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Tom McMillen

American basketball player and politician

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
People and ideasInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 4, 2026
Entity authorityQ1619365
Source-derived summary

Charles Thomas McMillen (born May 26, 1952) is an American politician, businessman, and former professional basketball player. A Rhodes Scholar, McMillen represented Maryland's 4th congressional district from 1987 to 1993. He played in the National Basketball Association for the Buffalo Braves, New York Knicks, Atlanta Hawks (mostly), and Washington Bullets from 1975 until 1985.

On March 22, 2011, he was appointed as chairman of the inaugural Board of Directors of the President's Foundation on Sports, Physical Fitness, and Nutrition. He is also the author of Out of Bounds, a critical look at the unhealthy influence of sports on ethics, and he served on the Knight Foundation's Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics investigating abuses within college sports.

Career

Basketball

Prior to entering politics, McMillen was a star basketball player on all levels. In 1970, he was the number one high school basketball player in the country coming out of Mansfield, Pennsylvania, and was the biggest recruiting catch early in coach Lefty Driesell's career at the University of Maryland, beating out rival coaches Dean Smith of the University of North Carolina and John Wooden of University of California, Los Angeles for McMillen's services. McMillen played for the Terrapins from 1971 to 1974. He was also a member of the 1972 U.S. Olympic basketball team that lost a controversial gold medal game to the Soviet Union.

McMillen earned his B.S. from University of Maryland in chemistry, which is part of the University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences.

Editorial summary

“Tom McMillen” enters the record as american basketball player and politician. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what McMillen, American and basketball can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA productive starting point for separating a subject’s documented career from later reputation and commemoration. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1952, 1987, 1993, 1975—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1952-05-26. Its strongest next move is a source search built around McMillen, American and basketball.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Tom McMillen” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, McMillen, American and basketball provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1619365. VIAF identifies the subject as 271300916. The Library of Congress control number is n92018209. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1952, 1987, 1993 and 1975.

Critical limits

Later biographies can compress uncertainty and repeat inherited reputations, so apparently settled claims may still require comparison. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
Verify next

Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Tom McMillen”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Tom McMillen primary sources, Tom McMillen archive and McMillen research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Tom McMillen”?
  2. How has the subject’s reputation changed across later accounts?
  3. Which claims depend on a single source or contested interpretation?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Tom McMillen” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.