Perhaps the greatest big man in Brown basketball history, Bears’ 6-9 center
Jim Turner ’86 was the catalyst for Brown’s 1986 Ivy League Championship and NCAA Tournament team.
Turner first earned a starting role with the Bears in his junior year, but it was as a senior that he came into his own. Former Brown great and Legends of Ivy League Basketball Class of 2018 Coach
Mike Cingiser '62, will be the first to tell you that Jim really arrived in that wonderful 1986 Ivy Championship season. The Ivy League Championship that season came down to the final weekend, with Brown defeating Harvard and Dartmouth on the road.
Jim Turner became a dominant force in the paint and emerged as Brown’s second ever Ivy Player of the Year and a unanimous first-team All-Ivy selection.
He led the Ivy League in scoring by a wide margin with 24.0 points per game in League games and pulled down over eight rebounds per game to rank second in the League.
Over the final 10 games of the season, Turner averaged over 26.0 points per game while hitting 72.0 percent from both the floor and the free throw line. He had four 30-point games as a senior, including 37-point games against Dartmouth and Penn, and 35 points vs. Columbia.
Originally from Levittown, N.Y., Turner continues to hold Brown records for career field goal percentage (.602), single-season field goal percentage (.628) and field goal percentage in a single game (.933 – 14-of-15, vs. Penn).
Turner was also at home in the classroom, posting a 3.67 grade point average with a Sc.B in Applied Math / Economics, graduating magna cum laude, and being selected an Academic All-American.
Turner spent two years as an investment banking analyst at Lehman Brothers after graduation and attended the Fuqua Business School at Duke University where he obtained his M.B.A. with a GPA of 3.9 in 1990. At Duke he was named a Fuqua Scholar and was also awarded a Corbett Memorial Scholarship in recognition of his first-year academic achievement.
After graduating from Duke (where he led his team to the 1990 MBA basketball intramural championship, winning a coveted championship t-shirt that could only be won, not purchased) he returned for five more years at Lehman Brothers and then did a few years each at UBS Securities, Citicorp Securities and Bear Stearns prior to joining BNP Paribas, a leading global French bank, in 2000.
In 2002, he was named head of BNPP’s debt capital markets business, a position he held until he retired from banking in 2016. During his time at BNPP, he had led the company to well over $1 trillion in bond financings for scores of marquee US Fortune 500 companies. He is currently focused on volunteer and charitable activities.
A member of the Brown Athletics Hall of Fame and Brown’s 100
th Anniversary Team, he and his wife,
Theresa, have four children,
Jillian and
Kelsey, both juniors at Brown, who were both members of the track & field/cross country teams, and
Caroline and
Ryan. His family recently moved from New Providence, N.J. to Spring Lake, N.J.
The 2019 Class of Legends of Ivy League Basketball will be honored during the semifinals of the
Men's and Women's Basketball Tournaments on Saturday, March 16.