never knew this
John Starks, for example, perhaps the most beloved player on the 1990s Knicks, quit high-school basketball after just a year, telling his coach ‘he needed a job to help his mom at home.’ Starks eventually cycled through a series of small-time college basketball programmes, from Rogers State, where he was on the ‘taxi’ squad (which didn’t suit up for games), to Northern Oklahoma, until he got kicked out for smoking pot in his dorm room. After that he met his future wife and ‘took a minimum-wage, $3.35-an-hour cashier job at a Safeway’ to help ‘provide’. Later, he was promoted to stock boy and would ‘test his athleticism by touching the 10.5-foot-high beams towards the back of the store’ – it didn’t hurt that he’d grown four inches since high school. Starks still played basketball in his spare time. Drifting, restless, he finally enrolled at Tulsa Junior College, which had no basketball team.
At that point, he had a bit of luck. An assistant coach at a nearby college went over to watch an intramural game to see if any talent had ‘slipped through the cracks’. Eventually, he ended up offering Starks a scholarship to Oklahoma Junior College, where he was ‘maybe our tenth or eleventh-best player at the time’. Sometimes big-time college teams will schedule early-season games against junior colleges, partly as a favour and partly because they want to pick up a few easy wins. The day Starks got married, OJC was supposed to play in Kansas, but a snowstorm was coming and the game had to be called off. When the storm failed to materialise it was on again. OJC’s coach managed to reach Starks at the wedding reception. He and his new wife ‘hopped in their Chevy Impala’ and ‘sped up Highway 75’. Arriving at half-time, his team down 25 points, Starks changed out of his tuxedo. In the second half, he led a furious comeback, scoring 22 points on his own, including a reverse dunk off a half-court alley-oop. Even though his team lost by four, the performance was good enough to get him a scholarship to Oklahoma State, a Division One programme. He was on his way.