Ernie Hall, the leading scorer on Ventura College's legendary men's basketball teams of 1949-50 and 1950-51, was too ill to attend his induction into the school's athletic Hall of Fame Friday night.

His teammates of 58 years, guards Jim Cowan and Charlie Dunn, accepted the award on his behalf and presented it to their center at his bedside Monday morning.

Hall, 77, whose team won the Indiana high school boys' basketball tournament in 1948, held the Ventura College career scoring record for 37 years and was the first black player to play basketball for Purdue University, died Monday evening surrounded by family and friends after an eight-month bout with throat cancer.

Services will take place graveside at 11 a.m. Friday at the Santa Clara Catholic cemetery in Oxnard.

"He was a heck of a ballplayer," said former Ventura High coach Bob Swanson, who watched Hall play for the old Ventura JC.

"He was only 6-foot-2 and played center because he could move so well. He wheeled on people. He was able to go around bigger players."

Ventura's first All-State player, Hall finished his two-year career with 1,518 points. He held the school's scoring record for 37 years, before being overtaken in 1988 by a similarly spindly forward from Compton named Cedric Ceballos.

Hall was small for a starting center, even in his day. But he was quick, skillfull and deadly from mid-range and inside 7 feet, especially with his signature reverse move.

"He was just as quick as could be," said Cowan. "He could get off his feet real fast."

"You don't have to be tall if you're quick and smooth," said Dunn.

Hall came to Ventura from his native Indiana in 1949, recruited by Elmer McCall, the dignified, bespectacled coach also from Indiana.

The previous winter, Hall had scored 11 points in Lafayette Jeff's 54-42 win over Evansville Central to help the Broncos win "Hoosier Hysteria," the legendary single-class Indiana state high school basketball tournament.

He would become, among so many other things, the Pirates' first great out-of-state star, averaging 19.5 points per game as a freshman and 20.3 as a sophomore as Ventura won its first two Western State Conference titles.

It was perhaps with this legendary team that the city of Ventura fell in love with the game of basketball.

"They caught the fancy of the city," said Swanson. "They packed houses."

In 1950-51, Ventura won its first 16 games of a 36-5 season, which included the school's first state championship and its first — and last — trip to Hutchinson, Kan., for the national JUCO tournament.

California community colleges haven't participated in the NJCAA tournament since Ventura's train trip east.

It was in the national semifinal loss to Northeast Mississippi that Hall, along with fellow black teammate Jim Crockam and Mexican-American forward Ed Millan, was the target of intense racial abuse from both the opposition and the Mississippi-dominated crowd.

"It was awful," said Millan. "It was just an untenable situation."

Hall transferred to Purdue, where he was the first black player in program history. He lasted nine games, averaging 12.4 points per game, before he was removed from the team after being arrested for assault and battery. He was later acquitted, but finished his career at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

Hall spent 29 years in the U.S. Postal Service before enjoying a quiet retirement.

He is survived by two children, Kitty Thompson and her husband Johnny of Camarillo and Earl Hall and his wife Krystal of Oxnard, and four grandchildren, Omar and Autumn Thompson and Eric and Ernesto Hall, whose father, Ernest "Chuck" Hall Jr., died in 2000.

At 6-3, Earl Hall, 25, was an undersized center at Santa Clara High, where, guided by his father's tips, helped the Saints with a state championship in 1999.

"It came natural," said Earl Hall. "It just ran in the genes."

Hall is also survived by four teammates — Dunn, Cowan, Millan and Crockam, who made up the rest of coach McCall's starting lineup.

"He was a good friend," said Millan.