Big George

 There are some things you don't know, Kids Of Today, hard as that is for you to believe. Allow the Blob to fill you in on one in this morning.

Once upon a time, see, there was this high school kid.

He stood 6-foot-8 and lived right down the street from 240 or so pounds.

He had muscles on his muscles, and he played football so well the coach at Michigan State once came down from East Lansing to try to persuade him to play for Sparty.

But this high school kid chose basketball instead. And he was really, really good at it.

And if right now you're waving your hand in the air, acting like you know who I'm talking about, let me say right here that, no, it's not LeBron James.

It's George McGinnis. Who died this week at 73 after suffering a massive heart attack, and who was LeBron long before there ever was a LeBron.

He was built the same, he had game the same, but he came along in the late 1960s, when no one had ever seen anything remotely like him. At Washington High School in Indianapolis, he won a state title on an undefeated team and was named Indiana's Mr. Basketball. In his only season as a sophomore at Indiana (freshmen weren't allowed to play then), he averaged 30 points and a shade under 15 rebounds and led the Big Ten in both categories, something no sophomore had ever done.

Then he jumped to the old ABA, where he led the Indiana Pacers to two ABA titles and was the league MVP in 1975, when all he did was average 29.8 points, 14.3 boards and 6.2 assists per game.

He was the best player in the ABA whose name wasn't Julius Erving. And when the ABA dissolved and the Pacers were absorbed into the NBA, he wound up playing with Dr. J in Philadelphia, where the 76ers were an early precursor to all the Super Friends teams we see today.

That Big George was also a kind, humble soul who married his high school sweetheart and stayed married to her until he lost her to cancer in 2019 is just gilding the lily. Fact is, he was one of those athletes around whom legends grow like corn in a hot summer.

Some of them were true. Some of them, Bunyanesque, were only sort of true. 

I never got to meet Big George in person, which, given all the stories flowing like a mountain spring from those who knew him, was my loss. I did see him one time, back in 1971 when I was a junior in high school.

I was in Bloomington for a model United Nations with some other kids from my history class, and one day two of us played hooky and went to see Indiana play Iowa. This was in the pre-Assembly Hall days, when the Hoosiers were still playing in the old fieldhouse. If memory serves (and it double-faults more than not these days), McGinnis was coming off the floor at halftime and my buddy yelled "McGinnis!" and he looked up and my buddy snapped his picture.

My memento of that day, oddly, was football-related. At point we turned around, and there sitting at one end of the floor was IU's then-football coach, John Pont. I got his autograph on the back of my official Model UN nametag. Kept it in my wallet for years until it literally fell apart.

Anyway, that's my only George McGinnis story. It ain't much, but it's all I've got.

A better story -- the best, really -- comes from two years earlier, in 1969, when Big George was Mr. Basketball. It sounds like those aforementioned Bunyanesque half-fables, only this one actually happened.

In the first game of the Indiana All-Stars annual home-and-home with the Kentucky All-Stars. McGinnis went for 23 points and 14 rebounds. It was only an average game for him, and afterward one Kentucky player made the mistake of saying out loud that he wasn't all that impressed.

So you know what Big George did the next week?

He scored 53 points.

And ripped down 30 rebounds.

I don't know what that certain Kentucky player said after that. But I can guess.

Something along the lines of "Oh. OK", I'm guessing.

Which I'm also guessing might be the response from the Kids Of Today who sneer at the players of McGinnis' era, saying they were all just a bunch of -- what's the term they use? -- plumbers. 

Go back and watch some clips of Big George. Check out how he played. Check out, mostly, how the guy was built -- like the proverbial brick house, only encased in titanium.

Yeah, boy. Some plumber.

And some loss here in Indiana, where our basketball Mt. Rushmore is suddenly missing a piece.