The high rate of success of European players compared to American players seems to be evidence of your theory. My role model in my high school days was Adrian Dantley, a short man who somehow dominated inside the paint. I probably should have worked more hours on my outside shot.
Black boys seem to mature faster than white boys. Anecdotally, I went to a high school that was over 40 % black. I was one of three white boys on the Junior Varsity football team and one of those was, naturally, the punter. The other became my Best Man when I married. By the time we reached Varsity, the roster was about 50/50 racially. The white boys caught up in the maturing process.
I am in agreement with Steve Sailer in thinking that white boys developing at their own pace is best. When the white boys are put on teams with large amounts of blacks, they tend to defer to the more aggressive black boys.
At some point at the end of the maturing process, it is good to get the white boys playing against the best competition available of any race.
Mark Price and his younger brother Brent were the sons of a coach.
One of my first basketball memories was that of LSU and Pistol Pete Maravich going up against Kentucky and Dan Issel. At that time, Kentucky ruled the SEC, at the time a football conference. Each team was all white. Maravich scored something like 55 points and Issel 44, almost a one-on-one competition. Both were so much better than the other players on the court.
Bobby Orr was a greater player than Wayne Gretzky.
Flagg is a delight to watch, especially for his passing and rebounding. I'd like to see him stay at Duke and get his degree.
His body is still maturing.
Why not use Duke's $ 12,000,000,000 endowment to self-insure him against the risk of a career-limiting injury so he doesn't feel the need to enter the NBA at such a young age?
I'm assuming his NIL money is in the several millions range while his initial contract may guarantee hundreds of millions. I think back to some of the decisions I made when I was 18. I'm glad there was no video evidence.
Hard to argue with that. I assume he has trainers and coaches who are looking at his physical metrics and comparing them to NBA players and telling him he's good to go.
.Speaking of NIL, do any of those "student"-athletes still bother going to class? I'd just show the Dean of Academic Affairs my bank balance and tell her I've already got all the remedial math I need.
Due to the NBA's collective bargaining agreement, the initial contracts aren't much when compared to the 2nd or 3rd deal you sign. What you really want is the supermax extension after your four-year rookie deal is up. So it makes sense to get out of college when you can if you're expected to be an elite NBA player.
I'm surprised that Tony Kucoc did not make the top 50; he was really good and a key component of the Jordan Bulls' title runs in the '90's (which also included Steve Kerr and John Paxson).
"For instance, Wayne Gretzky, recognized from an early age as The Promised One". Fascinating that the top 2 goal scorers all-time for hockey will have Slavic (Russian!) surnames. Clearly Gretzky was the greatest as his all-around game was phenomenal (scoring, passing, on-ice awareness, etc.), and lifted his team (with great supporting cast) to multiple Stanley Cups. Ovechkin, an immense talent, is clearly more a pure goal scorer, with only the one Cup title.
I am sure you could exchange certain players for others. Other great white players off the top of my head. Brian Winters. Kiki Vanderweghe. Paul Westphal. Sven Nater. Geoff Petrie, whose career was ruined by knee problems in an era when surgery was not much of an option. Ditto Jeff Ruland. Both Van Arsdales. Doug Moe. Louie Dampier. Doug Collins. Vern Mikkelson and Jim Pollard from the old Minneapolis Lakers. I'm sure others could fit.
Kerr shouldn't be put on the list. He was always just a role player off the bench. Plus he's a left-wing punk.
I have seen Chris Broussard and some other black basketball commentators attribute the success of non-American players in the NBA to having worked a lot more on skill in their formative years rather than just playing an endless series of AAU games like most of the black players do. This might also apply to white Americans who don't play a ton of basketball with blacks in competitive leagues. Game experience is good of course but from observing my boys it does tend to reward athletic hero ball players who seek to dominate the offense rather than fundamental team basketball.
And obviously the earlier maturity and generally higher level of aggressiveness of black kids can be intimidating, especially when accompanied by legions of hooting parents and relatives who have no compunction about talking trash to little white kids on the court. One of my most cherished sports memories is when one of my sons' extremely white team played a club called Blackout (you can guess) in a very physical game with screaming hood parents on the sidelines and my kid hit a 3 to put the game out of reach and flexed in front of the bench. It was glorious.
Yeah I live in Europe and my kids play soccer. Talent is identified as young as age five and hothoused.
Lamine Yamal - who has the potential to be the greatest player ever - is still 17 and has already won a tournament with the Spanish national team. He’s been coached by the best at FC Barcelona’s academy 20 hours a week for most of his life. You can watch clips of him on YouTube aged 13 playing underage rivals Real Madrid and there are thousands in attendance!
The American notion of ambling through high school and college playing pointless games seems rather quaint.
There was a real good NYT Magazine article around 2010 about why Netherlands is so good in the soccer World Cup despite its limited population. Pretty much the same thing as basketball. They take 7 year old boys and train them in drills over and over until a few go pro at 16. They don't let them play as many games as American soccer kids. Soccer in America is intended to be fun for kids and good exercise: lots of games and college scholarships as the big goal.
Dutch soccer players do not go to college.
And youth soccer in the US is pretty white and middle class and the parents like it that way.
The downside of the European system is that the players are treated as commodities and their education is often neglected. Obviously some of the players make it big, and some can make a living wage playing pro soccer in lower divisions, but if you get hurt or just don't improve enough, you're left without a lot of options.
Of course the AAU basketball system is probably the worst of all worlds. I'm sure some of the coaches involved are decent, well-meaning people, but the system largely prioritizes recruiting and winning over developing talent.
The best educated England players usually seem to be sons of professional footballers who paid for them to go to private school. Defensive midfielder Owen Hargreaves had a somewhat different background (grew up in Canada and started playing professionally in Germany) for which he was often mocked as “posh”.
Iceland, small and mono-cultural (pop. 330K) seems to be the exception where it has built a successful national team through mass participation, coaching and perhaps love of the game. Although the national squad might play professionally overseas, the structure seems to be built on amateur participation within Iceland
How many rock stars playing black-influenced music grew up around many blacks? Off-hand I can think of two from Detroit, Eminem and Jack White (whose parents stayed put because they worked for the archdiocese). White’s post-White Stripes music reveals him as one of the few modern rock stars to take much interest in post-1980 hip hop.
Popular music was one of the least segregated of all industries in the 1960s. Everyone thinks of Motown as black but there were a few white players in the house band. The Beatles and the Stones of course mixed and played with lots of black musicians.
I don’t keep up with current fads but contemporary hip-hop strikes me as *very* black. Bands of all kinds have been on the wane and musicians seem to play less with other musicians and tend to do it all in the studio. Seems to lead to more segregation.
“The Beatles and the Stones of course mixed and played with lots of black musicians”
At the same time until replacing Bill Wyman the Stones’ touring band down to pianists and saxophonists was almost entirely white, e.g. saxophonist Bobby Keys from Slaton, Texas (5% black in 2020).
Of course, the paradigmatic example is Elvis Presley from Tupelo, Mississippi. The thesis of Baz Luhrmann’s movie is that Elvis was something like a white basketball player from Harlem. But in general rock stars seem more often to be from places like Dartford, Hibbing, Liverpool or Aberdeen, WA.
You could listen to other races' radio stations in the segregated south all you wanted. At night, you could pick up AM stations from hundreds of miles away. Bob Marley in Jamaica could listen to New Orleans AM stations at night.
The book about Dylan and Seeger that inspired the movie says that the young Dylan listened to a station from Shreveport, Louisiana that was bounced via Little Rock. The record store in Shreveport that advertised on the station was surprised when they started getting orders from Bobby Zimmerman in Minnesota.
I don't follow sports but these occasional stories of a white gentile succeeding in this world (and with that name! No hiding on that resume!) just warm my heart.
I wonder why you are looking at the top white players of all time and covers changing patterns of racial integration. It's a small sample and a high bar. To cast a broader net why not look at all the players in March madness from a few years ago, divide the players into two home town groups (lilly white v vibrant) and see if the two groups have significantly different rates of progressing to the NBA?
Another possibility- someone made a graph of home counties of march madness players.
The race data and populations of the counties should be available. You could check white players in the tournament divided by white population of the home county. If you see a significantly higher chance in all white counties, something that swamps all the other differences, it would be strong evidence. I don't think you will ever get close to unbiased stats on how much specifically each white player played with blacks in his youth.
A sample size of 50 seems like a start. Plus, the best known players like Larry Bird have been interviewed endlessly about questions like where did Bird learn to trash talk like that? So you can pick up important anecdotes like that than you could with 500 obscure players.
What are you comparing the anecdotes to? Let's say you find that 90% of the top white players of all time never had to compete with black kids before age 18. Is that a lot or a little? Are you comparing them to the pool of all boys who have ever played on a playground? I'd bet 90% of young white kids never played basketball with more than one or two black kids. Are you going to compare them to kids who played some high school ball?
Is your hypothesis that it would be more common in the 50 top players than the rest of the white players, or is it more that this gives you a leg up in getting to the NBA so it would be reflected proportionally in the top fifty? I would assume the effect has petered out long before the NBA so it is crucial to decide who's in the control group.
Yes, but we make simplifying assumptions all the time when doing population health studies. It won't work well if you want to limit it to 50 top players. I don't see extrapolating results from the top 50 guys of all times. I suppose it depends what you are trying to demonstrate. If it's to falsify the idea that being in the crucible young with the black players makes white players better, it's a valid method.
How do you hypothesize the effect works? Is it more
1) A hard filter for mediocre players or
2) Exerts a steady downward pressure constantly, on a player's ability relative to his potential?
Bill Laimbeer's father was a year behind mine at Harvard, where they were in the same final club. Says here that Laimbeer grew up a town away from where I did in the Chicago suburbs before his family moved to Palos Verdes–certainly a much fancier address than Clarendon Hills IL, but Clarendon Hills was perfectly pleasant and very white. Given all that, it's pretty weird that Laimbeer became such a famously thuggish presence on the Pistons with Rodman et al.
In high school, Laimbeer's Palos Verdes upset the most celebrated L.A. team of the era, all black Verbum Dei with two NBA first round draft picks, David Greenwood and Roy Hamilton.
There were about 1 million African-Americans living within about 1 hour drive of Palos Verdes so Laimbeer could go get all the black playground competition he felt like. For example, Venice Beach had a pretty intense pick-up basketball game scene, and that was very mixed race.
I was a tall white boy in Indiana in the 1970s, when the boys' high school basketball tournament was still the biggest thing in the universe. "Hoosier Hysteria" faded quite a bit when they divided schools into classes by population early in the 90s. But I well remember the single-minded focus at every level on teaching white boys "The Black Game." Busing students ten minutes out of the way to ensure racial balance in the classroom was taken as an act of war, but it was fine and dandy that from the age of six white boys would be on teams that would regularly travel two or three hours to cities where they could to play basketball against black competition. And black teenagers who would attract police attention if they walked through a white neighborhood empty handed could walk up any driveway with a hoop at the end of it if they were carrying a basketball and expect a friendly reception. My dad finally took our hoop down when crack came to town, but it was nice while it lasted.
Good point. NBA players didn't exploit the 3 point rule intelligently for a long time in part because the culture of street ball emphasized the dribble drive.
Finally in this century you get a culture shift toward 3 pointers led by rich black kids like Stephen Curry who no doubt had his own driveway growing up to practice outside shots in.
Drazen Petrovic was sort of a proto-Curry in that he scored a lot, mainly on three-pointers, of which he hit an insanely high percentage (45% in his last season, 52% overall on field goals)
By the way, I once had a dinner at a Benihanas with a couple from Spokane, WA. The young man told me that Mark Rypien's public school defeated John Stockton's Catholic school in Spokane. Stockton, of course, is one of the greatest point-guards in basketball history. Rypien was an outstanding, but not great, quarterback for the Washington Redskins.
Drazen Petrovic isn’t white?
The high rate of success of European players compared to American players seems to be evidence of your theory. My role model in my high school days was Adrian Dantley, a short man who somehow dominated inside the paint. I probably should have worked more hours on my outside shot.
Dantley was quite a force down low for a man only 6'5". Barkley had a similar body.
Petrovic must have been white, otherwise Rod Strickland wouldn't have punched him.
Right. Blacks are allowed to punch out whites in basketball. Part of the game.
Black boys seem to mature faster than white boys. Anecdotally, I went to a high school that was over 40 % black. I was one of three white boys on the Junior Varsity football team and one of those was, naturally, the punter. The other became my Best Man when I married. By the time we reached Varsity, the roster was about 50/50 racially. The white boys caught up in the maturing process.
I am in agreement with Steve Sailer in thinking that white boys developing at their own pace is best. When the white boys are put on teams with large amounts of blacks, they tend to defer to the more aggressive black boys.
At some point at the end of the maturing process, it is good to get the white boys playing against the best competition available of any race.
Mark Price and his younger brother Brent were the sons of a coach.
One of my first basketball memories was that of LSU and Pistol Pete Maravich going up against Kentucky and Dan Issel. At that time, Kentucky ruled the SEC, at the time a football conference. Each team was all white. Maravich scored something like 55 points and Issel 44, almost a one-on-one competition. Both were so much better than the other players on the court.
Bobby Orr was a greater player than Wayne Gretzky.
I remember thinking Hornacek and Hersey Hawkins (black, from Chicago Public League) had very similar games
Flagg is a delight to watch, especially for his passing and rebounding. I'd like to see him stay at Duke and get his degree.
His body is still maturing.
Why not use Duke's $ 12,000,000,000 endowment to self-insure him against the risk of a career-limiting injury so he doesn't feel the need to enter the NBA at such a young age?
With NIL, it's not like he's leaving everything on the table by staying in college.
I'm assuming his NIL money is in the several millions range while his initial contract may guarantee hundreds of millions. I think back to some of the decisions I made when I was 18. I'm glad there was no video evidence.
Hard to argue with that. I assume he has trainers and coaches who are looking at his physical metrics and comparing them to NBA players and telling him he's good to go.
.Speaking of NIL, do any of those "student"-athletes still bother going to class? I'd just show the Dean of Academic Affairs my bank balance and tell her I've already got all the remedial math I need.
I believe most universities have gimme professors that pass anyone who can mark his X on a sheet of paper.
Due to the NBA's collective bargaining agreement, the initial contracts aren't much when compared to the 2nd or 3rd deal you sign. What you really want is the supermax extension after your four-year rookie deal is up. So it makes sense to get out of college when you can if you're expected to be an elite NBA player.
I'm surprised that Tony Kucoc did not make the top 50; he was really good and a key component of the Jordan Bulls' title runs in the '90's (which also included Steve Kerr and John Paxson).
"For instance, Wayne Gretzky, recognized from an early age as The Promised One". Fascinating that the top 2 goal scorers all-time for hockey will have Slavic (Russian!) surnames. Clearly Gretzky was the greatest as his all-around game was phenomenal (scoring, passing, on-ice awareness, etc.), and lifted his team (with great supporting cast) to multiple Stanley Cups. Ovechkin, an immense talent, is clearly more a pure goal scorer, with only the one Cup title.
I am sure you could exchange certain players for others. Other great white players off the top of my head. Brian Winters. Kiki Vanderweghe. Paul Westphal. Sven Nater. Geoff Petrie, whose career was ruined by knee problems in an era when surgery was not much of an option. Ditto Jeff Ruland. Both Van Arsdales. Doug Moe. Louie Dampier. Doug Collins. Vern Mikkelson and Jim Pollard from the old Minneapolis Lakers. I'm sure others could fit.
Kerr shouldn't be put on the list. He was always just a role player off the bench. Plus he's a left-wing punk.
A lot of comparable talent from 25 to 75. Ranker's list goes all the way to 100, but I thought 50 was enough for my purposes.
Rudy Tomjanovich and Jerry Sloan come to mind. Both were fine coaches as well.
I have seen Chris Broussard and some other black basketball commentators attribute the success of non-American players in the NBA to having worked a lot more on skill in their formative years rather than just playing an endless series of AAU games like most of the black players do. This might also apply to white Americans who don't play a ton of basketball with blacks in competitive leagues. Game experience is good of course but from observing my boys it does tend to reward athletic hero ball players who seek to dominate the offense rather than fundamental team basketball.
And obviously the earlier maturity and generally higher level of aggressiveness of black kids can be intimidating, especially when accompanied by legions of hooting parents and relatives who have no compunction about talking trash to little white kids on the court. One of my most cherished sports memories is when one of my sons' extremely white team played a club called Blackout (you can guess) in a very physical game with screaming hood parents on the sidelines and my kid hit a 3 to put the game out of reach and flexed in front of the bench. It was glorious.
Yeah I live in Europe and my kids play soccer. Talent is identified as young as age five and hothoused.
Lamine Yamal - who has the potential to be the greatest player ever - is still 17 and has already won a tournament with the Spanish national team. He’s been coached by the best at FC Barcelona’s academy 20 hours a week for most of his life. You can watch clips of him on YouTube aged 13 playing underage rivals Real Madrid and there are thousands in attendance!
The American notion of ambling through high school and college playing pointless games seems rather quaint.
There was a real good NYT Magazine article around 2010 about why Netherlands is so good in the soccer World Cup despite its limited population. Pretty much the same thing as basketball. They take 7 year old boys and train them in drills over and over until a few go pro at 16. They don't let them play as many games as American soccer kids. Soccer in America is intended to be fun for kids and good exercise: lots of games and college scholarships as the big goal.
Dutch soccer players do not go to college.
And youth soccer in the US is pretty white and middle class and the parents like it that way.
The downside of the European system is that the players are treated as commodities and their education is often neglected. Obviously some of the players make it big, and some can make a living wage playing pro soccer in lower divisions, but if you get hurt or just don't improve enough, you're left without a lot of options.
Of course the AAU basketball system is probably the worst of all worlds. I'm sure some of the coaches involved are decent, well-meaning people, but the system largely prioritizes recruiting and winning over developing talent.
The best educated England players usually seem to be sons of professional footballers who paid for them to go to private school. Defensive midfielder Owen Hargreaves had a somewhat different background (grew up in Canada and started playing professionally in Germany) for which he was often mocked as “posh”.
Iceland, small and mono-cultural (pop. 330K) seems to be the exception where it has built a successful national team through mass participation, coaching and perhaps love of the game. Although the national squad might play professionally overseas, the structure seems to be built on amateur participation within Iceland
How many rock stars playing black-influenced music grew up around many blacks? Off-hand I can think of two from Detroit, Eminem and Jack White (whose parents stayed put because they worked for the archdiocese). White’s post-White Stripes music reveals him as one of the few modern rock stars to take much interest in post-1980 hip hop.
Popular music was one of the least segregated of all industries in the 1960s. Everyone thinks of Motown as black but there were a few white players in the house band. The Beatles and the Stones of course mixed and played with lots of black musicians.
I don’t keep up with current fads but contemporary hip-hop strikes me as *very* black. Bands of all kinds have been on the wane and musicians seem to play less with other musicians and tend to do it all in the studio. Seems to lead to more segregation.
“The Beatles and the Stones of course mixed and played with lots of black musicians”
At the same time until replacing Bill Wyman the Stones’ touring band down to pianists and saxophonists was almost entirely white, e.g. saxophonist Bobby Keys from Slaton, Texas (5% black in 2020).
Of course, the paradigmatic example is Elvis Presley from Tupelo, Mississippi. The thesis of Baz Luhrmann’s movie is that Elvis was something like a white basketball player from Harlem. But in general rock stars seem more often to be from places like Dartford, Hibbing, Liverpool or Aberdeen, WA.
You could listen to other races' radio stations in the segregated south all you wanted. At night, you could pick up AM stations from hundreds of miles away. Bob Marley in Jamaica could listen to New Orleans AM stations at night.
The book about Dylan and Seeger that inspired the movie says that the young Dylan listened to a station from Shreveport, Louisiana that was bounced via Little Rock. The record store in Shreveport that advertised on the station was surprised when they started getting orders from Bobby Zimmerman in Minnesota.
I don't follow sports but these occasional stories of a white gentile succeeding in this world (and with that name! No hiding on that resume!) just warm my heart.
I wonder why you are looking at the top white players of all time and covers changing patterns of racial integration. It's a small sample and a high bar. To cast a broader net why not look at all the players in March madness from a few years ago, divide the players into two home town groups (lilly white v vibrant) and see if the two groups have significantly different rates of progressing to the NBA?
Another possibility- someone made a graph of home counties of march madness players.
https://www.reddit.com/r/CollegeBasketball/comments/1jdl5x5/oc_the_hometown_of_every_american_player_in_the/
The race data and populations of the counties should be available. You could check white players in the tournament divided by white population of the home county. If you see a significantly higher chance in all white counties, something that swamps all the other differences, it would be strong evidence. I don't think you will ever get close to unbiased stats on how much specifically each white player played with blacks in his youth.
A sample size of 50 seems like a start. Plus, the best known players like Larry Bird have been interviewed endlessly about questions like where did Bird learn to trash talk like that? So you can pick up important anecdotes like that than you could with 500 obscure players.
What are you comparing the anecdotes to? Let's say you find that 90% of the top white players of all time never had to compete with black kids before age 18. Is that a lot or a little? Are you comparing them to the pool of all boys who have ever played on a playground? I'd bet 90% of young white kids never played basketball with more than one or two black kids. Are you going to compare them to kids who played some high school ball?
Is your hypothesis that it would be more common in the 50 top players than the rest of the white players, or is it more that this gives you a leg up in getting to the NBA so it would be reflected proportionally in the top fifty? I would assume the effect has petered out long before the NBA so it is crucial to decide who's in the control group.
The Larry Bird anecdote is evidence to not take the Census data on French Lick's black population fully at face value.
Yes, but we make simplifying assumptions all the time when doing population health studies. It won't work well if you want to limit it to 50 top players. I don't see extrapolating results from the top 50 guys of all times. I suppose it depends what you are trying to demonstrate. If it's to falsify the idea that being in the crucible young with the black players makes white players better, it's a valid method.
How do you hypothesize the effect works? Is it more
1) A hard filter for mediocre players or
2) Exerts a steady downward pressure constantly, on a player's ability relative to his potential?
"Only three of the top 50 white players are Americans who joined the NBA in this century: Gordon Hayward, Kyle Korver, and J.J. Redick."
Kevin Love makes 4.
Thanks.
Bill Laimbeer's father was a year behind mine at Harvard, where they were in the same final club. Says here that Laimbeer grew up a town away from where I did in the Chicago suburbs before his family moved to Palos Verdes–certainly a much fancier address than Clarendon Hills IL, but Clarendon Hills was perfectly pleasant and very white. Given all that, it's pretty weird that Laimbeer became such a famously thuggish presence on the Pistons with Rodman et al.
In the Pistons documentary "Bad Boys" it's clear in the Laimbeer interview that he is insane, or something
Okay, that might well explain it.
In high school, Laimbeer's Palos Verdes upset the most celebrated L.A. team of the era, all black Verbum Dei with two NBA first round draft picks, David Greenwood and Roy Hamilton.
There were about 1 million African-Americans living within about 1 hour drive of Palos Verdes so Laimbeer could go get all the black playground competition he felt like. For example, Venice Beach had a pretty intense pick-up basketball game scene, and that was very mixed race.
I don't know how much Laimbeer did.
I spent one hour in Venice Beach in 1986. I don't ever want to go back. What a freak show!
We still grow 'em tall in rural New England
I was a tall white boy in Indiana in the 1970s, when the boys' high school basketball tournament was still the biggest thing in the universe. "Hoosier Hysteria" faded quite a bit when they divided schools into classes by population early in the 90s. But I well remember the single-minded focus at every level on teaching white boys "The Black Game." Busing students ten minutes out of the way to ensure racial balance in the classroom was taken as an act of war, but it was fine and dandy that from the age of six white boys would be on teams that would regularly travel two or three hours to cities where they could to play basketball against black competition. And black teenagers who would attract police attention if they walked through a white neighborhood empty handed could walk up any driveway with a hoop at the end of it if they were carrying a basketball and expect a friendly reception. My dad finally took our hoop down when crack came to town, but it was nice while it lasted.
Chris Mullin is also an outlier in that he is one of the few NYC players known as a really good long-range shooter instead of a dribble-driver
Good point. NBA players didn't exploit the 3 point rule intelligently for a long time in part because the culture of street ball emphasized the dribble drive.
Finally in this century you get a culture shift toward 3 pointers led by rich black kids like Stephen Curry who no doubt had his own driveway growing up to practice outside shots in.
Drazen Petrovic was sort of a proto-Curry in that he scored a lot, mainly on three-pointers, of which he hit an insanely high percentage (45% in his last season, 52% overall on field goals)
Also Mullin was an outlier in that he looked like a NASA engineer but talked like a wigger.
Andrei Kirilenko, 6'9" and posterized by 6'1" Baron Davis. Maybe the best argument for doubting that Flagg will be a star.
Dave Debusschere was another player on the All-White team who played MLB.
By the way, I once had a dinner at a Benihanas with a couple from Spokane, WA. The young man told me that Mark Rypien's public school defeated John Stockton's Catholic school in Spokane. Stockton, of course, is one of the greatest point-guards in basketball history. Rypien was an outstanding, but not great, quarterback for the Washington Redskins.