The Annals of Pacers Draft Busts, Vol. 1

From the ancient sports journalism desk: A 1981 SI profile on Steve Stipanovich (via DS), at a time when casual racism still permeated the upper ranks of sports journalism.  Remember, kids: just because black players are born with a natural ability to play basketball doesn’t mean you can’t work harder than them:

“Unlike Sampson and Bowie, Stipanovich isn’t a natural player. Yet back in the summer camps and the high school all-star games in which he competed with and against Sampson, Bowie and other big boys, he often outperformed them. Stipo (pronounced STEE-poe), as his friends call him, has a fairly laughable 28-inch vertical leap…’I can’t go up and jump over people like a lot of guys,’ he says. ‘I’m the wrong color for that. Right away I saw in those all-star games that people had a lot more talent then I had. I just outworked and outhustled them.’”

At least the writer didn’t claim that Sam Bowie or Ralph Sampson would have concocted a better excuse for shooting themselves in the shoulder with their own gun (read the piece).  The ringers pulled in by other Big Eight schools to guard Stipo provide a lol-worthy moment, though:

“The most prominent were Kansas’ massive 6′9″ Victor (The Fat) Mitchell, who has since ballooned to the size of a blimp and drifted away from school, but not before one P.A. announcer read off his stats as ‘Mitchell—eight points, six rebounds, four orders of fries,’ and Oklahoma’s 6′10″, 250-pound Charles (Big Time) Jones, who as a redshirt last year was caught sleeping behind the bench during a game and was renamed ‘Bed Time.’ Already this season Sooner Coach Billy Tubbs has screamed ‘Time!’ (for time out), only to watch Jones’s teammates, thinking his name had been called, look for him to shoot.”

Filed under: basketball  casual racism  Pacers  sports  Steve Stipanovich