LEGENDARY RUTGERS PLAYER PHIL SELLERS PASSES AT 69
By Harry Allison
Rutgers great Phil Sellers has died and here’s how Richard Sandomir of the New York Times reported it:
Phil Sellers, a brash, high-scoring forward who helped transform Rutgers University into a national basketball power in the 1970s, but whose N.B.A. career lasted only one season, after which he led a quiet life in business, died on Sept. 19 at a hospital in Livingston, N.J. He was 69.
His daughter, Kendra Palmer, said that she did not know the cause, but that he had recently had a stroke, an intestinal perforation and other health issues. A GoFundMe campaign raised more than $100,000 to cover the health costs that his insurance did not.
Sellers was recruited to Rutgers in 1972 after averaging 33.2 points and 22.6 rebounds a game at Thomas Jefferson High School in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. He was considered the best high school player to come to a New Jersey college since Bill Bradley arrived at Princeton University from Missouri a decade earlier.
“Phil Sellers is the biggest catch in Rutgers history,” Dick Weiss, a columnist for The Courier-Post of Camden, N.J., wrote soon after Sellers agreed to play there.
