MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – One of West Virginia University's pioneering men's basketball players has died.
 
Norman Holmes, one of five players who integrated Mountaineer basketball and the Southern Conference in 1965, died Monday in Crofton, Maryland, according to teammate Jimmy Lewis.
 
Lewis, All-American guard Ron "Fritz" Williams, Ed Harvard, Holmes and Carl Head were the first Black players to play in the Southern Conference during the 1965-66 season.
 
West Virginia, which integrated Southern Conference track and field in 1961 with Phil Edwards, and then Southern Conference football in 1963 with Dick Leftridge and Roger Alford, was once again ahead of the curve compared to many of its regional basketball rivals in the mid-1960s.
 
Maryland integrated its basketball program the same year West Virginia did when Billy Jones enrolled, but Duke (1967), North Carolina (1968), Wake Forest (1968), NC State (1969), Clemson (1971), Kentucky (1971), South Carolina (1971), Florida (1972), Georgia Tech (1972), LSU (1972), Tennessee (1972), and Virginia (1972) came afterward.
 
Mississippi State was the last major men's basketball program to integrate when Larry Fry and Jerry Jenkins joined the team in 1973.
 
Holmes was recommended to West Virginia coach George King by former WVU freshman coach Bucky DeVries, who discovered Holmes while he was playing basketball in the Marine Corps.
 
Holmes played high school football with Garrett Ford Sr.'s older brother while growing up in Washington, D.C., so he had some familiarity with WVU. Norman was taking courses at East Carolina and was planning to pursue a career as an officer in the Marine Corps when King offered him a scholarship to join the Mountaineer freshman team in 1964.
 
King's main priority was signing Fritz Williams, considered one of the top prep prospects in the country from Weirton, West Virginia. However, Fritz was uncomfortable in the role of integrating WVU basketball and was more inclined to play at schools that were already integrated, such as Michigan.
 
King's solution to his Williams conundrum was to bring in other Black players to help Fritz's transition to Morgantown. First, he signed Alexandria, Virginia's Jimmy Lewis, who came highly recommended by Earl Lloyd. 
 
Lloyd was King's teammate with the Syracuse Nationals and was the first Black to appear in an NBA game on Oct. 30, 1950, for the Washington Capitols. Lloyd, who played collegiately at West Virginia State, understood the unique challenges these players were going to encounter while playing in the Southern Conference, so his recommendation carried a lot of weight in King's mind.
 
King also added Harvard, Williams' high school teammate, and to help those three, he wanted someone older, more mature, and serious-minded to help them adjust.
 
Holmes perfectly suited those requirements.
 
"Coach King brought me up there because I was older," Holmes once recalled in 2015. "Jimmy Lewis was just 17, and I think I was 22 at the time. (King) wanted a little stability there."
 
When Duke assistant coach Bucky Waters was hired to replace King after King took the Purdue basketball job, he added junior college transfer Carl Head to the mix, giving West Virginia five Black players for the 1965-66 season.
 
Waters was a young coach full of great ideas. He had names for his personnel groupings such as "blockbusters" and "gangbusters" and he changed the school's tradition of running out on the carpet during pregame introductions. He wanted his players to run though a big hoop with the lights turned off and a spotlight on each player as prerecorded music was playing over the loudspeaker. 
 
It more closely resembled a Broadway production and the players and fans viewed it with great amusement.
 
"He would turn off the lights, and one time one of the players fell down because they couldn't see where they were going as we were about to run out for pregame introductions," Holmes chuckled. "The fans were looking for someone to run through the hoop and nobody did because we were all piled up on the other side (of the bleachers)."
 
And while Williams and Head were the stars of the team, Holmes was by no means just a complementary player. He scored a career-high 18 points in a 127-97 victory over George Washington on Feb. 25, 1967, and finished his career with 361 points, 135 assists and 257 rebounds in 78 games for the Mountaineers.
 
He scored a big basket in WVU's 94-90 upset victory over No. 1-ranked Duke in Charleston on Feb. 7, 1966, and grabbed eight rebounds and handed out four assists in West Virginia's Southern Conference tournament championship game victory over Davidson.
 
Holmes was part of the "gangbusters" defensive squad that Waters would put into the game to wreak havoc on the opposition.
 
"Defensively, we just wore them out," Holmes once said of the Davidson victory. "We had a system where I forced them over to Fritz and we would trap them."
 
The Davidson win propelled the Mountaineers to the NCAA Tournament where they lost in the first round to fifth-ranked Princeton in Blacksburg, Virginia.

Holmes' senior season saw West Virginia win 19 games before losing to Davidson in the Southern Conference tournament championship game in Charlotte. That victory helped coach Lefty Driesell get the Maryland job two years later.
 
Davidson, with star players Mike Maloy and Wayne Huckle, was West Virginia's biggest basketball rival in those days.
 
"We knew we couldn't match their size, so what we had to do was to take their guards completely out of the game," Holmes once recalled. "If we took the ball from them at midcourt, then they couldn't get the ball to their big guys because they were just so much bigger than we were.
 
"Davidson had an unbelievable group of freshmen in 1967, and they were already good before these freshmen came in," Holmes added. "When we beat Davidson (in the 1967 championship game), those freshmen were sitting up in the stands telling us what they were going to do to us."
 
Holmes scored four points in his final game for the Mountaineers against Dayton in the first round of the National Invitational Tournament at Madison Square Garden in New York City.
 
WVU's two-year record with Williams, Head, Holmes, Harvard, and Lewis was 38-18, and then 19-9 again in 1968 the year after Head left the program.
 
Holmes met his wife, Sharon, while attending WVU.
 
"Meeting my wife there the first week was the best thing that ever happened to me," Holmes once explained. "The other (Black) players were not dating girls on campus, and I was the only one, and I was always with her. Jimmy Lewis and Fritzy were always together, and they would always say to me, 'Man, you hang around with that girl all of the time, and you are never with us.' I would tell them, 'Yeah, well you don't look like her either!'"
 
Holmes left WVU to enter the banking industry at American Securities in Washington, D.C. He handled his professional life the same way he handled his three years attending West Virginia University in the late 1960s as one of the few Blacks living on campus at the time – with class and dignity.
 
"My first day on the job, they told me they had never hired a colored person before – that's what they called us back then," Holmes recalled. "I said, 'Well, I have never worked for a bank before either.'"

There is a display in the Basketball Hall of Traditions that includes Holmes and the other players commemorating their pioneering contributions to West Virginia University. 
 
In addition to his wife, Norman is survived by his children Rodney, Gregory and Mildred Holmes, and Damani Gross. 
 
He was 80.