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Rollie Massimino and George Raveling inducted to National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame

Two Villanova Wildcats joined the 2013 National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame induction class on Sunday.

By Brian Ewart

"I still haven't watched the film because I still think we are going to lose," former Villanova head coach Rollie Massimino joked about his 1985 National Championship win over Georgetown as he was inducted into the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame.

Massimino was inducted alongside George Raveling, a 1960 Villanova graduate, who later went on to coach basketball at Washington State, Iowa and Southern California. He now works with Nike as their director of international basketball, travelling globally to help the sneaker giant promote the sport. His time at Villanova came at the end of Alexander Severance's tenure as coach.

Raveling is also known as the man who currently possesses the original handwritten manuscript of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech.

For Massimino, the honor came largely due to his 1985 team's stunning upset over top-ranked Georgetown in the NCAA tournament. The Wildcats barely squeaked into the newly-expanded field of 64 that season as an 8-seed, and played through a gauntlet to reach the title game.

The headline inductee, however, was the University of Houston's Elvin Hayes, who led that team as they ended UCLA's 47-game winning streak in 1968. The other inductees were coach Gene Keady (Purdue), and players Xavier McDaniel (Wichita State), Marques Johnson (UCLA), Tom McMillen (Maryland), Bob Hopkins (Grambling) and George Killian. Also honored at the ceremony was the 1963 Loyola-Chicago Ramblers team that was the first NCAA champion with at least four black players in the starting lineup -- a few years before Texas Western's "Glory Road" team.

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