Ron Kellogg

Ronald Allison Kellogg Jr. (born December 19, 1962) is a retired American college and professional basketball player, best known for his college days as a left-handed sharpshooter for the successful Larry Brown-coached Kansas Jayhawks teams of the mid-1980s. Though he graduated one season before the NCAA implemented the three-point field goal, his propensity for sinking deep two-pointers earned him a reputation as one of the premier long-range shooters of his era in the Big Eight Conference. A 6’5” (1.96 m) swingman born in Omaha, Nebraska, he was drafted by the Atlanta Hawks of the NBA and played professionally in the CBA.

College Kellogg enrolled at Kansas in 1982 after a standout career at Northwest High School in Omaha, where he was a three-time all-state selection and was recruited by over 150 colleges before choosing KU over Iowa, Colorado, Nebraska, and Creighton. He played sparingly as a freshman under head coach Ted Owens, averaging 3.9 points on 41.0% shooting from the field in just over ten minutes per game. Though he showed only modest improvement as a sophomore in 1983–84, averaging 6.1 points per game on 43.4% shooting, According to Kellogg, his performance in the Nebraska game, in which he hit 16 of his 19 shots from the field and all seven of his free throws en route to establishing a new Devaney Center scoring record, was inspired when "y ex-girlfriend walked in[to the arena] with her boyfriend. That kind of teed me off. I wanted to prove a point after I saw that." Kellogg finished the season as the team's second-leading scorer behind Manning at 15.9 points per game on 55.2% field goal shooting, and was again selected to the All-Big Eight first team. He was traded to the Los Angeles Lakers in a draft-day deal, but failed to make the Lakers roster and never appeared in an NBA game. He signed on with the Topeka Sizzlers of the Continental Basketball Association, where he would be reunited with former KU teammates Thompson and Hunter. During his second season with the Sizzlers, his teammates also included former KU and Boston Celtics star Jo Jo White, who was 41 years old at the time, and New York City playground legend Lloyd Daniels. Kellogg also played for the Omaha Racers, Savannah Spirits and Yakima Sun Kings in four CBA seasons, averaging 11.5 points in 147 games. After leaving the CBA, Kellogg pursued a career in business and now coaches high school basketball in Baton Rouge.

Legacy

Kellogg's claim to fame was his silky left-handed jump shot, which netted him a reputation as the best shooter in Nebraska prep history and one of the greatest ever to wear a Jayhawk uniform. When the Omaha World-Herald asked four scouts to recall Kellogg's game as part of a 2008 retrospective, each of them responded with the same two words: "incredible shooter". Kansas head coach Bill Self, a graduate assistant on the 1985–86 KU team, describing a shooting drill at practice in which the players would launch 30 to 35 jump shots from the elbow within a five-minute span, recalled, "On the fourth day we ran it, Ronnie finally missed one. Do you hear me? He went three consecutive days in a rapid-fire shooting drill without missing!" In another column, he was labeled a "born flake" who, during a critical time-out in a game against Memphis State his junior year, allegedly told a bewildered Brown, "Coach, we need to fix the whirlpool."