Michael McCleary
University of Wisconsin men’s basketball coach John Powless was willing to play shorthanded to teach a valuable lesson.
Powless was filling in to coach the Badgers’ freshman team for a game during the 1967-68 season, and his center, Glen Richgels, was a walk-on plucked off the line to purchase student tickets just months earlier by then-Wisconsin assistant Dave Brown. Richgels didn’t have any offers out of Madison East High School, but if you looked hard enough, you’d find a paper that listed him as an All-American.
Wisconsin men’s basketball program leader in scoring average dies at 75
That meant Richgels gave Brown his sixth All-American on the freshman squad, with the best of the bunch being former Milwaukee Lincoln star guard Clarence Sherrod. Richgels certainly wasn’t treated like an All-American. Like the time Powless coached the freshman team: Richgels threw an outlet pass and waited around halfcourt. Powless called timeout, and immediately pulled Richgels.
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“That’s not the way we play ball here at Wisconsin,” Powless told Richgels. “You pass the ball, you get down the other end as fast as you can.”
Powless sat Richgels, and the game continued with Wisconsin sending only four players onto the court.
So the 6-foot-9 Richgels never stopped running. It was as important a skill as any to Wisconsin teams of that era. The Badgers didn’t win much then, but they did get up and down and score.
The 2024-25 Wisconsin team scored 80.1 points per game, the program’s most in 53 years. Yet it still fell short of the 1970-71 team that Richgels started for, which averaged an all-time best 6.2 points per game more. Those numbers caught a few who played then by surprise. Because it only resulted in a 9-15 finish that season. Being part of the most prolific scoring team in Wisconsin history didn’t feel prolific at the time.
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Except one player unquestionably was: Sherrod averaged 23.8 points per game that season. That was without a 3-point line, a different era that’s difficult to measure against current Wisconsin scoring feats. Still, it remains a program record. It’s something that normally would commit a player to a fanbase’s collective memory.
Yet news of Sherrod’s death at 75 last month perhaps has introduced a new generation of Wisconsin fans to the 6-2 guard, not as common a fixture in Badgers lore as some of the program’s more recent stars. The stars over the past 25 years have created national success. Sherrod was never on a winning Wisconsin team during his career.
Still, there’s not a player in program history who accomplished what Sherrod did on a per-game basis. Richgels, for instance, had a solid senior campaign — his only season as a significant contributor for the Badgers. Yet his most important contribution to scoring on that 1970-71 team was throwing outlet passes to Wisconsin’s most dynamic players. That meant he dished a lot of passes to Sherrod.
That’s partially why Richgels was left with a pit in his stomach after he heard the news of Sherrod’s death. Sherrod deserves recognition. And perhaps something that’s 54 years overdue.
Milwaukee Lincoln star’s legend grew in Madison
Michael Dyer only had lived in Milwaukee for two days. He was looking for a place to play basketball in his new home when he noticed a scene on one of the courts at Garfield Park.
It was 1968. So a 25-cent wager wasn’t nothing. Yet one of the college-aged kids on the court was offering it to any of the three children flanking him each time they stripped the ball away as he dribbled.
“The kids didn’t make much money,” Dyer remembered.
Dyer never had seen anything like it. Sherrod, a high school legend as a member of Milwaukee Lincoln’s dynasty, wasn’t looking for a full-court game. He was competing against himself, the swarming children serving to make his dribbling exercise more difficult.
The children dispersed, and Dyer asked Sherrod if he could shoot around. It wasn’t difficult for Dyer to see that his new friend was quite popular. He was well-known in Milwaukee. And in Madison, which Dyer explained was filled with Milwaukee transplants, there seemed to be an even smaller-town connection.
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Sports weren’t necessarily the craze on the Wisconsin campus, where the National Guard was stationed amid anti Vietnam War demonstrations. Yet the Milwaukee Bucks wouldn’t draft Kareem Abdul-Jabbar until 1969, and the Milwaukee Brewers didn’t relocate to the state until 1970, so Marquette and Wisconsin owned much of the state’s sports equity. And Sherrod was the Badgers’ biggest rising star.
Sherrod’s status was undeniable by the 1970-71 season. Many of his teammates had seen it far earlier, several mentioning a time Sherrod outdueled Boston Celtics legend Jo Jo White in a 1968 Badgers upset of then-No. 4 Kansas.
Clarence Sherrod helped the 1970-71 Wisconsin team set the program record for scoring average at 86.3 points per game.
UW Athletics
Wisconsin had four double-figure scorers that record season, led by Sherrod’s massive point total, which earned him second team All-Big Ten for the second straight season. Richgels averaged a double-double with 12.1 points and 10.6 rebounds, just shy of his 12-rebound-per-game goal.
Wisconsin could shoot. It could run. And its fastest player, Sherrod, was a pretty good bet to put up the scoring numbers necessary to win.
“He wasn’t up and down,” then-Wisconsin assistant Dave Vander Meulen said about Sherrod.
When basketball was the objective, there were few who committed more to it than Sherrod, former teammates remembered. His success was apparent. Yet many former Badgers recalled something different.
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“My recollection is we lost a lot of close games that we could have won,” former Badgers guard Rod Uphoff said.
Wisconsin lost a total of 10 games by 10 points or fewer. Sherrod earned credit from the press for his elite scoring acumen while approaching several program records, but he said during a January 1971 interview that he couldn’t be “satisfied” with that because the team was losing.
That’s why more than 50 years later, Bob Frasor Sr., a starting guard for that team, saw a blurb on TV about a scoring record from that season and thought: Us?
Losing is how details are forgotten.
Clarence Sherrod holds the Wisconsin record for scoring average in a season. He set it during the 1970-71 season by averaging 23.8 points per game.
UW Athletics
“If I looked at any of these articles,” Frasor said, “they wouldn’t refer to us as ‘high-scoring Wisconsin.’”
The 48th Madison Gyro basketball banquet at season’s end tried to foster a celebratory view of the season.
Richgels said he expected that he would attend that night for two things: to collect his rebounding trophy and celebrate Sherrod when he was awarded the Oz Fox Most Valuable Player trophy, voted on by the players.
Richgels was asked to show up early and wear a sport coat. But when he arrived, he was pulled into a room with Lee Oler and Frasor. Trophies were placed in front of them, and a photographer snapped a picture. The event rolled around, and there was an audible gasp when Richgels was announced as MVP, he remembered.
It surprised him, too. He told a State Journal reporter then that the award should have been Sherrod’s — perhaps even the previous two seasons, too.
Glen Richgels was voted by his teammates the Most Valuable Player on Wisconsin’s 1970-71 team.
Glen Richgels
“Clarence deserves something,” Richgels said at the time. “He’s really good.”
The University Afro-American Center at Wisconsin made a statement the next month, naming Sherrod the season’s most valuable player. Yet Richgels said Sherrod was gracious at the postseason banquet.
As soon as it concluded, Richgels remembered Sherrod approached him and shook his hand, then walked directly out of the room.
Madison remains home
Sherrod never went far. At least not for too long.
The NBA and ABA both had drafted him in the eighth round. After he was cut by the ABA’s Kentucky Colonels, he found a team out of Hartford, Connecticut, in the Eastern Basketball Association. A former teammate, Craig Mayberry, had an opportunity overseas, but Sherrod convinced Mayberry to tag along with him.
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They got in a car, drove 20 hours to Hartford, where Sherrod attended a few practices, then had a change of heart.
“I think I’m going to go back to school and go get my law degree,” Sherrod told Mayberry.
From then on, much of his life was devoted to a career as an attorney. He still played basketball for a little while. But that eventually stopped, too, as he picked up competitive golf and tennis. And the public persona as a former Wisconsin basketball player also stopped, for the most part.
Dyer said Sherrod wasn’t one to seek praise for his former accomplishments, and soon was adding a host of others. He earned a degree from Wisconsin’s law school in 1975, served as an assistant district attorney in Milwaukee for two years, then returned to Madison as Dane County’s deputy district attorney in 1977.
Upon returning to Madison, he didn’t need long to settle back in. What Dyer remembered as a product of hanging in Penn Park “with nowhere to go and nothing to do” later became an idea about changing the nightlife landscape in Madison. The other late-night options in town made last call for alcohol at midnight. So a new social club, “The Professionals,” vowed to keep the party going.
Sherrod, Dyer, a now-graduated Leon Howard and fellow former Badgers player Larry “Marcus” McCoy bought an abundance of beer, soda, vodka, brandy and gin and rented out a space in an apartment building. McCoy turned 45 RPM records, Howard and Dyer guarded the bar and Sherrod manned the door. It was $5, all you could drink. And that made a profit every time, Howard said.
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“It was a hectic time, I remember that,” Howard said. “But everybody was served… They wanted to get their $5 worth.”
The monthly parties ran for three years. With the help of some flyers, Sherrod could draw a crowd.
Dyer remembered having conversations with Sherrod about going statewide with his fame, entering the running for a judgeship — but Sherrod decided against it. He worked as legal counsel for the Madison Metropolitan School District. According to an examination of clippings on Newspapers.com, that role was seemingly the only capacity in which he ever provided an interview to Madison-based newspapers for the rest of his life.
He could have been in booths at Wisconsin football games, in prime seating for basketball games. Dyer noted Sherrod earned his share of “hoorahs,” including when Wisconsin inducted him into the athletics Hall of Fame in 2002. That day, Mayberry remembered, many approached Sherrod wanting to shake the former Badgers great’s hand. But Sherrod didn’t use the notoriety of his former life as a source of motivation.
“I never knew him to have a trophy case,” Dyer said, “but I knew him to have a lot of trophies.”
There was a time Mayberry remembered an unknowing spectator called Sherrod a “fair weather fan” for leaving a Badgers football game early. He took offense to that. But those who knew him had little indication outside of that moment that he cared about the Wisconsin fanbase’s collective memory of him.
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Sherrod chose a life of public service and solitude.
After his retirement from the Madison school district in 2007, he volunteered as a tutor in reading and math at an elementary school a block or two from his home. He had the means to travel, so he did: to Cancun, Chicago, seeing Mayberry in Philadelphia, then to San Francisco. He read books and played golf and tennis at Cherokee Country Club, not needing anyone beyond himself to maintain his hobbies.
He never lacked an ability to socialize. He seemingly was secure in himself — even as Howard and others made frequent unsuccessful efforts to reach him over the years.
In his final year, though, he did become more secluded. Mayberry was told a health incident forced Sherrod to enter a facility, so he traveled to Madison to see his longtime friend just a few months before he died.
The two spoke once or twice a month for 50 years. Yet the last time he saw Sherrod, Mayberry was instructed to meet him at an Olive Garden rather than have Mayberry find out where Sherrod was being housed. Sherrod died Aug. 18, and Dyer received a call at his home two days later. He was shocked.
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Dyer agreed there is something fascinating — a person with Sherrod’s accomplishments spending the majority of his life in the city where he built his fame, yet still managing to live rather quietly. But if Sherrod was a private figure, Dyer said, it was because he was a public figure for so long. And Sherrod preferred the former.
The funeral was held Aug. 27 at Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Madison. Dyer estimated about 100 people attended.
“He would not have liked it to be at the Coliseum, overflowing,” Dyer said.
His body then was transported to a burial site in Chicago, where the last of his remaining family lives.
‘It’s like I took something away from him’
Richgels said he’s lived a blessed life.
Now 76, he has his own oasis on the “edge of the earth,” just 90 miles from the Canadian border in Minnesota. He reiterated that none of his life was in the plans. He never set goals. Yet soon after his only season with the Badgers, he still was caught in a whirlwind: He was selected in the 1971 NBA Draft, played overseas in Paris while getting a master’s degree in mathematics, which led to an opportunity to coach girls basketball before earning his doctorate and becoming a math professor at Bemidji State University.
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Everything happened so fast — he hadn’t had time to reflect.
But a feeling of sadness crept in when he saw news online of Sherrod’s death. Sherrod had taken “Madison West,” as he called Richgels, under his wing as a player. Yet after Richgels won the team’s MVP in 1971, he and Sherrod never talked much. They went their separate ways — because that’s the way Richgels thought it was supposed to be.
But Richgels was reading the comments about Sherrod last month, describing how great of a person he was. Yeah, he thought, this is all true. And he wanted as many people to know as he could.
He began digging, reading through archived clips. Somewhere in his home is a newspaper article that detailed the 22 records Sherrod left Wisconsin with.
He searched for three hours to no avail. It nearly drove him mad, he said. Because the news has left him overwhelmed and rethinking things. Richgels has been lucky in his life, and he was lucky that night in 1971 when he earned the team’s MVP.
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“But it’s like I took something away from him that he deserved,” Richgels said.
This small guard, Richgels reflected, accomplished so much in both athletics and academics. He understands the marketability of this current era of successful Badgers athletes, but he wants Sherrod on a similar pedestal.
Richgels said he isn’t sure he has deserved all the things he’s fallen into in life. Yet he saw firsthand how hard his former teammate worked.
For that, Richgels hoped, Clarence Sherrod will be remembered.
Photos: Wisconsin men’s basketball opens NCAA Tournament vs. Montana
Montana guard Joe Pridgen passes the ball as Wisconsin forward Nolan Winter defends during the first half of Thursday’s first round of the NCAA Tournament in Denver.
John Leyba, Associated Press
Wisconsin forward Nolan Winter pulls in a rebound over Montana guard Joe Pridgen during the first half of Thursday’s first round of the NCAA Tournament in Denver.
John Leyba, Associated Press
Montana forward Te’Jon Sawyer looks to pass the ball as Wisconsin forward Nolan Winter defends during the first half of Thursday’s first round of the NCAA Tournament in Denver.
David Zalubowski, Associated Press
Wisconsin forward Nolan Winter collides with Montana forward Te’Jon Sawyer while shooting during the first half of Thursday’s first round of the NCAA Tournament in Denver.
David Zalubowski, Associated Press
Wisconsin guard Kamari McGee looks to pass the ball as Montana forward Jensen Bradtke, left, and guard Kai Johnson defend during the first half of Thursday’s first round of the NCAA Tournament in Denver.
David Zalubowski, Associated Press
Wisconsin guard Kamari McGee drives to the basket ahead of Montana forward Jensen Bradtke, left, and guard Malik Moore during the first half of Thursday’s first round of the NCAA Tournament in Denver.
David Zalubowski, Associated Press
Monte, the University of Montana mascot, kisses the standard Thursday before the team faces Wisconsin in the first round of the NCAA Tournament in Denver.
David Zalubowski, Associated Press
Montana coach Travis DeCuire directs his team against Wisconsin during the first half of Thursday’s first round of the NCAA Tournament in Denver.
John Leyba, Associated Press
Wisconsin guard John Blackwell drives the lane as Montana guard Malik Moore defends during the first half of Thursday’s first round of the NCAA Tournament in Denver.
David Zalubowski, Associated Press
Montana forward Te’Jon Sawyer drives to the basket as Wisconsin forward Steven Crowl defends during the first half of Thursday’s first round of the NCAA Tournament in Denver.
John Leyba, Associated Press
Wisconsin forward Steven Crowl posts up against Montana guard Joe Pridgen during the first half of Thursday’s first round of the NCAA Tournament in Denver.
John Leyba, Associated Press
Wisconsin coach Greg Gard looks on during the first half against Montana in the first round of the NCAA Tournament in Denver.
John Leyba, Associated Press
Montana guard Money Williams collects a loose ball as Wisconsin guard John Blackwell pursues during the second half of Thursday’s first round of the NCAA Tournament in Denver.
David Zalubowski, Associated Press
Montana guard Kai Johnson drives past Wisconsin forward Carter Gilmore during the second half of Thursday’s first round of the NCAA Tournament in Denver.
David Zalubowski, Associated Press
Montana guard Joe Pridgen goes up for a basket as Wisconsin guard Kamari McGee and forward Carter Gilmore, right, defend during the second half of Thursday’s first round of the NCAA Tournament in Denver.
David Zalubowski, Associated Press
Wisconsin forward Carter Gilmore lands on Montana forward Amari Jedkins during the second half of Thursday’s first round of the NCAA Tournament in Denver.
David Zalubowski, Associated Press
Wisconsin forward Xavier Amos pulls in a rebound over Montana guard Joe Pridgen and Wisconsin forward Nolan Winter during the second half of Thursday’s first round of the NCAA Tournament in Denver.
David Zalubowski, Associated Press
Montana guard Brandon Whitney drives past Wisconsin guard Kamari McGee during the second half of Thursday’s first round of the NCAA Tournament in Denver.
David Zalubowski, Associated Press
Wisconsin forward Carter Gilmore looks to pass the ball as Montana guard Money Williams defends during the second half of Thursday’s first round of the NCAA Tournament in Denver.
David Zalubowski, Associated Press
Wisconsin forward Carter Gilmore reacts after hitting a 3-point basket against Montana during the second half of Thursday’s first round of the NCAA Tournament in Denver.
David Zalubowski, Associated Press
Wisconsin forward Steven Crowl looks to pass the ball as Montana forward Te’Jon Sawyer defends during the second half of Thursday’s first round of the NCAA Tournament in Denver.
David Zalubowski, Associated Press
Wisconsin coach Greg Gard directs his team against Montana during the second half of Thursday’s first round of the NCAA Tournament in Denver.
David Zalubowski, Associated Press
Wisconsin guard John Tonje passes the ball as Montana guard Money Williams defends during the second half of Thursday’s first round of the NCAA Tournament in Denver.
John Leyba, Associated Press
Wisconsin guard John Blackwell collects the ball as Montana guard Kai Johnson defends during the second half of Thursday’s first round of the NCAA Tournament in Denver.
John Leyba, Associated Press
Wisconsin forward Nolan Winter loses control of the ball while driving between Montana guards Malik Moore and Joe Pridgen during the second half of Thursday’s first round of the NCAA Tournament in Denver.
John Leyba, Associated Press
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