Larry “Gator” Rivers, a Chatham County commissioner and former Harlem Globetrotter who helped integrate Georgia high school basketball in the 1960s, died Saturday morning. He was 74.
Rivers is best known for his time with the Globetrotters in the 1970s and ‘80s, but he also played on a famous Georgia high school basketball team, the 1966-67 Beach High Bulldogs of Savannah, which won the first integrated GHSA basketball tournament in the highest classification in 1967.
Beach, an all-Black team coached by Russell Ellington, defeated South Fulton 94-55 in the championship game that year. Until that season, the GHSA had allowed as members only historically White schools.
Rivers was a sophomore and the sixth man on that 1967 high school team and went on to make Georgia’s North-South All-Star Game as a senior and play at Mobley Junior College, where he was an All-American, and then at Missouri Western. Rivers joined the Globetrotters out of college in 1973. Rivers, a 6-foot-1 guard, was known as a dazzling ball-handler.
Ellington, his Beach High coach, later joined the Globetrotters too as the coach.
In 2008, Rivers returned to his hometown and brought his Gatorball Academy, which mentored youth through basketball. Rivers won election as a Republican to the Chatham board of commissioners in 2020.
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp issued a statement Saturday calling Rivers ‘’a hometown basketball legend.’’
“He led a life of accomplishment and chose to spend much of that life serving the people of his community,’' Kemp said.
Savannah mayor Van Johnson also issued a statement. ‘’Commissioner Rivers never forgot Savannah or Beach High School and dedicated endless hours of mentoring and teaching the rules of basketball and life to scores of young people. For this, he will always be remembered.”
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