Passing of Ex-UW Guard Mike Neill, HS Legend, Caught Hometown By Surprise

He was our Jimmy Chitwood, a mythical long-range basketball shooter who was a little on the mysterious side, hailed from the other side of the mountains, played for a high school team nicknamed the Bombers and whose story had the makings of a Hollywood movie.

Sadly, MIke Neill will be memorialized on June 14 in a golf tournament in Richland, Washington, by nearly 100 friends and family members who only recently discovered the legendary one died a year ago without anyone close to him knowing it.

Neill, a former University of Washington guard who played at Richland’s Columbia High School — or simply Richland High — was 67 and homeless when he passed away in March 2023 in Yakima, about 75 miles from his hometown. His cause of death was believed to be from a heart attack, though his friends couldn’t confirm that.

“For a year and a month, nobody knew,” said Obie Amacker, one of the organizers of a golf event scheduled for Horn Rapids Golf Course. “There was just a blurb in the paper that had his age wrong, so nobody thought it was him. It’s a sad tale.”

Everyone always loves the long-range shooter who can score in bunches, which is how Steph Curry and Caitlin Clark built their huge basketball followings. Neill was no different.

He was a 6-foot-3 left-hander, a great curiosity, who burst onto the Washington high school scene after he had grown up shooting late into the night at a basket in the family driveway in the Tri-Cities.

As a fresh-faced sophomore with floppy hair in 1973, he averaged 24.5 points per game and guided the Bombers to a 23-3 record and state runner-up finish. He would lose in the state championship game 67-59 to a Roosevelt team from Seattle that featured 7-foot center James Edwards, who became a UW teammate of Neill’s and played two decades in the NBA, but the young shooter’s reputation for being way ahead of his time was secured.

A year later, Neill did it again, scoring at a higher rate and advancing to another state title game. This time, he averaged 26.1 points per game and led Richland up against an unbeaten and powerful 1974 Garfield team — still considered the greatest ever assembled in state history — and lost 62-44, finishing 23-3.

In 1975, Neill was an even more prolific scorer, averaging 28.7, as creative as ever in launching shots from around the perimeter, for a Bombers team that finished 22-4 and in fourth place in the state tournament.

All of his offensive production was done without a 3-point line, making his three-year Richland basketball heroics all the more amazing.

He received a UW scholarship and headed for Seattle. As a freshman in 1976, he scored 5.9 points per game and came off the bench for a 23-5 NCAA Tournament team, the Huskies’ first postseason entry in 23 seasons since appearing in the 1953 Final Four. He grew out a mustache and didn’t lack for confidence.

Neill became a UW starter as a sophomore and junior, averaging 8.8 and a team-leading 11.5 points an outing in 1977 and 1978, respectively, before he encountered grade trouble he couldn’t overcome and didn’t play anymore.

Returning to the Tri-Cities area, Neill became somewhat of a recluse away from the basketball bright lights, having trouble adjusting without the game more central to his well-being. He eventually drifted away from his family, which included brothers Phil and Steve, who were Richland players, with Phil even coaching the Bombers for a long time. Someone said Mike tried officiating games, though it’s not clear if that happened and how far he took it. He began to wander and left town, ending up in Yakima.

Richland, if not the state of Washington, will forever claim him as this kid with a magic touch, as a basketball hero not unlike those in that movie Hoosiers, with people infatuated by his dominant ways, remembering only good things about someone who kept everyone spellbound.

“Very sad,” said Kim Stewart, a UW forward and a teammate. “Neill was one of a kind.”

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