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Saturday, September 30, 2006
Where have you gone? (Pre PL Army edition)
Reading this piece about Army's Kevin Houston brought back memories of this site's roots.

Back in the day, the original incarnation of Hoop Time was weekly Central Pa. basketball tabloid. It was the old-fashioned dinosaur fossils on dead trees deal. It covered Penn State, Bucknell, Division II Bloomsburg and two D-III schools -- Susquehanna and Lycoming.

Our first season was barely started when we encountered a minor crisis-- a stretch over the Holidays when all five teams were either off or on the road, leaving us with nothing to cover for that week's publication.

The answer ended up being a drive up I-81 to Scranton to watch what was then being called the Atlantic Basketball Association. The ABA was the idea of some oldtimers who had been around during the last days of the old Eastern Basketball League.

That league, in its heyday, was a pretty high caliber league, probably second to only the NBA. The NBA was small back then. There were nowhere near the number of jobs there are today. That left a lot of talent for the weekend league based in the mid-atlantic.

That league, and the ABA incarnation that has morphed through a number of names and alignments, are entirely different creatures these days. The old EBL eventually became today's CBA, which actually does send some player to the NBA from time to time. The new league is strictly semi-professional.

Haven't seen one of the new league's games in years, but I from what I recall, the only word in their vocabulary that starts with a D is Dunk. To this day, it is the only league, at any level, where we have witnessed a player fall out of bounds and land in the concession stand.

That night in Scranton, we snapped pictures of a kid shooting free throws with a grocery bag over his head during a between period promotion, then ran one on the cover of the next issue with a headline "The Unknown Basketball League." For you youngsters, it was a reference to a very bad comic on the old Gong Show who wore a paper bag over his head.

If these new computers came with floppy drives, we'd dig for a copy of that old story to post. Best recollection was that it was not a real favorable review.

But I do remember being impressed by the Scranton team's undersized point guard. A little 5-11 white kid who seemed very out of place in a league where most of the players are signed out of NYC's summer Pro-Am playground league.

The guy hustled all over the floor, even played a little defense. And he could shoot. Boy could he shoot.

Houston, who was inducted into Army's Hall of fame Saturday, is still No. 1 on the Black Knights all-time scoring list (2,325 points in 113 games). His senior season he led the nation in scoring (32.9 ppg), free-throw percentage (91.2).

We'd tell you more about Houston, but he played at Army in the pre Patriot League days, so we don't know much more, other than what we read in the Journal News story. It's worth a click to be reminded that things have not always been so dreary in West Point.
Published at 9:28 PM by Hoop Time.
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