While I’m waiting to continue enjoying my two favorite sports days of the year, allow me to present a card from the recently annexed Aunt Celia wing of my collection (named for the Christmas-gift donor of the entirety of the wing). My favorite part of the card is Mark Jackson’s face in the background, just off Perkins’ right shoulder. That is the face of a guy who has had success everywhere he’s gone, but now he’s finding out what it’s like to be on the Clippers. He’s like, “Oh, man, you sad motherfuckers can’t even box out Sam Perkins?”
I feel for Mark Jackson. By that time, 1994, Perkins had been around for quite awhile. And even in his prime he was more of a solid all-around big man with a nice outside touch than some kind of young Moses Malone animal on the offensive glass.
But that’s another subject. What I wanted to get into was that my connection with college basketball began in earnest in 1982, the year Sam Perkins was a member of probably the most talented college basketball team since I’ve been watching. Before that, I’d had some awareness of college hoops, but my interest lagged far behind my interest in the pro game, which itself got started quite a while after I’d began my religious affiliation with baseball. But in 1982 I followed the tournament and watched with amazement the incredible final game—incredible all the way to the sour-note conclusion authored by poor “Wrong Town” Freddy Brown—between North Carolina and Georgetown. Georgetown had “Pat” Ewing and Sleepy Floyd and UNC had Perkins, James Worthy, and freshman “Mike” Jordan.
I started wondering this morning if I ever saw in subsequent years an NCAA champ that could equal the talent level of the Carolina trio, which featured in Perkins a future longtime pro, a future Hall of Famer and clutch-play legend in Worthy, and the future greatest player of all time in Jordan. Read the rest of this entry ?
Cardboard Gods 
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