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SYLVA–The year was, I believe, 1994, and here I was courtside at Cameron Indoor Stadium for your standard early-season mismatch between Western Carolina and Duke.
A friend and I had a couple of press passes, and we were sitting in that tiny corridor at Duke which makes up press row – two or three feet of space separating the out-of-bounds line and the hopping, howling SAT-masters that make up Duke’s student body.
We’d done some sneaky name tag rearrangement for seats a little closer to midcourt, and we joined Skip Foreman, a bureau chief for AP who covered the ACC. My buddy, a WCU classmate, was stringing sports for various papers at the time, and was taking well-earned grief for his actions earlier in the week, when he’d held up a nationally-televised game at the same venue by spilling his press row co-cola onto the playing surface.
Harouna Mutumbo (WCU photo/Mark Haskett)
It was a dull game, plodding, predictable. But eventually, came the dunk. It was a Western Carolina dunk. I suppose I could look up the particulars but score and sequence aren’t relevant. What is relevant, at least to this post, is that Foreman, who watched way too much basketball, was dumbfounded. “Might’ve been the best dunk I’ve ever seen,” he said.
Here’s the scenario: the Cats were out ahead of the Blue Devils on a 3-on-2 fast break, and guard Anquell McCollum, now an assistant to Larry Hunter at Western Carolina, had the ball on the left wing. I don’t know who was filling the middle, but it doesn’t matter. Streaking down the right side was 6-2 swing man Frankie King, a muscular, explosive star at Western who was a few months away from being drafted by the Lakers.
McCollum slowed up a fraction to let King make up ground, and the Duke defenders relaxed a little, maybe thinking he was setting the offense. McCollum then fired his pass; not a skip pass or an alley-oop, but a long pass from around three-point range the likes of which I’d never seen. It was a pass that banked high off the glass, and that a soaring King grabbed with his off-hand and jammed home with force that shook the rafters.
A short second of silence followed, and then, if not pandemonium, lots of admiring noise, we’re-not-worthy posturing and so forth. It was easily the highlight of the night, and one of the highlights of the season for Western.
Western’s men’s basketball story for the past two decades has been made up of lots of these moments, which is good, because they are pretty much all that Catamount fans have had. Here’s another example: early nineties, Southern Conference Tourney in Asheville. Western is on its way to an early exit courtesy Chattanooga, but during a moderately-attended mid-day matchup with the Mocs, Western guard Keith Gray, whose vertical leap was astonishing, picked the pocket of Chattanooga guard Shendi Moon.
Gray wasn’t afraid to showboat, and this was as clean a breakaway as there is. But what came next boosted Gray into ESPN top-plays stardom; he stutter-stepped at the three point line, and just as he reached the foul line he slammed the ball on the floor and leaped. After jumping from somewhere near the free throw line – some 15 feet from the basket – Gray grabbed the self-fed alley-oop up near the rim and dunked it hard.
WCU photographer Mark Haskett said at the time that he caught the dunk perfectly in-frame, and that Gray was very nearly horizontal to the floor as he finished.
Needless to say, the crowd went nuts, and the highlight clip with the play-by-play call was classic. “Hey! He can’t do that! Did he do that?! I think he got away with something there! Did you see that? He can’t do that!”
Some extraordinary talent has come through Cullowhee, so much so that just about every year has seen a major league, highlight-reel player in the purple and gold. Kevin Martin, the Hayes twins, King, Gray, Terry Boyd – and this is an abbreviated list. Both ironic and instructive is the fact that it was one of the few years that Western didn’t have a standout-during McCollum’s senior year-that it won the SoCon championship and turned in a surprising performance at the big dance.
That brings us to this year’s club. Such has been the state of Western hoops for so long, and so sparse is decent media coverage in the hills, that what Hunter has on the floor this year has gone unnoticed in the pre-season. But between a strong recruiting class, some nice transfers and a core of upper-classmen, the Cats have sudden depth and talent. And after Thursday’s grittily-played basketball game between Western and San Diego State, Friday’s thumping of Louisiana Tech and Saturday’s come-from-behind win over Northern Illinois, we have reason to hope that a higher level of hoops is here to stay.
But even if some typical Cullowhee misadventure pulls this team apart, there’s still this: meet Harouna Mutumbo, nephew of Dikembe, red-shirt freshman from Toronto. What a crackerjack this kid is. Worth the price of admission, right there.
