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THURSDAY MARCH 29, 2018
Hot Rod documentary to premiere on Friday
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A LOOK INSIDE
BY JOHN LOWE
ASSISTANT SPORTS EDITOR On Friday, Morgantown-based production company Pikewood Creative will premier their documentary “Hot Rod” at the Metropolitan Theatre on High Street. The film tells the story of Rodney Clark “Hot Rod” Hundley, who is best known in West Virginia for playing for the WVU men’s basketball team from 1954-57. While he was at WVU, he led the Mountaineers to three consecutive Southern Conference titles, the school’s first three NCAA Tournament berths while averaging 24.5 points per game and 10.5 rebounds per game. Hundley was also known as the “Court Jester” or “Clown Prince” as he would often take fancy shots or mock the opponent with his ball handling skills. Dan Lohmann, one of the producers of the film, first acquired interest in Hundley when he was working on a short film about the WVU basketball star when he was a student in 1998. “For long periods of time, he (Hundley) would play and that’s kind of a misnomer about Hot Rod,” Lohmann said. He would play for almost the entire game and then he would ‘clown’ for the last five minutes of the game sometimes. It got me interested. What this guy is doing is something you’ve never seen before.” While the film Hot Rod touches on his Mountaineer career and ingame antics, it also focuses on his career as a play-by-play broadcaster for the NBA’s New Orleans and Utah Jazz, a position he held from 1974 until his retirement in 2009, calling 3,051 games in that span. When Hundley passed away in 2015, Lohmann and WVU play-by-
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PHOTO VIA WEST VIRGINIA UNIVERSITY/MONTICOLA 1956
Hot Rod Hundley shoots a fall shot in the WVU Field House (now Stansbury Hall) during a game in 1956. play announcer Tony Caridi set out to make a project that could connect Hundley’s story both in Utah and West Virginia. “I had always thought people in West Virginia had always perceived him as a great player but never understood how big of a broadcaster he had become,” Caridi said. “People in Utah knew him as a great broadcaster but never realized how great of a player he was. So we thought that was the story.” When Lohmann and Caridi started to put together interview subjects for the documentary, they met Hundley’s daughters and found even more pieces to the story. “The gold is when we sat down with his daughters,” Caridi said. “Because they opened up a whole aspect of his life that people had
kind of from a distant way knew that he had kind of an estranged relationship. But they opened up and for the first time really let the truth be known as to how it worked and how they were raised. That I think is the massive part of the story.” In addition to his daughters, former WVU and Laker teammate Jerry West, former broadcasting partners Dick Enberg, Brent Musberger, Jim Nantz, Craig Bolerjack and Ron Boone as well as former Utah Jazz coaches Frank Layden and Jerry Sloan were all interviewed for the documentary. Lohmann and Caridi hope the film brings to the people of West Virginia and Utah a greater understanding of who Hundley was. “He’s about as thick and textured and complex of a charac-
ter that you’ll come across,” Caridi said. “He was a showman, he was a great player, he was a comedian, he was a party-to-you-drop party guy and never stopped, he was a guy that had darkness in his heart because of his childhood. I don’t think people applaud when the movie is over. I think they come away emotionally like they just went through an experience.” Hot Rod will have premier at the Metropolitan Theatre on Friday before having its television debut on 7 p.m. Tuesday on AT&T SportsNet Pittsburgh. The film will also have a debut on AT&T SportsNet Rocky Mountain for those who live in Utah and will also air on West Virginia PBS stations starting Mon., April 16. Hot Rod will air a minimum of 96 times across the three networks in the next year.
Look for the basketball icon throughout the paper for more stories on “Hot Rod.”
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