Greve Was A Scoring Machine, Makes It Into Hall Of Fame

It’s funny how things work out sometimes.

A couple weeks ago I wrote the first of two columns about the only two Montgomery County basketball players to score 50 points in a game. That column was the start of an interesting turn of events.

Before last week’s column about Matt McCarty, the county’s all-time leading scorer in a single-game, I was talking to Matt’s dad, Tom, at a Crawfordsville game. He was originally a Waveland boy so we chatted about the first player to ever score 50 points — Mike Mitchell. Then Tom asked me if I was aware that Bill Greve, another Waveland legend, was not in the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame.

His comment stunned me a bit. After all, Greve ranks third on the all-time scoring list with 1,777 points, and he was part of two sectional titles and two county titles, and he had a great career at Purdue.

I looked into it and sure enough, Bill Greve was not in the Indiana Hall of Fame. His brother, Keith was, but Bill wasn’t. I sent an email to Chris May at the Hall of Fame about it and even printed a nomination form last week. The following day I received an email back from May saying that a press release would come out this week concerning Bill Greve.

The release from yesterday names the Hornet superstar as a member of the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame Class of 2018. His induction will take place in March next year.

Greve had an outstanding four-year career at Waveland.

• He scored 63 points as a freshman, with a season-high of nine against Fillmore. The team went 15-8 that year.

• He scored 394 as a sophomore with a high of 28 against Alamo. Team went 22-3.

• He scored 608 as a junior with a high of 38 against Darlington. Team went 15-7.

• He scored 712 as a senior with a high of 46 against Bowers. Team went 20-4.

In a four-day period during his senior year, Greve put together great back-to-back games. On Saturday, Jan. 29 1955 he erupted for a career-high 44 points, surpassing his previous high of 43 which he set the third game of the season in a 77-67 loss to Kingman. In the game when he scored 44, he totaled 17 field goals and 10 free throws in the Hornets’ 82-63 win over Alamo.

Greve topped his career-best by two the very next game, a Tuesday night affair on Feb. 1 that year against Bowers. This time the Hornets won 75-59 as Greve scored 46 points on 18 field goals and 10 free throws.

Greve started the season with a 40-point night in a 74-56 win over Russellville, giving him four games with 40 points or more. According to school records, only three players ever hit the 40-point mark.

Mitchell did it twice with games scoring 51 and 40 points. Keith Greve did it in the 1950-51 season when he scored 41, and Bill did it with games of 40, 43, 44 and 46 points all during his senior year.

Bill held the Montgomery County single-season scoring record for 39 years until Matt McCarty totaled 719 in 1993-94. They are the only players to ever score at least 700 points in a season. Greve is the only player in Montgomery County basketball history to have two seasons with more than 600 points.

The county has had only five players score more than 600 points in a season. Greve did it with 712 and 608 total points and McCarty it with his 719 points. Linden’s Daryl Warren totaled 644 points in the 1970-71 season and Crawfordsville’s Matt Petty had 625 points in 1988-89.

In Greve’s four years as a Hornet, the team went 72-22 and won sectional titles in 1952 and 1953. In fact, in the six overall sectional championships won by Waveland, there was a Greve on the team each year — Leonard in 1935, Ray in 1939, Keith in 1949 and 1951, and Bill in 1952 and 1953. Waveland made it to six sectional finals after the final Greve graduated but never won it.

Greve ended his high school career and was the winner of the first Montgomery County Athlete of the Year in the spring of 1995.

He went on to play three years at Purdue and led the team is scoring as a sophomore with 13.8 points per game and averaged 12.8 points as a junior. In his final year he averaged 6.6 points and ended with an 11.1 scoring average in his 66 games with the Boilermakers. He also averaged 7.7 rebounds a game, including a career-best 8.8 rebounds a game as a sophomore.

According to his biography on the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame, the Purdue basketball media guide credits Greve as being the first Boilermaker to record a documented double-double after a game with 12 points and 14 rebounds against Missouri on Dec. 8, 1955. It was his first of 13 career double-doubles at Purdue.