Jack Twyman was a Hall of Fame basketball player who once scored 59 points in an N.B.A. game. In 1959-60 he and Wilt Chamberlain became the first players to average more than 30 points a game in a season. He went on to become an analyst for the N.B.A. game of the week on ABC and a food company executive who pocketed more than $3 million when he sold the company in 1996.

But Twyman’s greatest fame came from simply helping out a friend. After his Cincinnati Royals teammate Maurice Stokes had a paralyzing brain injury in the final regular-season game of the 1958 season, Twyman learned he was nearly destitute.

So he became Stokes’s legal guardian. He helped him get workers’ compensation; raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay for medical care, partly through organizing an annual charity game of basketball superstars; and helped him learn to communicate by blinking his eyes to denote individual letters.

And for decades Twyman pressed the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass., to induct Stokes, a power forward who once grabbed 38 rebounds in a game. When the Hall of Fame finally did so, in 2004, 21 years after Twyman’s admission, Twyman accepted the award for his friend.