later played basketball and baseball at West Virginia, averaged 41.8 points in 1957-58 for a record that still stands. Mick Cooper of Harman in Randolph County averaged 41.3 five years later.
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As a West Virginia Tech freshman in 1955-56, Svet played as a reserve and contributed to a Tech team that averaged slightly more than 100 points. A year earlier, the Golden Bears scored 109.7 points per game to set a national collegiate record.
In addition, he offered hints during the season that, if he had accepted Schaus’s offer, he might have developed into an outstanding Mountaineer. Playing for the Tech junior varsity, he scored a team-high 24 points in leading his team to an overtime victory against the Mountaineer freshmen at the Fieldhouse in Morgantown.
For his sophomore year at Tech, Svet arrived on the Montgomery campus as a projected starter. But he had a sudden change of heart.
“I got a wild hair,’’ he recalled, “and went into the Marine Corps.’’ The Marines, he said, offered “adventure and everybody loved them uniforms.’’
He suggested that maybe he and Baisi did not always see eye to eye. “Baisi was a disciplinarian as he should have been,’’ he said. “I left on good terms but on his terms.’’
Shortly thereafter, Baisi reappeared in Svet’s life. The Golden Bears coach had taken his team to a tournament at the Marine base in Parris Island, South Carolina, and learned from one of his players that Svet was stationed there for basic training. Baisi then informed the Marines basketball coach that young Svet would be a worthy addition to the Marine team. “You have one of my boys here,’’ Baisi told the coach.
After he completed basic training, Svet joined the team and traveled up and down the East Coast playing basketball.
After the Marines, he returned to Cowen and was soon contacted by a West Virginia native, Don Gibson, who was coaching the New Mexico Highlands University football and basketball teams. Gibson offered him a scholarship to play both sports, and Svet accepted, opening the door to a long life in law enforcement and the legal profession.
While in New Mexico, he earned a college degree in history and political science, got married and, after seeing a newspaper ad, became an Albuquerque policeman. It was satisfying work. “You got the feeling that you could do some good,’’ he said. He quickly moved up to sergeant.
When his wife suggested that he attend law school, he began applying all over the country and eventually enrolled at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, where he earned his degree in 1971, graduating third in his class. It was 16 years after graduating from Cowen High.
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It probably looked like a mistake in the fall of 1956 when Svet walked away from a West Virginia Tech basketball scholarship and a chance for a college education to join the Marines. But the Marine stint, he recalled all these years later, was a tipping point.
“That was the beginning of a change in my life,’’ he said. “They straightened me out. I stopped raising hell, so to speak.’’
Not that it changed him totally. “I didn’t stop drinking,’’ he said.
