Beyond the Top 50 Cal Pros: Who Didn't Make the Cut and Why

Our summertime series, the Top 50 Cal Pros, is now complete. Settling on the 50 who made the cut was not easy.

While establishing the criteria for our selections, we made a couple of significant decisions:

First, Olympic athletes were excluded from this particular list. This was not an easy call because Cal has exceled on the Olympic stage for a century. And the decision was not made simply because the Olympics were an amateur endeavor for decades.

Instead, the issue was that for generations most athletes competed in just a single Olympic Games. Because they had no way of sustaining themselves financially while satisfying archaic amateur regulations, they often were essentially forced to retire from athletics shortly after college.

As a result, while modern-era athletes such as swimmers Matt Biondi and Natalie Coughlin competed in multiple Olympics, those from yesteryear mostly didn’t so much have post-collegiate careers as much as moments.

Consider quarter-miler Archie Williams. His post-collegiate career basically consisted of the 1936 Olympics, where he ran the 400 meters in 46.1 seconds in the preliminary round, then won gold with a clocking of 47.0 in the final in front of Hitler at Berlin.

Williams graduated from Cal with a degree in mechanical engineering, became a civilian pilot training instructor at Tuskeege, was one of just 14 African Americans commissioned during World War II in the aviation meteorological cadet program, and was such a popular high for two decades in the San Francisco North Bay that Sir Francis Drake High School was renamed Archie Williams High School in 2021-- 28 years after his death.

A great and accomplished man, but hardly the owner of a professional career in sports.

Ultimately, we couldn’t reckon comparing Williams’ brilliant 93.1-second Olympic “career” to Jason Kidd’s 19 years in the NBA.

Secondly, two athletes with legit credentials were bypassed because their connection to Cal was exceedingly brief and neither played for the Golden Bears.

Don Budge attended Cal for a short time in the fall of 1933 before leaving to pursue tennis. He was the first player to complete the tennis grid slam by winning all four majors — the Australian Open, French Open, Wimbledon and the U.S. Open — in 1938. He also won Wimbledon and the U.S. Open in 1937, the start of winning six consecutive Grand Slam events. 

Ranked No. 1 in the world in 1937 and ’38, Budge won 10 Grand Slam singles titles. They were amateur events at the time, but represented the peak of the sport. 

Right-handed pitcher Jim Maloney reportedly attended Cal and Fresno City College before signing with the Cincinnati Reds in 1959. His time in Berkeley was apparently brief. 

He went on to a 12-year major league career during which he won 134 games, was twice a 20-game winner and pitched two no-hitters.

Here are 19 more accomplished pros from Cal that we considered for our list: 

— Ted Albrecht: The offensive tackle was drafted No. 15 in first round by the Chicago Bears in 1977 and started 75 games but his NFL career lasted just five seasons.

— Tyson Alualu: An interior defensive lineman, Alualu was drafted No. 10 by the Jacksonville Jaguars in 2010 and played 14 NFL seasons for three teams.

— Ryan Anderson:  A first-round NBA draft pick in 2008, Anderson averaged 12.3 points for six teams over 12 seasons, including a career-best 19.8 for the New Orleans Pelicans in 2014.

— Sam Chapman: A Rose Bowl hero for the Cal football team, Chapman hit 180 home runs during a major league career that was interrupted by military service for nearly four full seasons during World War II.