A Venerable Old Card Part 54

A little non-baseball post for your Monday morning flashing back to my high school years growing up in St. Louis.  I was a college basketball fan back in those days even though Missouri isn't necessarily the hoops hotbed that is North Carolina.  St. Louis has had some really talented players over the last twenty years, but the basketball program at Mizzou has done almost nothing to keep any of that skill in state.  Larry Hughes, David Lee, Jayson Tatum, and Bradley Bealare just a few of the examples.... The program has even struggled to keep players from other parts of the state around like Tyler Hansbrough and Otto Porter.

Not to say every year over the past two decades has been terrible, but there haven't been many bright spots.  When I was a kid it was sort of the opposite situation.  The school employed Norm Stewart as their coach, he's in the Basketball Hall of Fame, and he generally had competitive teams.  The best Mizzou team that I got to watch was the 1993-1994 team, which was one of the last years that the Big 8 existed.

A brief summary of the season:  The Tigers lost their opening game to Arkansas by 52 points.  The previous season's Most Valuable Player from the National Junior College Athletic Association's Championship game, one Paul O'Liney, watched the game and decided that he should go to Mizzou and help out their basketball team.  The senior heavy team then rolls off the rest of the regular season with only one more loss, which took place against Notre Dame, in January.  They ran the table in the Big 8 becoming the first team to do it since the 1971 Kansas Jayhawks.  Since the conference does not exist anymore, it's safe to say that they will be the last to do it.

The team was led by senior guard Melvin Booker who ended the year as the Big 8 Player of the Year and a first team All-America selection.  Previous to the 1993-1994 season he had also earned All-Big 8 honors during the 1992-1993 season.  While Booker was a great college player, he only managed a total of 32 games in the NBA with the Rockets, Nuggets, and Warriors.  

Still, the great college guard ended up with a few basketball cards.  I ended up with a copy of one just the other day.  It's even signed.....

I don't really know much of anything about this product, but it seems like there are tons of cool college basketball players in here.  I ended up with a couple of these cards, but I really liked this Booker card the best out of the lot of cards I picked up from this set.  Happy to have a card of one of my favorite college basketball players from my past.  

I hear his son is a fairly good basketball player too. 

  

Back to baseball tomorrow.