A World War II veteran who was kept out of action due to his 6-6 height, Neal Conway enrolled at Georgetown in the fall of 1949, playing two seasons as a backup center on the men's basketball team, seeing action in two games early in each season.

"A basketball scholarship to Georgetown U. is what brought my father and mother from Northeastern Pennsylvania to Washington in the early 1950s," writes his son, Neal J. Conway Jr., in a personal web site detailing his family story. "My father eventually became a government attorney and my mother, before having me, was an administrative assistant in the United States District Attorney's office during very interesting times."