3/1/2023 0 Comments Bald head basketball players![]() ![]() He was a one-year wonder, and for a long time after the Georgetown triumph, sports pundits were still hammering him. The media have never been good to Graham. Every time I thought I was close to pinning him down, poof. But after our first quick phone conversation in 2013, it took five months of e-mails, Facebook messages, and phone calls to arrange a sit-down. I knew a lot had happened to the guy in the intervening years and figured there’d be a lot of interest in the intriguing ups and downs in the life of the man who helped Georgetown win its only national title and then disappeared. Later that year, I began trying to get in touch with him. He’d bought the ticket at a Shell station on South Dakota Avenue, Northeast, while driving around during his shift at Rent-A-Center. On April 4, 2013, the DC Lottery sent out a press release announcing the winner of a $1-million Powerball ticket. Photographs courtesy of Georgetown University. Graham celebrating with Reggie Williams (at left), who went on to play for a decade in the NBA, and other Hoyas (right). After finishing with 14 points and five rebounds against Houston in the championship game, he never played for Georgetown again. Graham was the guy who in March 1984 alone was accused of throwing a punch at Syracuse forward Andre Hawkins and leveling University of Nevada Las Vegas center Richie Adams with an elbow he also bowled over Dayton guard Sedric Toney, prompting Toney to say, “There’s such a thing as being physical, but he comes down and tries to hurt you.” Graham was the program’s id: a 220-pound, gum-chomping, hyper-aggressive menace.Īnd then it was over. “That was a f-in’ statement.” And it was usually a statement that came trailed by controversy. “He was a bald head in the middle of everybody wearing the Jheri curls, the Afros, the shags,” Public Enemy frontman Chuck D once told me. But for a short, profoundly memorable stretch, nobody embodied Georgetown’s establishment-rankling ethos more than Graham. The indomitable, stoic center Patrick Ewing was the face of the Hoyas. With his team’s win against Houston that April, he became the first black basketball coach to win a Division 1 national championship. Georgetown, though, was led by an opinionated, brilliant, wagon-circling African-American coach who suffered no fools: John Thompson Jr. While black superstars had long propelled the sport’s powerhouses, all but a few of their coaches were white men. To the media, Graham’s attitude perfectly aligned with the philosophy of his team- then the most subversive in college basketball. He wouldn’t think twice about ripping your head off.” “He was a scary dude on the floor,” says Chuck Everson, who played at Villanova University from 1982 to ’86. ![]()
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