Buzzed

The University of Virginia actually played a game that mattered last night, which has happened about 3 times in 30 years, and I got this tweet earlier:

While TECHnically he might be right about Mike Scott  since Ralph Sampson graduated two years after Jeff Lamp, it's always good to see Lamp get some attention since as you know the Earth has chosen to forget his existence.

Even more forgotten however is the original Virginia scoring machine, Buzzy Wilkinson, who averaged 28ppg during his career at Virginia.  And if you thought UVa has been in a dry spell for the last few decades, when Buzzy was there were the REAL Dark Ages.  I first heard about Buzzy back in 7th grade when I found this incredible book but had never seen anything else about him until I just now stumbled upon an article in SI during his senior year, which shows the talent he had around him:

There has been good reason for the lack of publicity about Wilkinson—namely his attitude toward his fellow players which is somewhat like that of a seasoned mother catbird pushing her young ones from the nest. He thinks it's high time the other players straighten up, fly right and start making baskets themselves. Several games this season he has spent the entire first quarter feeding the ball to his hand-wringing teammates before giving up and resigning himself to stardom. This holds his individual score down but Wilkinson is looking ahead to next year, when he won't be around. He is sincerely willing to sacrifice his individual acclaim if he can only get the Virginia team to stand on its own feet.

Interestingly, UVa almost never had him in the first place:

"Right up to the time I packed my bags I still didn't know whether I was going to Virginia or Kentucky," Buzzy says. "I'd spent a whole week at Kentucky, fooling around in the gym every day, but in that whole week nobody ever showed me the campus. That's all they showed me at Virginia. My home's just about halfway between Virginia and Kentucky but Dad kept talking about the folly of going 'out west.' He made it sound like the Indians were waiting for me."

Just like you-know-who 25 years later, UVa lucked into getting a superstar instead of Kentucky (and weren't even supposed to get Jeff Lamp, who was headed to Bobby Knight.)