By JOHN JAMES MARSHALL, Journal Sports
(NOTE – As the year draws to a close, the SBJ staff is sharing a few of our favorite stories from 2025. This one was published July 25.)
It was about 20 years ago when he was driving down Highway 71 crossing into Natchitoches Parish and realized where he was. Strictly on a whim, he pulled into the parking lot of Fairview-Alpha Elementary & Junior High School a few miles north of Campti.
It had been years since consolidation relocated Fairview-Alpha’s high school classes, but that really didn’t matter. All he wanted to see was one particular building.
And more importantly, one particular spot in that building.
There was activity going on in the gym but no one seemed to notice the man who was obviously a visitor. As he walked across the floor, memories began to flood his mind like flashes of lightning. As he looked around to take it in, things weren’t exactly the same, but it didn’t matter that there had obviously been a paint job or two and the basketball goals were different than before. But this was it. This is what he came to see.
But not just to see it. To live it again.
He saw himself as an 18-year-old, pulling up for a jump shot that was unlike any of the thousands he had taken before. The arc of the ball. The swish of the net.
“I looked up at that goal and saw it all one more time,” he says today. “And then I turned around and walked out. Nobody said anything to me.”
Little did the girls’ P.E. class at Fairview-Alpha realize that Greg Procell had come to relive the moment he became the greatest scorer in the history of high school basketball.
That night.
That gym.
That spot.
* * *
In high school sports, records get set all the time that no one thinks will ever be broken. It may take a while, but eventually, almost all of them are.
It’s been 55 years since Ebarb’s Greg Procell did something that still hasn’t been broken. When his career at the Sabine Parish school was finished in 1970, all of the newspaper accounts were of how he had set the state record. At the time, no one wanted to assume that there might be someone else out there in another state who had more than 6,702 points.
They should have known better.
(Whether or not Procell still holds the record depends on how you look at it. Demond “Tweety” Carter of Reserve Christian finished with 7,494 points, but that includes his point totals as a seventh and eighth grader on the varsity. Some sanctioning organizations only recognize points scored during high school years.)
Ask men of a certain age who know high school basketball about Greg Procell and just watch their reaction. They still don’t believe it.
Nobody does.
You’d get lost trying to make sense of all that Procell accomplished: Points in a game … points in a season … points per game … scoring records set in gyms that still haven’t been broken … and a fairly unbelievable final game of his high school career.
That’s how it ended.
But only when you know how, when and where it started can you grasp just how amazing all of this really is.
* * *
Parishes in Louisiana each seem to have their own identity, but none of the other 63 can quite match Sabine Parish. Located along the Texas border along Toledo Bend, the area began to grow as a railroad town but also as the home for the Choctaw-Apache Tribe, the second-largest tribe in the state
And more than half of the tribe’s population had traditionally been in and around the town of Ebarb. The tribe’s roots dates back to the indigenous people of the 18th century. Surnames such as Sepulvado, Meshell, Remedies, Ebarb and Procell are quite common throughout the parish.
There is no shortage of pride in Sabine Parish. And that is particularly the case in high school basketball. There are seven high schools in the parish and all seven have won a boys state championship in boys basketball. There’s no need to even look that up to see if it’s a record in Louisiana.
But it is not the most affluent – the most recent census shows that one in five residents live below the poverty level – and that was certainly the case for Procell when he was growing up. His household didn’t even have electricity until the early 1950s.
Though Procell was stricken with polio when he was five years old, he began playing basketball as soon as he could. One of his first basketball goals was constructed by his friend, Walter “Tootsie Roll” Meshell – it was simply a bicycle rim attached to a tree. Their group of friends spent as much time as they could playing basketball on a dirt court, often barefoot.
Sneakers were a little too much to ask for during those times.
When Procell was in middle school, he begged Frank Ebarb, his basketball coach, to give him a key so that the seventh grader could go to the gym and practice shooting. But that was against the rules so instead, Coach Ebarb just happened to leave a window open “by accident.”
There was an understanding between the two that it was their secret. No one else was invited.
Led by Procell, the seventh-grade team got to be pretty good and they begged their coach to let them go play in an eighth grade tournament in Noble.
“Y’all can’t play with them eighth grade boys,” Ebarb told them.
“I told Mr. Frank that if he’d let us play, we’d bring the trophy home,” Procell says.
The seventh graders played Pelican’s eight grade in the first game of the tournament.
Ebarb 98, Pelican 6.
“True story,” Procell says. “That was crazy.”
But not as crazy as what was about to happen for the next few years.
* * *
For many years in Louisiana high school basketball, schools could play an unlimited number of games. Non-football schools such as Ebarb started playing in October, but that really didn’t inflate Procell’s scoring numbers. (He played in 31, 39 and 42 games in his first three seasons.)
And the Rebels would play whoever walked in the gym. During his senior year, Procell and the Rebels played Captain Shreve (who would go to the Class AAA state championship game) two times, plus Bossier, Airline and Jesuit (now Loyola), among others.
As a freshman, Procell averaged 24.1 points per game. As a sophomore, it was 34.7 (making 52 percent of his field goals). As a junior, he averaged 34.0 per game.
That set a very big stage for Procell’s senior year. Early in that season, he had consecutive games of 70, 64, 48, 50, 50, 40 and 56 points and all but one of those was a win.
Perhaps even more than the career scoring mark of 6,702, there was one number that might still stand out above all others – 100.
That came on Jan. 29, 1970, in the opening round of the Ebarb Tournament. Previously, Procell’s high had been 72 points, but taking on Elizabeth that night, everything fell into place.
He had 42 field goals and made 18 of 19 free throws that night in a 139-79 win. Procell said he really didn’t realize how close he was to the magic number until the late stages of the game.
“When I got to about 80 (points) they started hollering out how many I had,” he says.
That also broke the state record of 82 points by Plainview’s Truitt Weldon in 1958. Amazingly, Procell doesn’t really recall much else about the game other than being taken out when he had 55 points “and the fans getting on Coach (Ken) Hebert pretty bad, so he put me back in.”
Interestingly, Hebert was the fourth different coach Procell had in four years of high school.
But the game record and the season record and the career record were all nice, but there was still one thing missing – a state championship.
And just as improbable Procell’s career had been in his first 179 games, it was the last one which took that to another level.
* * *
The boys state basketball tournament has had a number of different titles in various cities around the state, but one thing is for sure — there has never been anything like the 1969-70 Top 20 in Alexandria.
Crowds of 10,000 or more were in attendance for almost every game at Rapides Coliseum. The overtime finals between Captain Shreve and Brother Martin drew 15,657 fans.
It was the first school year after court-ordered integration, though not all the schools had begun the process. Newspapers actually charted the total number of starters in the tournament who were minorities (30 of 100; but 13 of 20 in the highest classification, it was noted).
Teams and fans came from all over the state came for the tournament, but there was no doubt who the biggest drawing card was – Greg Procell.
In the Class C semifinals against Maurice, Ebarb won 97-82 but the real story was the freeze that Maurice coach Johnny Picard instructed his team to do, even though they were losing by double figures in the fourth quarter. Not only did it prevent Procell, who had 51 points, from breaking the Class C scoring record for a state tournament game, but it also kept the Rebels from breaking the team scoring record of 103 set by, you guessed it, Maurice.
“We have the record,” Picard said. “And we want to keep it.”
Procell let Picard know about it. With eight seconds left in the game, he twice screamed at the Maurice bench “We’re Number 1, Coach.”
Not yet.
Three days later, Ebarb had to play Sabine Parish neighbor Pleasant Hill for the 11th time that season in the championship game. (Ebarb had won seven of the previous 10.)
Ebarb trailed by eight late in the game before mounting a comeback, but it looked as if it would fall short. Trailing by a point with seven seconds left in the game, Meshell missed the second of two free throws and Pleasant Hill grabbed the rebound. But Robert Jackson threw the ball away with three seconds left and Ebarb had one final chance.
While Pleasant Hill was furiously scrambling to cover Procell, who had scored 44 points, on the inbounds pass, Meshell slipped open. The pass was knocked out of his hands before he regained it in time to get off a 17-foot shot — just before the buzzer — that went through the net.
“I thought I got fouled (on the inbounds pass),” Meshell, who finished with 33 points, said after the game. “But I couldn’t wait for the whistle.”
The Rebels scored 11 of the game’s final 13 points.
“We really should have lost that game to Pleasant Hill,” Procell says now. “They were bigger and stronger and had better athletes. It was just incredible.”
* * *
Once described by his future college coach as “short, slow and couldn’t jump, but nobody had a better shooting eye,” Procell thought he was going to Southwestern Louisiana (now Louisiana-Lafayette) to play in college. In fact, Procell says “Coach Hebert came to Ebarb as our coach to recruit me to USL.”
That didn’t work out, so Procell went to Panola Junior College before transferring to Northwestern State. He had a solid career in his two seasons with the Demons, averaging 11.6 per game in 1972-73 and 7.1 the following year.
“They played that (slowdown) style ball at Northwestern,” Procell says. “It was pass it, pass it, pass it. But in fairness to him (coach Tynes Hildebrand), that’s all he knew. There weren’t a lot of teams that got up and down the floor like we did when he averaged 92 points a game (at Ebarb).”
Procell taught at Natchitoches Central for three years and at Huntington for another 18.
But it was a part-time career as a professional fishing guide that has made Procell perhaps as well-known across the country as for his high school basketball notoriety.
It was as a fishing guide on Toledo Bend that he made an acquaintance with a petroleum engineer, which has led to his career as a salesman in production chemicals for the last 32 years.
And it was on one of those sales trips that led him to the gym at Fairview-Alpha to relive the day of December 13, 1969, when Greg Procell made a shot that etched his name into a record book.
These days, he touches a lot more golf balls than he does basketballs. At 72, he’s still on the job and traveling throughout the area. And if you need a fishing guide, you don’t need to ask twice.
“Tootsie Roll” Meshell, who made that fateful shot in the state title game, recently retired after a career in teaching and the Sabine Parish sheriff’s office.
Procell stays in touch with his teammates from the 1970 team that went 56-12. He may have forgotten a few details of some of those games, but he hasn’t forgotten those who helped him along the way.
Earlier this week, Procell had a special lunch companion: 90-year-old “Mr. Frank” – the middle school coach who let that seventh-grade kid sneak into the gym and set the foundation for a career unlike any other.
“I just wanted to tell him thanks,” Procell says.
Contact JJ at johnjamesmarshall@yahoo.com