Gamecock hall of fame basketball player Art Whisnant dies
South Carolina basketball hall of famer Art Whisnant died Tuesday after a long illness. He was 81 years old.
Whisnant, who was was inducted in the Gamecocks Hall of Fame in 2001 and South Carolina Athletic Hall of Fame in 2016, was also the maternal grandfather of the world’s No. 1 golfer Dustin Johnson.
He played at USC from 1959-62 and was a three-time all-Atlantic Coast Conference selection, earning first-team honors in 1962.
The 6-foot-4 center averaged 19.1 points and 9.2 rebounds in 79 games at South Carolina and a career-best 21 points as a senior. He finished his career with 1,505 points and ranks in top 10 on the Gamecocks scoring list. His 880 career free-throw attempts still rank No. 1 in school history.
The Los Angeles Lakers selected Whisnant in the fifth round of the 1962 NBA Draft, but a long career in the league never materialized. He suffered a foot infection and ended up playing for the Wilkes-Barre (Pennsylvania) Barons of the Eastern League.
The North Carolina native ended up coaching youth travel teams around South Carolina and was a huge influence on his grandson’s golf career. In a 2017 interview with The State, Whisnant wondered what the 6-foot-4 Dustin could have been if he had focused on basketball.
Whisnant coached Johnson’s travel teams and said his grandson received an offer to play basketball from Charleston Southern. But golf eventually won out.
“He was into basketball, baseball. He can run and jump. He’d snatch a rebound and take it back down the court and beat everybody back down the court,” Whisnant said. “I don’t know, he just started playing golf, and I guess he liked it.”
Whisnant took his grandson to many junior golf tournaments growing up, walking the course to follow his grandson’s game at every one of them. He hasn’t done the math to figure out how many holes he’s walked in his life.
“Oh, I’ve got no idea,” he said. “We went to every tournament we could get to, every summer was junior tournaments all over everywhere.”
This story was originally published March 17, 2021 at 12:23 PM.
