Ronnie Hogue, UGa’s 1st Black Scholarship Hoops Player, Dies

Ronnie Hogue, the first Black scholarship athlete on the Georgia Bulldogs men’s basketball team, died Friday, the school announced. He was 69.

Hogue was a native of Washington, D.C., and lived in Maryland. No cause of death was given.

Arriving at Georgia in 1969, Hogue averaged 20.5 points per game as a junior and scored a career-high 46 points against LSU on Dec. 20, 1971 — the second-highest total in school history and most ever by a Georgia player at Stegeman Coliseum.

In a 2011 interview, Hogue recalled the difficulties of breaking the color barrier at a Deep South school.

“The first year I played, I can remember having spit balls and hot pennies thrown at me during games, but my teammates would huddle around to cover me up,” he said. “By the second year, after I proved I could play basketball, people were lining up to get my autograph.”

As a senior, Hogue averaged 16.5 points a game and was picked as the team’s top defensive player. He finished with a 17.8-point scoring average in his three years on the varsity team.

Hogue was a seventh-round pick of the Washington Bullets in the 1973 NBA draft.