I figure we should have a thread to discuss our TV/movie consumption.

Perhaps your review and recommendation will save someone from wasting their time.

@Gregg Rosenberg interviews the Colorado hoops commit, and son of NBA vet Samaki Walker, on what led him to become the player that he is today.

Link: https://arizonavarsity.rivals.com/news/rosenberg-q-a-past-and-present-with-jabari-walker

I'm going to be the guy that brings small school questions to the forum. I played 1A and 2A sports in high school and would like to open the discussion of who was the best player you have seen play in 1A,2A,3A?

I'll start.. I think it was 1997. Mogollon High School. Nic Porter. Guy did everything for them..

As we sit here in another day of quarantine, many people and sports networks are broadcasting and remembering big moments from their sports fandom. What is the most heartbreaking basketball memory you have as a player/coach/fan?

John Paxson in '93? Mario Elie in '95?

Let us know on this thread: We'll also post an article in the coming days.

Career…


Remember, my initial plan was to find a way to play for a year and then try to get a tryout with another NBA team. Some things changed after I went to France. First, I loved France, and Europe in general. I was always kind of a history buff, war and all that. France and Europe was a daily history lesson and everywhere you went, you found something that you had heard about in school. People were paying me to be there. One time, for example, I was visiting with Brigitte the Chateau D’Amboise along the Loire River in central France. We were just walking around the gardens on a not very crowded fall day. I knew nothing about the chateau, but saw what looked like a gazebo over in one corner of the gardens. I walked over and was basically by myself as I walked in to the little structure. I looked down and saw the name “Leonardo da Vinci” carved into a big stone slab. Brigitte walked in and I asked “what’s this?” She told me it was da Vinci’s tomb and he had been exiled from Italy and was buried right there. At that moment, it was just me, Brigitte, and Leonardo da Vinci. The second reason things changed for me was that in the basketball games, I played every minute and got to shoot the ball, in fact was expected to shoot the ball whenever I wanted. Americans were stars over there- kids wanted our autographs and so did adults. They marveled at our skills. I didn’t think that would ever happen in the states, even if I got lucky enough to make an NBA roster.


There are just too many stories to tell from a five year career in France. I played for three different coaches- a French guy, an East German, and me. The French guy in Angouleme was the first- he visualized basketball from a soccer aspect and, you know what, there are a lot of similarities in the two sports. I believe James Naismith also looked at his new game that way. In soccer, there are fast breaks, it is important to own the middle of the field offensively and defensively, and penalty shots, to name a few similarities. Coming out of America in the 70’s, I knew virtually nothing about soccer, but when he took me to watch a professional soccer game, I could see what he meant. We ran very few plays, and depended mostly on movement and spacing. The spacing was good for an American, because the French guys expected you to shoot the ball, therefore they would set a lot of on-ball screens or just get out of your way.


The second guy was an East German and he had escaped to the West during the years of the Cold War. The East Germans were notorious for their attempts to enhance performance through growth hormones and blood doping, but he really didn’t have access to any of that stuff in France, because it was heavily frowned upon by the French and the rest of the world. But he was the first person I ever heard mention core training, and we did a lot of Navy Seal kind of log lifting and mid-section work that I had never done. One time, we were running through stations that he had set up in the famous Paris park, the Bois de Boulogne, and he started to get on my case about how I was going about it. Eventually he said “Americans are weak”, to which I responded “who won World War II?” This guy was also the first coach that I had in a while that had a playbook and ran a lot of stuff. I liked him and liked living in Paris for two years. It was so beyond Phoenix in every way possible. Las Vegas is the only thing that comes close. I had married Brigitte by then and we enjoyed life- I highly recommend getting over there while you are young. There was a restaurant that we went to after many games near the famous Boulevard de St. Germaine, that was called Pizza Vesuvio- we had many memorable nights there, getting out at 3 or 4 in the morning. The team I was playing for was asked to tour Madagascar in 1976, which is a whole story that I will save for a later date. Suffice it to say, the island was going through political turmoil, and we were lucky to get out of there with our lives. The trip changed me in several ways, including a realization that I no longer wanted to play the game as much and would only do one more year- for the money.


The last coach was me. I returned to Angouleme for my final season. I had come to a decision point by this time- stay in France and make a life there, perhaps coach; or, return to America and get started with a coaching career there. Brigitte and I agreed that we wanted to live in the USA, but it would be nice to do a final season in her hometown to be around her family a little longer. You may be wondering how you could just from one team to another over there, but every contract was year by year. That was a two-way street- you could get dumped by your team at the end of each year, or you could dump them for a better deal. America had begun by that time to get into multi-year bargains in professional sports. So Herb’s guy over there, who was my rarely seen agent, Jan Vandenbrouck, contacted the team in Angouleme and set it up. My first coach over there had quit after I left, but decided to come back for this season. We had a great training camp at a sports school in the area and looked like we would have a pretty good team. They still didn’t have much money as an organization, so our second foreigner was a Yugoslavian guy. He was about 6’7” and rugged and ornery as most Yugo’s were. They were great to play with, but not so great to play against.


We started out poorly and, quite unexpectedly, the coach quit three weeks into the season. The team’s owner and president asked me if I would coach the team until he could find a replacement. I thought he meant that would happen quickly. His plan was to wait until the season was over. European teams operate in a club system, in which the head coach of the senior men’s team was responsible for all the teams down the line. Schools didn’t have sports teams, so clubs were the way that young people competed. That really complicated my life, as I had to oversee the various levels. I knew I wanted to be a coach and was going to be, but that was a bit of an overwhelming way to get started. I called on everything that I had learned to do and not to do from all the coaches I had previously. I certainly wasn’t ready for the media, who could now hammer me for not only playing poorly, but coaching poorly. The team tried their best for me, but we did not meet our early expectations during the season. It didn’t help that early on, I had a compound fracture of my right hand, had surgery, and missed six weeks.


I left France in August, 1978, for an unknown future in the coaching profession. As mentioned previously, Brigitte and I wanted to live in Arizona, so back we came, with no job and no idea which direction this would go. By then, I had become fluent in French, so much that I was even thinking in French. When we got to Sky Harbor Airport, we had to take a taxi to my parent’s house, because they were out of town. The driver asked me where we wanted to go and I gave him the address. After a few moments, he asked me where we were from. I said my wife is from France, but I am from Phoenix. He said, “no, where are you from originally?” I again said Phoenix. He said he had never heard an accent like that by anyone from Phoenix. Yeah, I was thinking in French.


Next…Coaching in the USA…

Did anybody see this kid play in person last Fall!? What are your thoughts? One of the top sack leaders in the state last year with 14.5 sacks. Listed at 6'4 210 pounds, ran a 11.5 100-meter dash in Spring 2019 Track season. Wrote this analysis in Eric Sorenson's Zone-Read on Gleash after breaking down his film: “D.J. Gleash is a player who consistently gets to the quarterback with his relentless motor,” Cameron said. “His 14.5 sacks were against some of the top programs in the state and the nation (Mater Dei). He’s athletic off the edge and slippery between the tackles and guards. He’s also quick on underneath stunt rushes getting to the quarterback. He’s a smart and fast football player.”

Centennial coaches told me he's already packed on 15-pounds since last season. If we see a more explosive first step and violent hands off the ball maybe some D1 offers roll in!?

This article about Skyline junior athlete Zeke Branham was written for the Mesa Tribune and Varsity Xtra.

It highlights Branham's determination to change the culture of the Coyote football program while managing his own success on and off the field as his recruitment heats up.

Link: Zeke Branham aims to change Skyline culture

The TeamAZV Forum is a subscribers-only community for conversation and analysis of Arizona Sports and Culture.

My name is Ralph Amsden, and I'm the managing editor of ArizonaVarsity.com, and I'm glad you're here.

We have one rule- treat the staff and other subscribers to this forum like family.

Families fight. Families argue. But at the end of the day, they're still family. Please respectful, and try not to be too disagreeable in your disagreements.

If you need to get ahold of me, hit me at ralph@arizonavarsity.com.

Article: https://arizonavarsity.rivals.com/n...-first-round-pick-an-inside-look?ga_source=cm

Full Interview with former ASU WR's Coach Charlie Fisher: Login to view embedded media
Love to hear everyone's thoughts on the article and interview!!! Also, give me your predictions on how Aiyuk will fit and be used in the 49ers' offense!

Games…


The first thing I discovered when getting acclimated to France was that they didn’t eat meals like we did. An American meal was a sit down where everything was on the table and you took what you wanted and ate it, whereas the French ate in stages. Nobody told me that, of course, so my first lunch came with the team president and the coach and out came the first course, which was a sausage tray, with bread. I thought that was lunch and ate a huge plate of the stuff. Those guys must have thought “boy, this guy can eat!” Then, the second course came out, but I was full. First lesson learned.


The next thing I discovered came at our first team practice. I knew instantly that I was going to make this team, because I was better than anyone they had. The question was, as it always was for Americans, would I not get homesick. I had spent my whole college career away from home, so in my case, that wasn’t likely. In the mid 1970’s, American players were vastly better than their European counterparts. It would be similar to how Americans today view European soccer players. They are more skilled and have a certain flair and instinct that Americans have yet to achieve. I like to believe that it was our generation in the 70’s that began to change things for the Europeans. They brought us over there and learned from us. I remember one time over there doing a basketball camp in Poitiers for young French players. Everyday, I would eat lunch and then go to the gym to get some work done before the afternoon session. And everyday, 30 or 40 French kids would come in and just watch. What I got in trouble for at Wyoming- the Maravich stuff- they loved. Their big guys were kind of stiffs- and here were 6’8”, 6’9”, 6’10” Americans who had style, had some funk, and some flair.


Each French team was allowed two foreign players on their roster. I have heard that it is still that way today, but there have always been ways around it if your team could afford more foreign players. Usually, the more American players you had, the better your team was going to be. The biggest way around the two foreigner limit was to get your guys married to French women. The French were very loose about granting citizenship to men who married French women. Our team in Angouleme could not afford more than two foreigners, so it was me and a 6’9”guy from Senegal. Senegalese players were usually tall and athletic, but not very skilled. And they didn’t require large salaries. The team was already in season when I arrived and, as I learned, I was replacing another American who did not acclimate well and had gone home. Herb Rudoy had been contacted, and I was on his list, thanks to Jack McCloskey. Just a few days after I arrived, therefore, we had a game. Games back then were always on the weekends so people could come and watch. Soccer was the only sport that could pull off mid-week games, because it was and still is the most popular sport in Europe. By the time I arrived, basketball had crept up into the number two popularity position, just edging out rugby.


We were playing a team from the northeastern part of France, Mulhouse. Their best player was an American from New York- Fordham University. His name was David Brower. I had never heard of him, but the French guys all knew of him and the ones who spoke American told me to watch out for Brower. He was one of the leading scorers in the league, and was also rough and even dirty. He was about my height, 6’8”, but about twenty pounds heavier. I thought it would be nice to see another American, but it wasn’t that way at all. Brower started talking trash immediately and really playing a physical brand of ball. And, yes, even a little dirty. I hung in there, though, and thought I was having a pretty good game by halftime. I was rebounding, passing, and being a good teammate. Mulhouse had a better team than us, so they were up 10 at the break. I came into the locker room and was met instantly by the owner and the coach- neither of whom were very happy. I had only scored 6 points. They began gesturing with their arms in a shooting motion saying “shoot, shoot”. That was the first time in my basketball career where someone was mad at me because I wasn’t shooting enough. Brower had 14 points, so in the game within a game, I was making a negative difference. So, the second half I went out and, for the first time in my life, thought that I had to score points. I scored 24 points, which felt amazing. I ended up with 30 and Brower had 24. I more than held up my end of the bargain and it was the French players who didn’t, as we lost by 3. I still thought losing was bad, but the owner, the coach, and the players were so happy. I had never scored 30 points in a game in my life.


That season, in which I played just over half of the games, I averaged right at 28 points a game. It was work and you always had to play lots of minutes, but it was fun. The game within the game was always trying to outscore other Americans. I was able to travel all over the country that first year and really came to love France and appreciate the people. My good friend from Perry’s Sport Camp, Mike Dolven from Washington State was there when I got there also. He was playing for a very good team in Paris, and when I had a chance I went up to see him, and see Paris. The first night I got there, we were driving on the main street, the Champs-Elysees, and were going towards the Arc de Triumph when his car broke down. We had to get out and push, and all of the French drivers were giving us the business because we were blocking traffic. I didn’t care, though, because here I was, this kid from Phoenix, Arizona, looking at the brightly lit Arc de Triumph on the main street of the most beautiful city in the world. That was a long way from the concrete court at Papago Elementary School where I had a 20 second career. There were no cell phones- no way to contact my friends and family. How would they ever understand all of this?


What the Universe was doing for me also has come to full realization now, because the woman I have been married to for the past 45 years was introduced to me on my third day in Angouleme. Everything I had ever done in basketball put me in that little gym where she was doing some training for little kids. They introduced me to Brigitte because she spoke pretty good English and maybe they would get lucky and I would marry her and change my citizenship to French. I did marry her, as mentioned, but by then had moved to a team in Paris. That team offered me a bonus to change my citizenship, so one day we went over to the American Embassy and sat down to discuss the options. There were no options. If I changed my citizenship, I would be French- period. I said “yeah, but you know I’m really an American, right?” The guy said no- you’ll be French. I couldn’t pull the trigger on that one. A lot of guys didn’t bother to tell the Americans that they were changing, and the French didn’t tell either, so they were walking around with two passports. So, I was always a foreigner on the roster.


Next…the career…

Below is a link to the current Rivals 2021 Arizona Prep Football Rankings:

https://n.rivals.com/state_rankings/2021/arizona

As a general rule, we default to the opinion of those on our staff who have had a chance to evaluate these prospects in person, but because Arizona is a Rivals affiliate, we also acknowledge these evaluations, and in part, do have some influence and input on them at a national level.

For anyone who is unfamiliar with the Rivals star system, think of the rating this way:

5.5 3-star: Rivals is predicting this player will be a below average power 5 player, or above average group of five player.

5.6 3-star: Rivals is predicting this to be an average power 5 player, or a good group of 5 player.

5.7 3-star: Rivals is predicting this to be an above average college football player, most likely at the power 5 level.

5.8 4-star: Rivals is predicting that this player is going to be a power 5 starter, and has a strong likelihood to eventually be an NFL Draft Pick

5.9 4-star: Rivals believes this player will be a power 5 star, and has the potential to be a day two NFL Draft Pick.

6.0 4-Star: Rivals believes this player will be a power 5 star, and is on the cusp of being a first round pick in the NFL Draft.

6.1 5-star: Rivals is predicting this player will eventually be a first round NFL Draft Pick.

Europe…



After getting the letter from the Trailblazers, I literally had no plan for my life. But, as mentioned earlier, I believe the Universe works for you if you want it to. What Coach McCloskey said about Europe really didn’t resonate with me, because I knew absolutely nothing about it. Outside of the Soviet Union, I didn’t have a clue of who even played basketball around the world. It just seemed like a totally American game and, except for the Olympic slip up by some college kids trying to beat some Russian pro’s, it was never a topic of conversation by anyone I hung around with. So for about a month, I was pretty worthless- staying at my parent's house, not working at anything, not focused on anything. Here’s where the Universe stepped in.


One day, I woke up and thought to myself that I really did love basketball. I was passionate about it, but had been devastated by what appeared to be the end of it. I decided on the spot to give the NBA another try. Since I was prohibited from trying out with another team for a year, I had to come up with a plan to spend that year getting ready to be a free agent, like Bernie Fryer did. The first part of my plan was to get back in shape and work on my skills. That night, I took my ball and went over to Perry Park, which is around 32nd Street and Thomas. It is still there and I drive by it everyday on my way to MCC, and never fail to look over at the basketball court that literally changed my life. Because that very first night, I went over to just shoot and dribble and get the feel back. Then, some guys showed up that I had never seen before, and eventually they talked me into playing. It was obvious to them and me that I was way above their talent level, even though I hadn’t played since that last scrimmage in Portland. It felt good to play and as I left the court, there was a guy in the parking lot who was leaning up against his car. He asked me who I was, and we spoke for a few minutes. Turns out he was a sponsor of a really good local men’s team that played all over the Southwest in tournaments. I didn’t know that kind of thing existed and he asked me if I wanted to join his team. It was amazing- that morning I had decided to get off my butt and start playing again, and by that evening I was joining the best men’s team in the valley. The Universe, I tell you.


Right after that, my sister-in-law called me and wanted to know if I wanted to work in the bookstore that she managed over at what used to be called Thomas Mall. It seemed like easy enough work, but it would be another life changer, because I had never really been much of reader until then. Over the next few months, I learned to love reading almost as much as I loved to play basketball. Where was this all leading me? I thought that it would be straight back to a shot at the NBA. The men’s team was really good and was all guys who had played college basketball, and some, like myself who even had a cup of coffee in the NBA. I remember one trip to Hermosillo, Mexico, where our manager said we were going to play a good local team in an exhibition game. That’s about all we knew going down. It was after dark when we pulled in to Hermosillo and were immediately lost. We saw some placards on a telephone pole that were written in Spanish, but basically said that some team from Mexico was going to play the USA team. We thought, that’s pretty cool, the USA team is here tonight also. Turns out, we were the USA team and when we finally found the local arena, it was already almost full. We dressed and were warming up, and noticed that the crowd had kind of a hostile attitude towards the “USA team”. When we got to the bench, one of players told me that if it got rough with the crowd, he would handle the situation. He opened his bag for me and showed me a pistol that he had brought. I said, “Harry, how many bullets you got?” There must have been 10,000 people in the stands, so I didn’t think a pistol would do much good. We lost the game on purpose after a team agreement that it would be best to do so, and so even today there are probably some old farts in Hermosillo remembering the time that the local all-star team beat the USA.


As I progressed through the fall, I thought I had a pretty good plan for getting another tryout with an NBA team- keep playing on the men's team, work on my skills, work at the bookstore. In November, however, I got a call from an agent in Chicago named Herb Rudoy. In my entire history of playing basketball up to that point, I had never spoken to an agent. It never entered my mind that I shoud enlist one to help me. Herb called because Jack McCloskey from the Trailblazers had called him and recommended me. McCloskey, as a side note, would not have much success in Portland, but would go on to be the GM in Detroit and become famous for putting together the famous "bad boys" who would become pretty good. Herb was young and was trying to break into the agency business by placing guys overseas. He would go on to big time success in the business and would become a high dollar player agent in the NBA down the road. He asked me if I wanted to go play ball overseas, and I said where? He said France. Instantly, the two things that I knew about France popped into my head- the Eiffel Tower, and everybody speaks French, which I didn’t. I asked him about the latter item, and he assured me that there would be people over there who understood and spoke American, which was a derivative of English. I asked Herb who the team was and what the deal was. He said the team was in Angouleme and the deal was if I was good enough to make the team, then his man over there, a guy named Jan Vandenbrouck would negotiate a salary for me. I said what if I don’t make the team? Herb said that he was purchasing a round trip ticket and that I could return home and continue my life in Phoenix if I didn’t make the team. I told him I would think it over.


I got a map of France at the bookstore and looked up Angouleme. It is in the Southwest of France, not far from Bordeaux, which was a name that sounded familiar. There was really no one that I could talk to about playing in Europe around Phoenix at that time. The only guy I ever heard of who had gone overseas was Gerhard Shreur, who I knew a little bit, because he had played at North High, had played some 3 on 3 at East High, and had played at ASU. He was in Holland, and there was no way to get in touch with him in those days to ask his advice. Everyone in my family said “go!” and “you’re an idiot if you don’t!” Some even said “there is someone who will pay you to play basketball?” So, after a few days, I called Herb Rudoy back and said Oui Oui, I will go to France. The Universe.


So there I went- didn’t know a soul, had to make two connections- Phoenix to Chicago, Chicago to Paris, then Paris to Bordeaux. When I got to Paris, the flight was running late and I actually missed the connection to Bordeaux. I had no cell phone, because they didn’t exist, and I didn’t even have a phone number to call my team’s representatives who would notice that I was not going to get off the plane in Bordeaux. I didn’t even know their names. The people at the airline, Air Inter, were helpful and got me on the next available flight to Bordeaux, but that wouldn’t get into Bordeaux until around midnight. I prepared myself for a night in the Bordeaux airport, but when I arrived, I saw a whole group of people waiting for me. As I de-planed, a tall lanky guy came towards and suddenly produced a basketball and threw it at me. I caught it and he just nodded. I guess they were checking my hands. Anyway, we travelled back to Angouleme in kind of a car caravan. It is a small city about 70 miles northeast of Bordeaux. My European career had begun.


Next….Games…

The Pro’s…


The Portland Trailblazer camp was going to be in late June on the campus of Lewis & Clark College, which held bad memories for me. They had this initial camp to trim their roster for the summer, then would return in the fall for their pre-season camp. I left Linfield College in mid-May and drove back to Phoenix to begin training for it. Over the next six weeks I trained harder and better than I ever had in my life- not the boot camp deal Coach MacCormick had given us at Lee- but a very good regimen of cardio, ladders and rope, and basketball skills. The only playing I really did was to go over to East High, where Coach Youree was having 3 on 3 sessions. Those were so well known by then, that there were some players from the Phoenix Suns involved. 3 on 3 had been part of the backbone of Coach Youree’s program from the beginning. It is a great way to play tough, physical basketball, and learn how to win. Winning was what it was all about, because there was a championship court and everything else was referred to as a loser court. It said a lot about you if you could get a team to championship court and then stay there. The rules were simple- defense calls fouls, no makers, steals and rebounds had to be taken back out- no air ball put backs. You had to know the score, because Coach Youree was playing back in those days and if you didn’t know the score, he would change it. Because the defense called the fouls, the games could get pretty rugged- and they generally were. No wussie offensive players calling every touch a foul. Once, during my preparation for Portland, I was on championship court, playing against Coach Youree’s team, and I broke across the lane, got the ball and was going to shoot a jump hook- another shot he was famous for teaching us. Next thing I knew I was on the floor- knocked down- no call. Coach Youree looked down at me and said “well, that’s what they’re going to do in the pro’s.” OK.


The Trailblazers flew me up to Portland the day before camp began and put me in a hotel for the night. The next day, they picked me up and we drove over to Lewis and Clark, and checked into to a dorm there. Each player had his own room. This was the era before Bird and Magic upgraded the NBA to a show time, big money, premiere sports league. The Trailblazers were like Phoenix in those days- a small TV market team, and the league was still overall relatively small time across the board. There was no ESPN, no cable TV, and they were doing regional telecasts during the week on a limited basis, with ABC still only doing one national broadcast per week. Those broadcasts were reserved mainly for the Celtics, the Lakers, or the Knicks, who back in those days were very good. The Trailblazer camp looked kind of like the movie “Invincible” where between workouts, players would sit around the dorm between workouts and dread the moments when you were summoned to see the head coach. His name was Jack McCloskey and his assistant was an ex-NBA player named Neil Johnston. It was Neil who had the duty to send players to see McCloskey to get the axe. It was pretty commonly known by veterans that if Neil talked to you or was pleasant with you, you were still going to be around. If Neil quit talking to you or was unfriendly to you, you were gone soon.


These days, being a first round pick is pretty much a guarantee of making the roster, and even second round picks have a great chance. Back then, nothing was guaranteed and there was the ABA, which was a pretty successful competitive league. It was the ABA that came up with the three point shot, which NBA guys at the time thought was a joke. Portland had not been very successful and several of the players drafted bolted to the ABA, including their top pick- Barry Parkhill from Virginia. The ABA was offering guaranteed money. The highest draft pick to show up to Portland’s camp was Larry Hollyfield fro UCLA. He had played on a high school team that was undefeated, an undefeated junior college team for one year, and was part of UCLA’s 88 game win streak. He was very well known, but came into camp thinking he was already on the team and was overweight and out of shape. They cut him on the second day, and I can still see him leaving- he couldn’t believe they would cut a guy from UCLA! Their next highest pick to report was Mike Contreras, a tough, shooting guard from Arizona State. He got cut right away, too, for the same reason. I couldn’t understand how guys could come into a camp like this overweight and out of shape.


McClosky and Johnston put us through some drills, but we mainly scrimmaged. I remember putting on a Trailblazer jersey for the first time and thinking- like I did at Wyoming- how surreal it was. I was amazed, however, at how tight fisted they were with equipment. These days, players are lavished with stuff from the teams. Back then, they had kids in the locker room who picked up everything you took off, right down to the jockstrap, and would issue fresh clothing each work out- then repeat. It was impossible to get out of there with even a pair of socks. I survived each day because I came to camp in great shape and did well in the scrimmages. Neil was friendly with me.


At the end of camp, which lasted a full week, we had a public scrimmage. Full game gear and all. There was even a referee’s camp and they were going to use the scrimmage to evaluate them. Good crowd and a good scrimmage. During the action, one of my shots was clearly goal tended and the rookie referee who had the best look at it was a guy from Phoenix- Tommy Nunez. I looked at him and he gave me a classic referee shot- “don’t worry about it, Ballard, you’re not going to make this league anyway”. Thanks for the support. I played well, though, but I did notice throughout that Neil was not friendly to me or saying anything at all. Uh-oh. After the scrimmage, we were in the locker room taking stuff off, and of course there were those locker room kids right there to grab everything, when in the door walked the most famous NBA referee of the era- Mindy Rudolph. He was there to evaluate the rookie refs. I had seen him on TV so many times over the years, it was like a member of my own family walked in. I was the first guy by the door and when I saw him I cleverly said “Mindy Rudolph!” He stopped and looked at me and said “how tall are you, son?” I said “6’8”, Mindy.” He said “well, I didn’t know they stacked shit that high!” Wow, talk about a bubble bursting. The guys he was with started laughing as they all moved on. Trash talk from the greatest referee in the world? So, I got that going for me, which is nice.


That night, the Trailblazers took me back to that hotel, because my flight wouldn’t be until the next day. Neil Johnston didn’t say a word to me, but Jack McClosky asked me if I knew anything about playing in Europe. I said I didn’t and he just kind of mumbled and walked away. The next day, I was watching the news before leaving for the airport, and I saw a local sports reporter say that the only rookie Portland was going to keep was Bernie Fryer, a free agent from BYU. So, nobody actually told me that I was cut, but what I didn’t know was that Jack McCloskey was going to reach out to someone on my behalf about playing overseas. A few days later, back in Phoenix, I got letter from Portland saying thanks and stay in touch. Yeah, things were definitely different back then.


Next…Europe…

Changes…


The Universe is a fascinating place, for sure. Some people believe that nothing happens randomly, but that there is a force out there gives us what we really want. It may not be exactly what you thought it would be, but all of your actions led right to it. And when you look back you often think, well I got what I deserved. Most people call this force “destiny”, and I am one of the believers, I must admit. Right after my first season of competition with Wyoming, I was telling myself that I would work harder than ever to become the kind of player that Coach Strannigan would have to rely on the next season. I had done enough to think I could play NCAA D1 basketball, I just needed to be smarter.


Destiny had other plans, however. As soon as I had made my decision to be a coach rather than a lawyer, my whole perspective began to change, followed by the next set of events in my basketball life. When I started in college, I felt like the legal profession was where I wanted to go- then into politics, but I had no real picture in my mind of what that was like. It’s like walking in the dark- you know where you want to go, but you hit or step on unseen stuff along the way. When my epiphany about coaching struck me, I knew exactly what I wanted to do and could see myself doing it. When it becomes that clear, then things begin to happen to make it real. Those are followed by your actions. I got a phone call right after the season from a friend of mine, Dave Brunkal, a guy who was playing at an NAIA school in Oregon called Linfield College. He loved his coach, Ted Wilson, and mentioned that the coach ran a basketball camp in the Cascade Mountains of Oregon in the summer called Perry’s Sports Camp. He said Coach Wilson was looking for some good college players to be counselors and, if I wanted, he could put in the good word for me. I could have said no, because I really was looking forward to getting back to Arizona for the summer, but something inside told me to go for this. I also went to see an academic advisor at Wyoming and asked him what I would need to do with my major, because I wanted to go into coaching. I was in my fourth year of college and was actually quite close to having enough hours in pre-law, political science to graduate. The correct answer by the academic advisor should have been that I didn’t have to change my major to be a coach, because you just need a Bachelor’s degree to get into the profession- majors are irrelevant. Fortunately for me, the guy didn’t have any idea and said I should switch my major over to physical education, because isn’t coaching some kind of physical activity? Even though I ended up down the road with over 160 hours of college credit, I was able to graduate with a dual major, which had a major impact on the rest of my life.


It turned out that Dave Brunkal didn’t end up working at Perry’s Sports Camp that summer, a fact that he neglected to tell me until I was ready to go. By then, however, I had a strong feeling that this camp was going to be something special for me, so I flew up to Portland, where Coach Wilson himself met me and drove me to Vernonia, Oregon, which was 44 miles northwest of Portland. On the drive, I talked basketball with the coach all the way, which was really the first time in four years that I had a meaningful conversation with a college coach. The camp was in a beautiful setting outside of town- a classic camp with wooden dorms, eight outdoor courts, a swimming pool, and a cafeteria. The other counselors were all good college players, including Mike Dolven, the starting center for Washington State, who is still today one of my closest friends. The games us counselors had against each other every day were great- much better than I could have ever gotten in Phoenix that summer. Not only that, we were witnessing and learning from a great basketball coach in Coach Wilson. He was a fundamental teacher with a twist of some genius footwork that I had never seen or even contemplated before. He was fun to be around and ran a super camp, with the best high school players that Oregon had. Gradually, as the camp progressed, I began to wish that I could play for Coach Wilson. I began to talk that way to my friends, particularly Mike. I had been in college four years and had barely spoken on a genial level to any of my coaches. None of them had taken much time to teach basketball, so I had begun to think that was how college basketball was. I was looking at the bigger picture down the road- I was going to be a coach. Suddenly Wyoming and Division 1 basketball didn’t seem as important as it once had. I had dreamed about playing D1, had played it, and knew that I could, and I could return to Wyoming for my last year and would have for sure, had I not come to Perry’s Sports Camp. Coach Wilson didn’t have to recruit me, as some people speculated later that he did- I recruited him. I wanted my last year of college basketball to be something special, and particularly something that I could learn good things from. Even though I could only play one semester, I decided to transfer to Linfield and learn from a great coach once again, as I did under Coach Youree.

One thing that I know is true of all the good players that I have played with and coached- and I mean the really good ones- is that they want to be coached. They want to learn and they want honest feedback, based on an honest and friendly relationship with their coach. They get enough pats on the back from their parents and friends. That is one of the universal principles that separates players.


I came back to Oregon in the fall, and like I said, really enjoyed being around Coach Wilson and the team. His practices were very fundamental and he liked to run, which is what he could do with the talent we had. I sat out the first semester games and then played and started all 15 in the second semester. We were co-champions of the Northwest Conference and lost in the regional playoffs to go the NAIA national tournament. In the playoff game, I was at the free throw line with four seconds left, score tied, shooting a one on one. I made the first, so what would you do? We were playing Lewis and Clark and they had no timeouts left. I looked over to the bench at Coach Wilson and he gave me a do-whatever-you-want look. I don’t think I tried to miss, but I did miss. L&C rebounded the ball, threw a pass to a guy at half court and he banked it in from there to beat us by one. I remember how sad it was leaving the gym knowing that my career in college was over. I finished second on the team in scoring average and first in rebounding average, but was only named all-conference honorable mention, probably because I had only played a semester. When they tore down the old gym at Linfield, and before he passed away, Coach Wilson sent me a piece of the gym floor that I still treasure today, that had a little plaque on it that reads “I only wish I would have had you longer”. I hear you, Coach.


I had dreamed of playing professionally, but knew that was a long shot. Surprisingly, I got drafted by the Portland Trailblazers in their supplemental draft. These days, the NBA only drafts two rounds, so if you don’t get picked, you can try out all over the place. In those days, the teams drafted deeper and once you were picked, you were locked into that team for a year, whether you made it or not. At the end of a year, you became a “free agent”. I knew nothing of any of that and it was exciting to look forward to going to a professional camp.


Next…the Pro’s….

The WAC…


At that time, the Western Athletic Conference was an excellent basketball conference. Think about it- Wyoming, Arizona, Arizona State, Utah, BYU, New Mexico, UTEP, and Colorado State. In those days, the only way to get an NCAA bid for the postseason was to win your conference outright. There was no conference tournament, so a lot of very good WAC teams never made the tournament. And the WAC teams were always placed in the western region of the NCAA tournament- makes sense, right? Well, UCLA was always in the west region, as well, and we all know what they were doing. There was only one team to beat them in the NCAA tournament from the time I entered East High School, until I was done with college, and that team was UTEP, which was coached by Don Haskins and memorialized in the movie “Glory Road”. Haskins was still the coach when I was at Wyoming. I didn’t think of him or his team’s accomplishment at that time, because we were still in the middle of it.


We came through the non-conference schedule at 9-3, but the WAC was a different ballgame. If the NCAA tournament was the same then that it is today, four or five of the teams in the conference would have gotten bids. BYU ended up winning it, then losing in the west regionals to Long Beach State, coached by Jerry Tarkanian. UCLA had a young sophomore center named Bill Walton and they won the west regional and the whole tournament once again, going 30-0. UTEP finished second in the WAC and got an NIT bid, which was one of sixteen available bids. All the games were played in Madison Square Garden then, and UTEP got bumped in the first round by Niagara, who had a player averaging more than 30 points a game named Calvin Murphy. Utah had a great season and finished tied for second with UTEP, but went nowhere. Arizona State also had a very good team with a guy named Paul Stoval, who was a monster. He ended up playing for the Phoenix Suns. It was just a great conference, but was destroyed a few years later when Arizona and Arizona State bolted to the Pac-10.


As mentioned, I had some decent moments in the non-conference schedule, but by the time it came around to WAC play, Coach Strannigan was not too happy with me. I played sparingly the rest of the way, but had some interesting moments along the way. We opened the conference against UTEP, who had an incredible front line- Dick Gibbs, a future NBA player with the Washington Bullets, a team that would get all the way to the finals before losing to the San Francisco Warriors, as they were called back then; Scott English, another future NBA player with the Phoenix Suns; and James “Buster” Forbes, who would play on the 1972 USA Olympic team in Munich, Germany. The game was notable for me, because Forbes would elbow me in the mouth, chipping my two front teeth, which has caused problems to this very day. The only revenge I would ever get would be thanks to the Olympics. The USA would lose the gold medal game for the first time in history to the Soviet Union, and in the very, very controversial ending, Sergei Belov would catch a full court pass, knock "Buster" Forbes down, and score the winning layup. I didn’t want us to lose, of course, but if it had to happen, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer fellow. Whenever the replay has been shown throughout the years, which it has been often, I absent mindedly rub my front teeth. We lost at home to UTEP to open the conference, and any home loss in that conference was death. We beat New Mexico a couple of days later. Then we took the Arizona trip and lost both. There are two things I remember about the ASU game, and scoring is not one of them. I was going in for a layup at the end of the first half and got knocked to the floor- no call. I was knocked clear out of bounds and immediately jumped up and realized that no foul had been called. I let out some choice basketball-friendly profanities right in the face of a Sun Devil cheerleader, who just happened to be the daughter of my jayvee coach at East High. Embarrassing to say the least. I also remember being at the free throw lane as we were shooting a free throw. Paul Stoval, the aforementioned beast that ASU had starting getting grief from one of his teammates for not passing the ball. Stoval reached across the Wyoming player on the other side of the lane and slapped his teammate in the face. The ASU coach, Ned Wulk, took the teammate out, not Stoval. Later in the season, when we played them up in Laramie, I was part of a double team on Stoval in front of the ASU bench, and he turned to the coach and said “Hey, Ned!” I had never heard a player call his coach by their first name before. He was not someone you wanted to mess with, for sure.


Another big moment came in the return match with UTEP. Like most WAC schools at the time, the student section was in close proximity to the visitor’s bench. So if you tuned in to what they were saying, it could get pretty ugly. Earlier in the season, we had a full scale brawl in Laramie between their players and a bunch of Wyoming football players who were giving it to them the whole game. It was my experience that it could get downright personal and your absolute best course of action was to not turn around and get involved in any way. Tune them out. Anyway, at UTEP, I get in the game and almost immediately, there is a jump ball. Back in those days, they jumped them up at whatever free throw line was closest to the tie-up. No “Wooden” possession rule back then. So the ball was tipped to me and I started dribbling upcourt right in front of our bench. A quick UTEP guard made an attempt from the front at stealing the dribble, but I quickly dribbled between my legs and took one more dribble before passing the ball. Well, part of the reason I was always in Coach Strannigan’s doghouse was because he absolutely hated those kind of behind the back, between the legs, Maravich type hot dog dribbles, which I loved. I could see as I ran down court that he was grabbing a sub for me. The game was on regional TV and being shown back in Phoenix, so those watching saw how Coach Strannigan met me at half court when he subbed me out and started lecturing me once again on the evils of those hot dog moves. I went down to end of the bench and started pouting, as most players do when they get yelled at. A few moments later I heard Coach Strannigan’s voice saying “Ballard, get down here!.” So I jumped up out of my funk and ran down to Coach. He looked up at me and said “what the hell do you want?” I then knew I had been had by a student behind the bench who could imitate Strannigan’s voice. Then, to make matters worse, I looked up into the stands, and the students went wild. They were on me mercilessly the rest of the game. I chuckle now, but back on that day, it was brutal.


We ended the WAC season 3-11, which was awful. The only good thing that came out of it for me, was the epiphany that I had during the Colorado State game in Laramie. I played, got yanked, then was looking up from the bench toward the ceiling of War Memorial Fieldhouse- possibly looking to the heavens for guidance. I had been in pre-law since my freshman year, but saw a ray of light coming down from the ceiling and thought, there has to be a better way to do this (meaning coaching). Then and there, I decided that was going to be my life’s calling.


Next…Changes…

Cody Cameron's commitment analysis of 2021 Queen Creek DB Hunter Barth's commitment to the University of California.

Link:
Hunter Barth Commits to Cal: Interviews, Analysis, Film Review

NCAA D1…


Laramie, Wyoming was a small town in the Fall of 1970- about 10,000 regular inhabitants and a university population of about another 10,000. It sits at 7200 feet of elevation and is on a windswept plain. Story goes that it got the university because there were three things available when Wyoming became a state- the capitol, a university, and a prison. Cheyenne got first pick and took the capitol. Laramie got the second pick and took the university. I think the prison went to Rock Springs or somewhere like that. It was the only university in the state and everyone in the state was a Cowboy fan. Like I said earlier, their football program had been great- right up until the year before I got there. Then they had the infamous Black 14 incident, where the African American players on the team had gone to the head football coach, Lloyd Eaton, and demanded to wear black armbands in their game against BYU, because the Mormon church did not allow blacks in the priesthood. Eaton suspended the players, and the program began to tumble. To this day, it has never rebounded to where it was.


I did not have a sterling career at Wyoming for several reasons. I came up from Phoenix woefully unprepared for the brutality of the weather in Laramie. I think I had a couple of sweaters and a raincoat, which is all I had ever needed in hot Phoenix, and hot and humid Baytown, Texas. So it didn’t take me long to get sick, and was once so sick after practices had begun that I was hospitalized. For that reason, the first year I had a hard time getting in shape at that altitude. Practices ended just before the cafeteria closed, so we would run over, but most of the food was gone or put away, so most of us just drank milk or juices. I was always hungry at night, but too proud to ask my parents for any extra cash to be able to buy food. A lot of guys were doing that, or sponging off friends or girlfriends. I went hungry a lot of nights and was losing weight. Then, the shoe that Wyoming issued to us was a Converse low cut suede leather- very stylish, but had a serious flaw that caused several of us concern. The back of the shoe on the inside, where it rubs up against your heel, had a lip made of hard leather. It wore grooves in both of my heels that were open sores. I tried to work with the trainers to come up with a solution, but nothing seemed effective in allowing the sores to heal. Whenever you flex your foot to walk or jump, if you have a sore on your heel by the Achilles tendon, it will open up the wound. Mine eventually became infected. The team doctor then told me I was going to have to sit out until the sores completely healed. That was going to knock me out of everything until right before the first game. During that time, I was at least able to get to the cafeteria and eat on time, but lost all of my conditioning.


The first game was against the University of Nebraska- a home game at War Memorial. I was allowed to suit up, but pretty much knew I wouldn’t play. The only remarkable thing about it was running on to the floor for the first time with a full arena of about 10,000 people going nuts and hearing the school fight song- “Ragtime Cowboy Joe”. You know how it is when you dream something and then there you are- living your dream? Surreal. I thought back to the many days of deliberate practice that were no fun, but there I was. There was a moment during warmups when we heard the loud banging of a drum and some guy was in the upper deck dressed completely like a cowboy with an absurdly large hat. He would bang on the drum- stop- then point his drumstick at the opposing team and yell “you’re gonna lose!. The crowd would then repeat what he just said very loudly. It was impressive. The guy called himself Crazy George and he would go on to be the mascot for some major league baseball teams and NFL teams.


We beat Nebraska- I did not get in as predicted, but afterwards Coach Strannigan told me that they would like me to redshirt, because of all the things that had kept me out. I accepted and continued to practice with the team through the season. They even took me on the road trip to Arizona, which was great. I remember the day we left for Phoenix- the temperature in Laramie was minus 64 degrees. We got to Phoenix a few hours later and it was plus 75- a difference of 139 degrees. Some guys got sick and the doctor said they were suffering from something called “weather shock”.


The next year, I had put on some weight, worked hard on my skills, lifted weights, and bought adequate clothing for the weather ahead, so I fully expected a big year for basketball. It didn’t really happen that way. I had some good games- 17 points and 15 rebounds against Northern Colorado, 15 points and 12 rebounds against Montana were the best. In the Montana game, I still remember their fiery coach, Jud Heathcote, yelling at his team to foul me late in the game and then making 11 out of 12 free throws. Jud would go on after Montana to be the head coach at Michigan State and lead them to the NCAA title in 1979 with a guy named Magic Johnson. That title game against Indiana State with Larry Bird would change the face of NCAA and NBA basketball forever. And Jud wanted to foul me- so I got that going for me, which is nice. I even started a game against Denver University so it wasn’t like I didn’t have my chances. It just seemed like I was always in Coach Strannigan’s doghouse and could never get out. He was like all the other college coaches I had- impersonal and hard or unwilling to communicate with players. After the Montana game, for example, I was asked to do a post-game radio interview, during which the guy asked me where I preferred to play- inside or outside. Those radio shows were piped back into the dressing room area so everyone could listen, but it was my experience that no one really paid much attention to them in the locker room. I know I didn’t. So, to answer his question, I said I thought I was better suited for face up basketball, but would be glad to play anywhere the coach wanted me to. That was it, but I guess Coach Strannigan only caught the first part of the answer. He didn’t say anything, but the next day we flew down to Dallas and drove to Ft. Worth where the following day we would be playing TCU. Not a word from the coach. The TCU game was played and I didn’t play a second- coming off a 15 and 12 game against Montana. My parents had flown down from Phoenix to see me play for the first time in college. As the game ended, I was walking back towards the locker room, pretty shell shocked for not have gotten in, and Coach Strannigan walked by me and said “what do you think of your position now?” That hurt. The next night, we played North Texas State and I played. I never wanted to treat someone like that, though, and that has stayed with me through the years.


Next…the WAC…

The Cowboys….


When I returned from Philadelphia, I was less certain that I would be signing with Temple. I was so sure going in that I had not scheduled any other trips, but the visit had raised some doubts. That’s what the visits are for, right? But I was still sure enough to tell Coach Hefley that I enjoyed the trip and just needed some time to think it over. He took that to mean it was a done deal and promptly let the local newspaper, the Baytown Sun know and they ran a story on how I had committed to Temple.


You might be asking yourself, what happened to the University of Texas? A couple of things. Carroll Dawson, the assistant coach who gave me the June tryout in Phoenix, had departed. I saw their gym, Gregory Gym- it wasn’t very good, kind of like the old Sun Devil gym in Tempe that I was familiar with. Their team was a middle of the packer in the Southwest Conference, a conference that was noted for football above all else. I just kind of lost interest in them and that conference, in general. After I started playing well, most of my recruiting interest came from east of the Mississippi River anyway. Back in those days, there was no cable TV, so if I went east, I would pretty much disappear from view in Arizona. The best of those opportunities was clearly Temple, so it looked like that is where I would go.


I am a firm believer in fate, destiny, or the universe being in control of things, and this is where things took a turn. Deep down, I wanted to play in the west, but no schools outside of Texas in the west had shown any interest. A professor at Lee College was a graduate of the University of Wyoming, and unbeknownst to me, had called the assistant coach there, Bill Purden, who he knew, and told him that he should take a look at me. Bill asked who was recruiting me and the professor said he saw an article in the paper saying I had committed to Temple, but he knew from Coach Hefley that no papers had been signed. So right in the midst of being 50/50 on the whole thing, I got a phone call from Coach Purden. He wanted to know if I wanted to take a trip up to Laramie, Wyoming. I accepted.


Wyoming was in the old Western Athletic Conference, with Arizona State, Arizona, BYU, Utah, Colorado State, New Mexico, and UTEP. I knew about the conference, because growing up, I was a big fan of Frank Kush and ASU football. It just so happened that my senior year in high school, I went to the ASU-Wyoming football game at Sun Devil stadium. It still ranks as one of the best sporting events I’ve ever seen. Wyoming, from the WAC, was outstanding and undefeated, but so was ASU. The Sun Devil’s Max Anderson had a 98 yard touchdown run late in the game to give ASU a 13-12 lead, but Wyoming’s Jerry DePoyster hit a long field goal at the end to seal a 15-13 Wyoming win. Wyoming would end the regular season 10-0, be ranked #2 in the nation, and go on to play LSU in the Sugar Bowl- thus, becoming the first and only WAC team to accomplish that feat. They lost to LSU. ASU would end up 8-2 and have only one conference loss (to the number #2 ranked team in the country) and not get a bowl bid. This was before the era of the Bill Rincon’s Fix-Your-Flat Bowl, or the Ritz Cracker Peanut-Bites Bowl which we are in now. In fact, after that great season, there was talk around town that ASU and the WAC needed their own bowl, which ultimately led to the creation of the Fiesta Bowl. And the rest, they say, is history.


I didn’t know anything about Wyoming basketball before heading up there. Turns out, they had finished on top of the conference two of the three previous seasons. The problem in the west region of basketball at the time was UCLA. NCAA tournament games were not shown on TV until the Final Four, and no one in the west was making that event because of the Bruins. I knew the WAC conference, however, and knew that playing for Wyoming would mean playing at home in the Valley, and in Tucson, which wasn’t that far down the road. Turns out that Wyoming had a rich basketball history, winning the 1943 NCAA Title behind their star Kenny Sailors, who is credited with bringing the jump shot to college basketball. That story is featured in a movie about Kenny that was produced by Steph Curry called oddly enough “Jump Shot”. They beat Georgetown in the final, and had two Phoenix guys on the roster- Jack Downey and Charles Castle. What happened to those guys and where did they go to high school?


There were all kinds of red flags on this trip, but the mind is a funny thing. They flew me up there first class from Houston to Denver, which was an NCAA violation at the time. I took a puddle jumper from Denver to the Laramie Airport, which is something I recommend that you try, but only once. Laramie is at 7200 feet and it is very windy most of the time. They worked me out in front of the coaches, which was an NCAA violation at the time. When we showered up after the workout, one of the players said I shouldn’t go there- said the coaches were not good guys. They took me to dinner and then left the restaurant, giving me a lot of cash to pay the bill, telling me to “keep the change”. There was a lot of it. The weather was not too bad- not what I expected. They said it was an “Indian Summer”, and that it was always like that in the Spring. It was never that way again. The head coach, William “Wild Bill” Strannigan was kind of a gruff character, but I hit it off pretty well with Coach Purden. Despite all the basketball history and character offered by Temple, the tug of being able to stay in the west and, especially play at home was just too powerful. I committed to Wyoming. Sadly, right after that, Coach Purden took the head job at Valpairiso University in Indiana and left. That would turn out to be a most unfortunate occurrence for me. Fate, destiny, and the universe move in mysterious ways.


Next…NCAA Division1…

Sophomore year…good things happen….


When players come to me, as they sometimes do, and ask what they need to work on, I tell them “everything”! A player has to work hard, especially on weaknesses, and working hard is generally no fun. Most take the advice as kind of insulting, because there must be something they do well, right? The good players, however, take it as a challenge and put in some work. The great players become obsessed with it, but they are few and far between. I just finished a book that my son-in-law, who is a scout for the Seattle Mariners and a graduate of Stanford in economics, gave me called “Talent is Over Rated”, by Geoff Colvin. I can save you the trouble of reading it by telling you that hard work is no fun. Top performers put in great amounts of deliberate practice, but that is not a fun time for them. And they are always wanting feedback, not a pat on the back.


When I came home to Phoenix from Lee College that first summer, I noticed two things right away. I had improved dramatically as a player and thus it became a lot harder to find competitive games around town. I used to go to Perry Park or Pierce Park and play with guys there at night, but quickly realized that those games were no longer interesting. I still went there to work on things, but never played there again. I knew the upcoming year was going to be a make or break for me at Lee. I still wanted badly to play NCAA D1, but there was no interest from anyone at that time. I also knew that if I didn’t land a basketball scholarship, I would have to do as my brother was doing- work my way through college- because my folks could not afford to pay my way. So, I worked hard on basketball in the summer.


Back at Lee in the Fall, the team had added some really good players- a couple of guys from New York and an all-state scoring point guard from Texas. The New York guys were really good, tough players, and playing time was going to be a battle. The new coach, Mike Hefley, ditched the Marine conditioning program in favor of a way more relaxed one. We basically just did open gyms. When the practices began, it became obvious that Coach Hefley was going to keep it simple. Coach MacCormick had no offense and no defense, and Coach Hefley did not radically alter that. He put us into a 1-3-1 set against man or zone and we just balled, and defensively we played man and 1-3-1 zone. I wasn’t going to say anything, because that didn’t work well the last time.


As the season started, and even though I had improved a ton since I first set foot on the campus, I was still not a starter and had games where I played sparingly. Our team was just above .500 and really sort of swimming upstream. When I flew home to Phoenix for the Christmas break, I had some serious doubts about my future in basketball. I decided to just keep plugging, keep working, because you just never know, right? This is advice I give to players today, because what happened next was truly startling. When I got back to Baytown for the second half of the season, and for reasons that I never knew, Coach Hefley had decided to insert me into the starting line-up. We were headed to play in the San Jacinto holiday tournament, which included some very powerful teams along with the hosts, who were the defending national champions. There were going to be a lot of college coaches there to scout this event, much like our Fiesta Bowl Junior College Shootout at MCC. Talk about make or break- this was it. Our team seemed to gel as we went through the bracket, winning the first two games against tough opponents. I was averaging over 20 points and over 12 rebounds a game in those first two. It was instantly life changing, as coaches began to talk to me. I was most impressed with Don Casey, assistant coach for Temple University. I sat up in the stands with him after the second game and, without saying anything about them, he made sure I saw his NIT champion watch and his NIT champion ring. Back in those days, winning the NIT was a huge deal. The NCAA tournament was way smaller than it is now, 32 teams got in, and the NIT was nearly as good, if not better some years. UCLA was dominating the NCAA tournament in those years, so they were getting all the watches and rings from that one, so it was nice to see some other school have something to show. Temple had won it the year before.


The next night, the championship game featured San Jacinto, of course, and us, which was a surprise. The game went right down to the wire, but they beat us by three points. What was good for me, though, was I had gone toe-to-toe with a first team All-American player, Bob Nash, and scored 25 points and had 14 rebounds. I was named all-tournament and when Coach Casey came by and congratulated me, he said he wanted me to visit Temple and become an Owl. Pretty heady stuff. The rest of the season went pretty much the same way for me and I started to be recruited by several D1’s. We had a good season, no brawls, no arrests, no murders, and Coach Hefley stayed with me the rest of the way. I had two games where I got more than 20 rebounds, ended up averaging 20.8 points a game, despite the first half of the season where I didn’t score much. I had to thank Lavoy Darden for the tips on rebounding. He ended up getting hurt and missing a good part of the season. Disappointingly, we lost in the conference semi-finals to Wharton County. I was named second team All-TJCAA, which I didn’t expect, but am still honored to this day, because Texas juco is no joke. Then the recruiting began in earnest.


Temple was at the top of my list, because they were the first and most impressive school that I spoke to. You are allowed five official visits, but it has been my experience at MCC that most guys don’t get past the first or second one before committing. I could have taken five, but the first one I scheduled was to Temple. I flew to Philadelphia and it was an awesome environment for basketball. If you were a student of the game, which I was, it was almost overwhelming. Temple was part of the Big Five, which included, and still includes Villanova, La Salle, Penn, and St. Joseph’s. All the Big Five games back then were played in the Palestra, which is an old arena on Penn’s campus. Coach Casey took me over to see it right away and it just oozed history and basketball. There is a plaque in the lobby that about sums it up for me when it comes to basketball. It reads: “To win the game is great…to play the game is greater…but to love the game is the greatest of all”. Like I said earlier, most guys don’t love it like that. That’s why they don’t put in the deliberate practice.


After seeing the Palestra, I was pretty sure that Temple was it for me. Then some things happened that created doubt. First, Coach Casey took me over to see the legendary head coach of Temple, Harry Litwack. I went into his office and, as I did, Coach Casey disappeared. The office was large, but very dark. There was a light on at Coach Litwack’s desk and he was just out of the beam in the dark. It was like a scene from the Godfather. I heard a voice telling me to come over and sit down, and when I did, Coach Litwack leaned forward into the light. He was old, probably like me now. He was stern and serious, obviously not wanting small talk. He said “Coach Casey says you’re a player, but you’re going to have to prove that to me.” And with that the meeting ended. Coach Casey re-appeared and off we went to meet some of the returning players. Philadelphia kids are tough, arguably the toughest city kids in basketball anywhere. Temple’s team was mostly Philly guys, so some guy from Arizona? Good God, Coach- Arizona? That’s kind of what I felt from them. That night, they took me to the premier of some movie called M*A*S*H. I had never heard of the book or the movie. It turned out to be pretty good. Then we went to a hamburger joint near the campus. Temple sits in one of the roughest parts of Philadelphia and it would not be a good idea to be lost there, but before I knew what happened, they had all filtered out and left me alone. I was able to find my way back to the dorms and they were pretty impressed with that. An Arizona kid. I guess they were checking my toughness. But those things- Coach Litwack and the Philly kids reluctance to accept me, plus the sheer distance from Arizona that Temple was, all gave me pause to think and not sign right away.


A player and his girl friend gave me a ride to the airport when it was time to go back to Baytown. I never saw Coach Litwack again and Coach Casey said his goodbye at the university. He would go on to be the head coach there and be an NBA head coach for two different teams. In those days, there was no TSA checkpoint, so the player and his girl were walking me to my gate. The girlfriend suddenly exclaimed “there’s Muhammad Ali!’ And she was right- coming at us was the champ and his wife and a couple of little kids. Surprisingly, there was no entourage or posse or media or anything. Ali had been stripped of his title by the boxing federation for refusing to report for the military draft. This was during the Viet Nam War, and the country was as fractured as we find it today. To older, white Americans, Ali was a draft dodger. To young people like us, he was the champ who stood up for his beliefs. I would have happily just stood there and watch him walk by, but the girl instantly ran over to him. We followed, wondering if this was not going to go well. It was the opposite- the champ stopped and spent time with people he didn’t know. He was in his prime physically, was gracious, asked us questions, and thanked us when we told him he would always be the champ. Since we weren’t expecting this to happen, we had no paper for an autograph and cell phones didn’t exist, so we had no camera. It was an incredible moment that is still burned in my memory. He was so kind to us.


Next...the Cowboys...

Playing ball…


Teams at all levels typically scrimmage a few times before actually playing games. That has always been the way it is done at all levels through today. At MCC, we are allowed four in October. My freshman year at Lee, we did two. One was against the University of Houston’s freshman team (back then, freshmen were not allowed to play on the varsity), and one was against the prison team at the Alvin, Texas, maximum security facility. Coach MacCormick taking us to play guys in the heaviest lock down place around fit his Marine style.


The scrimmage against the UH freshmen was pretty interesting, because they were a program just coming off a Final Four with the great Elvin Hayes, who had moved on to the NBA. Their game against UCLA in the Houston Astrodome during that season was the first nationally televised broadcast of a regular season college game in history. Their freshman class was super talented and they had a guy named Dwight Davis who was the first and only person I have witnessed live touching the top of the backboard. I don’t know if he did it to intimidate us, but it had that effect. I had heard of such feats, and even today, if any of the freakish athletes in the NBA now can do it, I have only seen it live once. Dwight was about 6’9” and when he ran down the floor, I swear it looked like a guy running on a trampoline- like someone playing slam ball, if you can picture that. He was the only guy in my lifetime to ever dunk the ball with me trying to foul him by literally hanging on his arms. I’m sure Dwight would have had a glorious NBA career, but had some bad injuries at Houston down the road.


The scrimmage at the prison was remarkable for a few things. Going in through all the various levels of security, with the tons of razor wire and heavily armed guards was spooky and made us all glad to get back out later. The faces of the guards- deadly serious. Guards were used as referees and went way out of their way to make the calls work in our favor. The “spectators” were other prisoners who knew the guards were sticking it to their fellow inmates, thus they did not show any affection for us. We were fresh meat, that’s all. Craziest of all was the moment before the game, when one of the inmate players came over to our team and was recognized instantly by our returners as someone who had been on the Lee College team the year before. His name was David Anderson, and the returners gathered around and it became clear to me that they had no idea why David was in there. He said, “I killed my mother”, and began to tell them how she was always telling him what to do. I walked away at that point.


The TJCAA back then was divided into a northern and southern division, and being down by the Gulf put us in the southern half. Texas is still divided in half today, but it is more of an east-west alignment. We opened the season as many juco’s do, with a tournament somewhere in the northern half. As we practiced, I began to wonder what Coach MacCormick’s philosophy was in terms of offense and defense. He never really said much and we really didn’t work on any plays or any coordinated defensive plan. We just scrimmaged and conditioned right up to the first game. That’s OK, I suppose, if your talent is just greater than everyone else’s. So, for the first time in my life, I began to say things to the coach that were questioning his way of doing things. That wasn’t smart. The first game, nine of our ten players played- only I didn’t get in. Lesson learned. The less I said, the more I began to play. My freshman year overall was spotty and less productive than I had hoped. But the talent I played with in practice everyday and in the games was vastly superior to anything I had ever been around to that point. If you really tried, you couldn’t help but get better. A few of the guys in the house, including me, were gym rats. In all my years in playing and coaching basketball, I have found that to be a constant- that some guys play the game, but most don’t really love the game. As coaches, we are always prodding our players to work extra, become students of the game, and become gym rats. Most don’t do it, because they don’t really love it like that. And that, my friends, is quite simply the reason that a few players separate themselves from the pack. When I went back to Phoenix for a two week Christmas break, I hung out with friends whom I had played with and against over the past few years, and it became clear to me right away that I had improved by leaps and bounds over the first four months in Texas. Coach Youree had given me a fantastic fundamental base from which to build and I was building.


My friend Lavoy Darden taught me a lot of little tricks and footwork things that would prove useful the rest of my career. He said defense was like boxing- you need to be on the balls of your feet and be bouncy and quick to move. He showed me how that was done and we worked on it together. It really helped with rebounding, as that skill is basically quick reaction to the ball. Every now and then, you see some leaper sky for a rebound, but generally the best rebounders are those who anticipate and move to the ball quickly. They don’t wait for the ball to come to them. Dennis Rodman would be a good visual for that. He was eight years old when Lavoy was teaching me that. Rebounding is one of those things that will get you noticed by recruiters, as well. On weekends, no one ever asked the coaches to come back and open up the gym, because, well, we just never really talked to them. The gym rats found a little junior high gym down the street that had a window we could pry open and go in and work. No one in my two years ever discovered our little secret there- not even the vaunted Baytown police- and we never caused any damage or did anything that might compromise our ability to go work. Down the road in Baton Rouge, there was a kid named Pete Maravich averaging ungodly numbers at Louisiana State, and we were all affected by things he was doing with a basketball. One of our Louisiana teammates, Pat Foy, was from Baton Rouge, and he showed us to the best of his ability the kind of creative things Pistol Pete had brought to the game. So we worked on them.


As mentioned, my freshman season was unremarkable numerically- I had some good games and some stinkers. Started a few, but came off the bench for most. The game that stood out the most that season happened late in the year. We were playing our league rival, San Jacinto, in their gym. Remember, they would go on to win the national title- they were loaded. Their gym, which was really nice compared to ours, was packed, mostly with their fans. We gave them a pretty good game, but down the stretch they began to pull away. Dunking was illegal that year, because of Lew Alcindor at UCLA, so they wouldn’t do that unless they got a big enough lead to not worry about a technical foul. In those days, technical fouls did not count as personal fouls, so you could dunk and trade free throws and possessions as much as you wanted to or as much as your coach would let you. With about two minutes left, Jeff Halliburton decided to dunk it on a breakaway- and it was thunderous. The crowd went nuts. We missed both technical free throws, but got possession of the ball- missed a shot and they got a break out. Their 6’3” point guard, Terry Mullin from New York, looked like he was headed in for another banger. One of our players, Charles McKinney, wasn’t going to allow that, so he took Mullin out with a very hard foul. Both teams went running over to the basket and we grabbed Charles and held his arms so he wouldn’t do anything crazy, and the San Jac guys grabbed Mullin’s arms for the same reason. Mullin, being a savvy New York kid kept telling his teammates that he was OK, so they let him go. He immediately began to pummel Charles while, stunned as we were, we were still holding his arms down. After a few blows, all hell broke loose in the gym. People were coming from all directions, chairs and other objects were flying through the air, and we were being mobbed by players and fans. I remember looking down at the other end of the floor and seeing our big man, Bob Chisum. A fan had jumped on his back and was throwing haymakers from both sides of his head, while Bob was attempting to fight off other people in front of him. He reached up with both arms to try and pull his attacker off, but the guy had kind of rolled up into a little ball on Bob's back. The image reminded of a picture I once saw of Atlas holding up the world. There was no way for us to get to Bob as we were all in individual struggles to get off the court. Beaten and bloodied, we all ended up in the locker room eventually, just sitting on the floor, leaning against the walls, saying nothing. And what came of this? Nothing. No suspensions, no penalties. Just a rough night in the TJCAA. San Jacinto would go on and win the national title and Lee would get bounced in the first round of the playoffs. Coach MacCormick was fired by the college, not we heard for basketball reasons, but something else in his life. Details were sketchy. He would be replaced by his assistant, Mike Hefley.


Next…sophomore year, good things happen….

The Rebels….


My parents drove me down to Baytown, Texas, to start my career at Lee College. Our goodbyes were painful, because I had lived at home my whole life and was pretty attached to it and them. But, this is how life is and it was time for the next step. What made it a bit more frightening was that I knew nothing about Baytown or it’s inhabitants, nothing about the college, nothing about the living arrangements, nothing about my teammates, nothing about the league, nothing about the level of play, and most of all, nothing about the coaches. Other than that, I was ready to go.


Let’s start with Baytown. It is right at the tip of Galveston Bay, but is not a resort town on the beach by any stretch. It lies next to the Houston Ship Channel, which was reputedly one of the most polluted waterways in the world. Nearby were several chemical plants and a huge refinery run by Exxon. The air constantly smelled like industry- in other words, it stunk. It was extremely humid and the combination of the smell and the high humidity was not intoxicating in a good sense. Baytown was not a rich area- those were closer to Houston- and most of the inhabitants were blue collar industrial workers. There was a definite line between the white part of town and the black part of town in those days. The line was classic- railroad tracks. I would find out that walking on the railroad tracks, which were not far from the college, with my black teammates was not seen as a good thing on either side.


The college was a quaint series of red brick buildings just off the main street. There was a gym that was quite old and stuffy. Basketball was a winter sport right? So they never bothered to put in any kind of cooling system, because people don’t play basketball year round, do they? There were no dormitories, so the basketball team- almost the entire basketball team- was put into a house just across the street from the campus. It was a five bedroom, dilapidated Texas style house with a big front porch. The beds were all single, with a few bunk beds, because we started out with ten guys in there. There was a large living room with a chair and a couch, and an old TV with rabbit ears, as cable TV had not been invented. The address was 311 South Whiting, so the place must have had some memories or I could never be expected to remember that. Meals were bought on your own and paid for with a monthly allowance that each player was given. I didn’t have any idea, nor ever asked how that fit in with NJCAA rules.


I never had any prior contact with any of my teammates before being dropped off by my parents. The ten guys in the house were from New York, Louisiana, some other Texas towns, and me. We just grabbed rooms and beds as we could, no one really said anything about that. This was the sixties, so basically the black guys grouped together as did the white guys. There was never really any discussion about it, it’s just the way it was. The first couple of days, we just kind of hung around since school hadn’t started and kind of listened to the stories being told by the three returners amongst us. The third evening, most of us filtered into one of the bigger bedrooms and began talking about where we were from and just anything else that came to mind. Just teammates sort of trying to bond, right? One of the Louisiana kids was a pretty big guy- about 6’9”- and he really had been very quiet the whole three days. Guys started pushing him to speak up a little and tell us about himself. It sounded pretty normal at first, then he said that he had been fascinated by death and that he wondered what is was like to die. I, and the others began to feel a bit uncomfortable at this point. He went on- he said he was standing outside of a laundromat in Louisiana and he saw a woman inside by herself. So he shot her. That is where our meeting fell apart. He couldn’t be serious right? The next morning, he was gone, and a few days later some detectives showed up at the house, showed us his picture, and asked if we knew him. We said we did, said he told us that story but that it sounded so crazy that no one believed him. They asked us if we had reported this to the coaches? We said no, because no one believed him. It couldn’t possibly be true, could it? It was. I don’t know where he went or whatever happened to him. I can’t even remember his name. So, then we dropped to nine in the house. Welcome to Junior college.


The league was the Texas Junior College Athletic Association and it had some national powerhouses, as it still does today. Right down the street from Lee College was San Jacinto College, who would be the eventual national champions my freshman year. They had two guys who would end up in the NBA- Jeff Halliburton who would go on to Drake University, and Bob Nash, who would go on to the University of Hawaii. Most of the teams were loaded with players from across the nation. This was a level that was instantly much higher than what I had seen in high school, and it was not going to be easy.


Our head coach was John MacCormick and I fully, and naively, expected him to be a step up from my great high school coach. He most definitely was not. He was an ex-Marine drill instructor, who was very impersonal and didn’t teach basketball. He taught physical training. I don’t know about the other guys, but I was thankful that I had gone through all those things at East High, because Coach MacCormick put us through hell the first two weeks. All we did each day was run a quarter mile in the gym (eight laps), full speed, then immediately go to a station where we did rebounding, shooting, push ups, sit ups, dribbling drills, etc. After each station, we hustled to the starting point for another quarter mile. The running was timed, of course, and if we didn’t make it- well, I’m sure you know what happened. Run it again. We were supposed to do that eight times, but always missed a time or two, so it was always around ten quarter miles. Every day for two weeks, that’s all we did. Nobody in the house quit, but a couple of local guys quit within a few days. We ended up with only one local guy on the team- Lavoy Darden, who became a close friend of mine. We would drag ourselves over to the gym each day and dread the start of the routine. Within two days, absolutely every part of my body ached. Some guys actually cried before we started because we were all in pain. Nobody stretched- we just laid on the floor until Coach MacCormick came in. There was no warm up, but before you think how absurd that was, remember there was no cooling system in the gym except for a big box fan over in one corner that blew hot, humid air. You were sweating as soon as you walked in the gym. The coaches (we had no trainer) made salt pills available to us. There was no drinking fountain in the gym, which was the first time of many over my lifetime that I wondered who actually designs these junior college gyms? Even today I wonder that as I go around Arizona. Our gym at MCC has one bathroom in the lobby that has one urinal and one stall. I mean, what did the designers envision would be going on in a gymnasium at a college?


After two weeks of boot camp, ten of us Marines were ready to actually attempt to play basketball. It became apparent immediately that basketball strategy and tactics was not a strong point of Coach MacCormick’s. His assistant, Mike Hefley had coached a state championship team at Sour Lake, Texas, but he didn’t seem to be able to contribute much. Neither coach was really approachable to talk to, so most of the things that went on in and around the house on Whiting Street went unreported. We just kind of handled them ourselves. For example, Baytown had a stereotypical for the period police force. They knew who we were and we got to know them. There was a kind of mini-mart close to our house where we would walk to and buy food for the house sometimes. One night, one of our black players, Lafayette Spivey, was walking back from that store and was stopped by Officer Parker, who we knew. He asked Lafayette what he was doing, even though that was fairly obvious. He put Lafayette in his car and drove him to the house. He brought him to the front door and asked a group of us, black and white, who were sitting in the living room watching TV if we knew Spivey. We all thought it would be spontaneously funny to say no, we didn’t know him. Despite his loud protests and our laughter, Officer Parker put Spivey back in the car and hustled him off to jail. He was booked on “suspicion”, which was a Southern way of controlling everyone. We ended up having to shell out $50 to “bail” him out- money which probably never saw the light of day in the justice system, and all learned a hard lesson about joking around in the South. Of course, no one ever told the coaches. That’s the way we lived.


Next up…playing ball…

On to college….


By the time my senior season ended, I was thinking seriously about playing basketball at the next level. I had been given all three of the individual awards at our banquet from Coach Youree- Team Captain, Most Valuable Player, and Best Defensive Player. That was the only time in the history of East High basketball that would happen and it has always been so special to me that I still have all three of those trophies in my office at Mesa Community College. East, of course, would go on to have some phenomenal teams and players in their history, so I have always been proud of that achievement in Coach Youree’s eyes. There were really a lot of things I enjoyed about basketball by then- the skills that must be acquired, the flow of the game which was definitely not boring, the closeness of the fans to the action, and yes, the constant chatter that went on out there among the players. There was a closeness to it that made it seem more intense, more urgent than other sports. You had to play offense and defense and any lack of ability at either end was quickly exposed. Many years later, one of my assistant coaches, Rex Morrison gave the best description of offense and defense. He said if there existed an Insanity Meter that went 1-10, offense would be about a 3 or 4, because you could relax a little bit, take a deep breath, move the ball around, and think. Defense, however, was about a 9 or 10 because it was like someone trying to break into your house and you had to be very reactionary and courageous.


I was a skinny 6’6” white kid in 1968, coming from a brand new high school with a new coach who had not put any players into college to that point. Phoenix was not a recruiting hotbed for basketball in those days, and I had put up nice numbers in a tough local league, but they certainly weren’t eye popping. As I have since spent 15 years coaching college basketball in my career, I would term such a prospect as myself as what we call a “tweener”. Not big enough to be a big time rebounder at the D1 level nor the kind of scorer that they would seek. I dreamed of playing D1, but that was mainly due to the fact that college games were rarely shown on TV, and were always D1 schools being shown. I was recruited by some smaller colleges, most notably Pepperdine University, which in those days was a small NAIA school in the Los Angeles area. Their head coach, Gary Colson came to visit me at East, but I really had no interest in them. If I would have known more about their location in Malibu at the time, perhaps I would have shown more interest.


The area had a junior college powerhouse, Phoenix College, which at the time, was a top five school among the JUCO’s. This was the era when junior colleges didn’t have divisions- all 400+ were in the same division- junior college; so being top five was really something. Their coach, Leon Blevins, was an old friend of Coach Youree and he came by for a visit. I could tell he wasn’t that interested and was more or less doing coach a favor. Phoenix’s roster was heavily out-of-state kids and they were ready to go D1 type players, but probably didn’t have the grades. One of them was Dennis “Mo” Layton, who would go on to USC and then play for the Phoenix Suns. I can’t remember if Mesa or Glendale even had programs back then, but none of the other Arizona junior colleges talked to me.


As the Spring moved towards graduation, it was pretty obvious that no NCAA D1’s were going to come knocking, so I took the initiative of choosing one and writing to the coach. It was the University of Texas, in Austin. Why them? Well, my Dad was a Texan, growing up in the small town of Krum, which was about 40 miles north of Dallas. That was one reason. Another was that the University of Texas football team was always on TV when I was a teenager and they were really good. That had nothing to do with basketball, of course, and I really knew nothing about their program in that sport. They also had a great law school and, at that time, I still wanted to go into law. And finally, they were the Longhorns, which was the same mascot as East High. None of these were good reasons to want to go there for basketball, but it was a different time- no computers, no cell phones, and none of the quicker ways to find things out that we know so well today. I didn’t know if UT played in a conference or what it might be. Turns out it was the Big 8 (today’s Big 12) and they were terrible. Surprisingly, I received an answer from an assistant coach named Carroll Dawson. He said they were basically full on scholarships, but he was traveling to California in early June and could stop by and work me out. When you’re bad like they were, you could break NCAA rules and work some kid out off campus, but he didn’t mention that. When he arrived, it was June all right, which means in Phoenix, it would be very hot. He asked to meet me at that old concrete court with the chain nets, because he was just driving through and didn’t want to hunt down a gym. He decided that around noon would fit his schedule, so there I was, working out for the University of Texas in Phoenix in June at noon on an outdoor court. He stood in the shade and for about an hour, he put me through every skill determining exercise he could think of. Did I mention there was no drinking fountain close by? There wasn’t. I even did full court defensive slides, for God’s sake. When we finished, he said he was impressed and would get back to me. Then he said bye, or baah as they say in Texas and was off to California.


I didn’t hear anything from Coach Dawson for a few weeks and was really getting concerned that I would have nowhere to go play the next season. Then, out of the blue, I got a letter from UT. Remember, this is how people communicated in those days. A letter could take up to a week to come all the way from Texas and another week for your response to get back. Long distance phone calls were expensive and were usually only reserved for the guys a coach was really after. In his letter, Coach Dawson said how much he liked me as a player, but that they had no scholarships available. He went on to say that, if I was interested, they could place me in a junior college down there and I could go there for a year or two, get bigger and stronger, and then perhaps become a Longhorn. And I wouldn’t have to pay for anything, as any junior college I went to down there would give me a scholarship. That sounded very interesting so I replied that I was definitely interested. In the next letter from Coach Dawson, he had enclosed a piece of paper with the outline of the state of Texas on it. Inside that drawing, it was completely blank- no roads, cities, towns, rivers, lakes, or anything except five dots. He said those were the locations of five junior colleges that I could choose from. One of the dots was way down in the southeast part of the blank map, so I was assuming that it must be close to the Gulf of Mexico. Since I grew up in the desert, that dot seemed to be the most intriguing dot. So without too much more thought, I circled that dot and sent it back to Coach Dawson. A week or so later, I got a phone call from John MacCormick, who was the head coach at Lee College in Baytown, Texas. He said his college was the dot that I circled and welcome aboard! Caution: don’t ever get recruited this way. If I hadn’t lived through it myself, I wouldn’t believe this was even possible.

Next time- the Rebels...

East High, part 2...

I did, in fact, continue on with my friends into the baseball season after the glorious basketball season. Certainly nothing I had done so far would give anyone reason to think that athletics was going to be in my future. Not even I thought so. I dreamed of being a lawyer and then going into politics as my idol, John F. Kennedy had done. The baseball season was a better overall experience for me, however, so I did think I would continue on in sports at some level. Coach Youree coached the jayvee team, but the freshmen and jayvee practiced together most of the time, as there was only one baseball field at the new school. Baseball was a 180 from football and basketball- totally relaxed, great weather in the Spring- almost boring. Well, in fact, it was boring compared to what many of us had gone through all year. Even Coach Youree seemed more mellow and friendly. He said he was going to have a summer basketball program, which was something most of us had never heard of. He would run it through the City of Phoenix Parks and Recreation, and it would be a chance to get in somewhere cool and work out in the hot months ahead. Oddly enough, there wasn't going to be any summer baseball program, so anyone interested in that would go on to someplace else and play Babe Ruth or Pony League or whatever the progression was. Most of my friends were going to show up for Coach Youree's summer program. He also made it sound like if you were serious about basketball, then you pretty much had to be there. I wasn't too sure how serious I was about basketball, but I really took a liking to Coach Youree and his style of coaching and decided to give it a try.

Then, some marvelous things began to happen that would alter my life path forever. First, Coach Youree's summer program was fantastic. He taught the game from the ground up and insisted on constant repetition of fundamentals. Every session some progression was added and they were always challenging. We worked on things with great effort, because you just never wanted to disappoint Coach Youree on that front- we learned that in football. We worked until we got it right and never played until he was satisfied that progress had been made. I actually enjoyed learning the game at that point much more than playing it anyway. Coach Youree was intense, but had a great sense of humor. He could talk some trash, as well- you always had to be on your toes, which is something I try to be with him to this day. Second, I found myself to be somewhat ambidextrous, which lent itself well to basketball. I did most things left handed, like eat and write, but because my Mom, the softball great, was right handed, I learned to do a lot of sport things right handed. Some of the important basketball fundamentals like dribbling, shooting around the basket, and passing came much easier to me than most of my teammates. That was the first bit of separation that I had from some of my friends who were better athletes. Third, I began to grow. I grew at an unbelievable rate that first summer- a little over four inches. I went from 5'10" to 6'2" and then even started to look like a basketball player. Remember, there was no club ball or anything like it then, so we spent June and July in Coach Youree's summer program, four days a week. I really began to have an affinity for basketball after that, so much so that I decided I wouldn't play football the next year. I would concentrate on basketball, then go out for baseball to have a relaxing Spring again. And fourth, Coach Youree put me in his seventh hour PE class, a place where I would stay for the next three years. This class was for athletes, and not just basketball ones, as most people thought. We developed a bond in that class with our coaches and fellow athletes that was incredible. We would play a variety of games in that class- flag football, volleyball, handball, basketball, softball. What was great was that the coaches would also play and generally the games were "no rules". It was always about toughness there.

My sophomore year, I was rapidly improving, but so were some other guys, so I did not start out the year being a starter. I didn't really expect to anyway, as my resume from the previous three seasons was hardly stellar. But I did play a lot, kept improving, and about halfway through that season, became a starter. I was still growing, as well, and was 6'3" by the time the season ended. The season was such a success that I decided not to go out for baseball, but concentrate more on basketball. I wasn't sure how Coach Youree would take that decision, but he agreed with it. I now looked very much forward to finally playing for him. Again, we had a great summer program, which was now something more schools were doing. We actually ended that second summer by playing against some other schools in July.

As my Junior year began, I was now 6'4" and still growing. I was skinny and never a starter, but played a lot. This would be East High's last year as what they called an Independent. It was like a probation period before you could actually join the AIA. We played anyone who would play us from AAA (the biggest classification back then) to A (the smallest), or private schools or whatever. As players, we never gave any of that too much thought anyway.

The next summer was equally a time of learning from a great coach as the others had been and finished with a much more organized summer league. Going in to my senior season, I was 6'6" and we were placed in the AAA Metro Conference, where all the power was in Arizona at that time. North was great, as was Central, Maryvale, West High, and Alhambra. And there was two time defending state champions Phoenix Union, coached by the legendary "Wimpy" Jones. Their gym was a palace and was unlike any high school gym I had ever seen before or since. When I was a seventh grader, my friend, Keith Kenney, took me to see a game there. His brother played for North and I just remember thinking how cool it would be to play there. Our third game of the year was against Phoenix Union and would, in fact, be played in their gym. We started 1-1. Our opener was against West, and we went over there thinking we were going to handle them. They handled us- 75-50 and we were thoroughly embarrassed. In the third game against Phoenix Union, they were on a 38 game winning streak and had clobbered their first two opponents. My parents decided not to go to the game, fearing the worst outcome. I just remember not being nervous, but being very excited to be on that court with them. They were so athletic and big- we were going to have to play out of our minds to beat them. We did. We won 65-64 and I remember how it felt to this day. Coach Youree said that was the moment when he knew East would have a great program, which they subsequently did. He said it was like watching a college game. When I got home, my parents had no way of knowing how the game went (no cell phones back then). I told them we won and they were amazed. Typical of parents, they asked me how many points I scored and I said I didn't know. They asked how many rebounds I had, and I said I didn't know. We won and that's all that mattered. Back in those days, there was a sister newspaper to the Arizona Republic called the Phoenix Gazette. They covered prep sports heavily and had players of the week in all sports. That week, I was the first East High player to be so honored in any sport in the first four years of the school. Turns out I had 6 points and 16 rebounds against Phoenix Union, followed by 25 points and 17 rebounds against Yuma Kofa the next game. I ended up the year averaging more rebounds than points (12.6 points and 13.5 rebounds) and was the first East High player to be named to the All-City team, which was a big deal back then. We had an up and down year, ending up 13-10. The Metro was predictably tough and Phoenix Union would go on and win another AAA title. They beat Maryvale for the title, which was tough to watch, as we had beaten both teams during the year. Nobody could really predict what Coach Youree would do over the next 13 years until East closed. He would win 5 state championships. In those years, he would never finish worse than state quarterfinals. He would lose only one state championship game, and that was a four overtime loss to Alhambra, with their great player Steve Malovic. In one stretch, East won 54 games in row, then lost a state quarterfinal game in four overtimes, and then won 35 more in a row. His 1980-81 team was named the best high school basketball team of the 20th Century by the Arizona Republic, and was also honored as the Coach of the Century. I didn't know all of those things would happen, but I did know that he was a great coach and man, and someone that I still lean on for support to this day. I also thought that if this is high school, then boy, college coaches really must be something great. Boy, was I wrong.

Next time- On to college.....

East High and a Legend....

After graduating from the eighth grade in 1964, I had the unusual opportunity in those days to have a choice of where I could go to high school. Open enrollment was not a feature in our education system in those days, so normally you went to high school in the attendance zone of a particular institution roughly where you lived. My brother, who was older than I, had gone to North High, because we lived in their attendance zone. In 1964, however, the Phoenix Union District was opening a new high school at 48th Street and Van Buren called East High. You can see that the naming systems for high schools in those days were fairly uncomplicated. My family lived at 37th Street and Palm Lane and everyone east of 36th Street could go to the traditional and established North High or go to the new school. I didn't choose East because I knew Coach Youree and wanted to play for him. In fact, I had never heard of him or any of the teachers at the new school. I chose East because it was a chance to start something from the beginning of its existence. It was the challenge of it and a decision that I have never regretted. John F. Kennedy had given a speech in Houston where he said "we choose to go to the moon and do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard." He challenged us and those words had a great impact on my life and have always stuck with me through the many challenges that I have had over the years.

I didn't go to East to play basketball. The first sport up was football, and it was real football with helmets and pads and jock straps. These were things that I was totally unfamiliar with, as Papago Elementary had only a flag football team. I was pretty good at that, but knew nothing of the rigors of tackle football. This is where I had the first encounter with Royce Youree. East High did not have enough students to have freshmen, jayvee, and varsity football the first year. We, in fact, did not have any seniors, so they settled on just having one team- a jayvee level squad. This gave the coaching staff the opportunity of establishing a baseline of expectations for the future of their programs- not just football- and not just worrying about pandering to kids and parents to have numbers. One of the expectations that they decided to create was that East High kids were going to be tough as nails, so with an initial group of about eighty boys they put on a Marine style training regimen that I am positive would get them all fired today. Within a couple of weeks they had it down to the mid-twenties, and not a day went by where I did not think about quitting. Two things kept me going- my Mom was as tough an athlete as I ever knew and I knew quitting would hurt her, and my good friend Eddie Hall, with whom I went to practice every day. Eddie was clearly going to be an outstanding football player, where I was not. I was skinny, scrawny, and not very tall, but Eddie kept encouraging me to hang in there and not be a quitter. So I did. I made it all the way to the last week when I broke my wrist. I was there when East played it's first game against a new Tempe school- McClintock, who was also playing their first game with their new coach Karl Kiefer. East won 8-6 on a last second play. I didn't get in, but remember well celebrating on the field. As we celebrated, I remember running into Tom Vermillion, an offensive tackle, who obviously had a concussion and didn't even know the game was over. Tough, baby. A different time for sure. I barely played all year, but as the season went on, I grew to respect the coaches a great deal, in particular Coach Youree. I had never been around someone like him before.

After football, it was known that Coach Youree was going to head up the basketball program. There would be a jayvee team and TWO freshmen teams strategically called A and B. Most of my friends from football, including Eddie, were moving on to play basketball, so I wanted to do that also, even though my training at Papago was zero and my career there comprised twenty seconds. I had a career line of one rebound and 0-1 from the field. I came up to Coach Youree on the first day of practice and told him that as soon as the cast came off my wrist, I would be coming out. That wouldn't be for another seven or eight weeks, which would cover a fair amount of the season. I remember to this day the look he gave me- a look of respect for surviving the football experience to almost the end, a look of sympathy for my condition, and a look of no way you're going to play basketball. He had heard that I was a pretty decent baseball player and told that by the time I got my cast off, baseball would be just around the corner. Maybe I should skip basketball and come out for baseball. He would be coaching that, too. But I was insistent- I wanted to play basketball with my buddies. I truly believe that if I hadn't stuck in there through that hell of football, he would have told me no, but he eventually relented and let me come out for Freshman B.

By the time I was able to play, there were only a few games left. Being out so late and being on the B team, I did not get a good choice of uniforms. Mine was way too big and was not a good look. Fortunately, I did not get in any games until the very last one. There were about 30 seconds left in the game when the Freshman B coach, who had also been one of the football coaches, called for me to go in, so I ran to the scorer's table to check in. Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on your perspective, the clock was running while I waited at the table and I was not able to get on floor until only seven seconds remained. So, I ran out, the ball was inbounded to someone else and the game was over. That was my freshman season of basketball- one game, seven seconds, no rebounds. So, think if you will about my basketball career to this point. Seventh grade, eighth grade, and freshman year- a total of twenty seven seconds played, one rebound, 0-1 from the field.

Next time- East High, part 2

As we can all relate to, this is an unbelievable moment in history that we are living through. It is not possible to have workouts with players or to have safe interaction with just about anyone else at this time. But we can communicate en masse through a medium like this and share thoughts, ideas, and stories that bind us all together in the basketball world. Basketball has been a huge part of my life since the day I enrolled in a brand new high school called East Phoenix in 1964. There I encountered a young, tough, and demanding coach named Royce Youree. None of his knew him or knew of his exploits at Arizona State University, just down the road. But he would become a big part of our lives and, in my case, continue to be a coach, colleague, friend, and mentor to this day. So let's share first how the game gripped us enough to want be part of it forever. I hope to be able to read your stories, and you mine, as let's face it, we don't have much else going for us right now. So I'll start...

I grew up in a much smaller Phoenix. Until individual household air conditioning systems were mass produced, that's all Phoenix would ever be- small. After that happened, Phoenix has mushroomed to the mega metropolis that we know today. My first sport of passion was baseball. My mother was an elite professional softball player who played first base for the A-1 Queens, who in their heyday, was one of the best softball teams in the world. Along with the PBSW Ramblers, Phoenix had become a hub of women's softball in the 40's and 50's. My mother had been approached by the people who put together the women's baseball league that is featured in the movie "A League of Their Own", but had turned them down. Her logic was that she was at the top of her game as a professional- why would she sacrifice that for what she felt was a circus act. So by age five, I was a bat boy for the Queens and loved everything about a ball, a glove, and a bat.

We lived right next to Papago Elementary School and there was an outdoor concrete basketball court at one end of the property. It had chain nets. I never had much interest in it until about sixth grade. There was no club ball in those years and Papago only had a seventh grade team and an eighth grade team. Around my sixth grade year, I began to watch some NBA broadcasts on one of the three available TV channels- ABC. They would show one game a week, on Sunday, and it usually included the Boston Celtics, who won most of the titles in a league that we knew little about. The Celtics had an extraordinary big man named Bill Russell. The other team that would get a lot of airplay was the Philadelphia 76'ers. They had another extraordinary big man named Wilt Chamberlain. Every now and then on a Sunday, we would come home from church to find that the Celtics were playing against the 76'ers, so we got to see both big men at once. I really enjoyed those games and as my interest grew, I was able to get a basketball and go to that concrete court right after watching a game and start to learn how to play solely based on what I saw on TV. I had no coach nor received any instruction early on. Sometimes, there would be some grown ups at the court, and if they needed an extra body, they would let me play. The only thing I was really allowed to do in those games was rebound, so I got pretty good at it.

My seventh grade year, I tried out for the school team. The tryouts were after school on the concrete court with the chain nets, and I don't really know how I made the team other than most of the boys were sort of like me in terms of prior coaching. We didn't have any. But I was clearly not very good- wasn't a starter and didn't have any prospects of getting any better, as we only practiced twice before our first game. Now, in those days, the basketball "season" consisted of a tournament among the various schools in the Creighton Elementary School District. If you won, you advanced, but if you lost your "season" was over. Our first game was against Squaw Peak Elementary School. We lost and the coach didn't put me in. That was my seventh grade "season" in a nutshell. I went back to shooting around on Sundays or getting picked in those occasional adult games where I was only allowed to rebound.

The eighth grade year, I tried out again and once again made the team. Last year's seventh grade coach had been elevated to the eighth grade coach, so he knew me. That can be a good thing, but can also be a bad thing. As luck would have it, we drew Squaw Peak again for our opener, and once again, we were defeated. This time, however, I was inserted into the game midway through the first half. I got a rebound right away (I was good at that), but then dribbled the length of the floor to roughly the top of the key and shot the ball. I was lifted immediately and did not return to the floor. So my eighth grade "season" was over. In two "seasons" I had played approximately twenty seconds. Who would have thought at that time basketball would play such an important role in my life. Certainly not me.

Next up- East High and a legend. Share your early beginnings if you wish, or any other thoughts about the game. I am eager to read your stories.