Larry “Gator” Rivers, who helped integrate high school basketball in Georgia before playing for the Harlem Globetrotters and becoming a county commissioner in his native Savannah, died Saturday at age 73.
Rivers died from cancer, Chatham County Commission Chairman Chester Ellis told the Savannah Morning News. Campbell and Sons Funeral home said Rivers died at a hospital in Savannah.
Rivers was a sophomore on the all-Black Beach High School team that won the first Georgia High School Association basketball tournament to include Black and white players in 1967. He blossomed into an all-state player, graduating from the Savannah high school in 1969 and going on to be a small college All-American at Moberly Junior College in Missouri and an all-conference guard at what is now Missouri Western State University in St. Joseph.
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