Originally Posted by Smitty10
If there was a 3 point line back then, good chance Smitty would've been seen as a more valuable player at recruiting time and played for Kentucky or another blue blood rather than UD.
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I don’t know about Kentucky, but Smitty could have just about named his school. UCLA was among his many suitors, but his family really wanted him to stay home. That and
Donoher made him priority No. 1 when he was at Roth. He also made a push for his Roth teammate, Phil Lumpkin, but he wound up at Miami and was a force there. Those two played against each other every year.
Late edit: Now that I think about it, Kentucky wouldn’t have been a consideration for Smitty because Adolph Rupp didn’t recruit his first black player — Thomas Payne — until 1970, Smitty’s freshman year. Rupp was a great coach but a racist who essentially was forced into recruiting Payne. He’d passed on Connie Hawkins and many others when he found out they were black. He did recruit and sign Mike Pratt, a WHITE high school all-American from Meadowdale, a year or two before Smitty came to UD.
