re: Here's to Dale Brown!

The witch hunt was on for a while. Dale spoke out vehemently against Proposition 48, along with others like John Thompson and Nolan Richardson.

Meanwhile, Dale was getting recruits from places that the program just never will today have a chance at. John Williams from Los Angeles; Ice Reynolds from Brooklyn; Bernard Woodside out of Hempstead, NY; Chris Jackson from his own mother and Miss State out of Gulfport (an area that was 100 percent pro State); Jose Vargas out of the Dominican Republic; Ricky Blanton out of Miami; Shaq at the age of 13 from Germany air force base and later San Antonio; Geert Hammick from Didam, The Netherlands; Mike Hansen from Barcelona via Tennessee Martin; Jamie Brandon from Chicago; Stanley Roberts (and his coach) from Hopkins, SC; Maurice Williamson from New Haven, CT; Justin Anderson from Long Beach, CA; and last but not least on my list - the shortlived Tito Horford. God thanks be that we parted ways with Tito when we did or else we might have seen the probation hammer ten years earlier.

Dale traveled a lot and therefore found a ton of weird and wild talent from Vargas to Hammick to some one game wonder named Hernand Montenegro (remember him???) to Horford out of the DR to Danny Moscovitz of Israel and Roman Roubenchenko from Romania. Jesus be blind if a fifth of all of the foreigners were worth a damn...but Dale wouldn't have it any other way. He'd recruit a Clarence Caesar from Iowa, LA...a Wayne Simms from DeRidder...and a Vernel Singleton from Natchez. Then, he'd go find bench warmer talent like Kyle McKenzie out of Cincinnati, OH or Richard Krejewski out of North Dakota. Hell, Dale was sent around the world to speak by NIKE and all sorts of groups and the university. I think he just made that his time to recruit. He'd see a Yetti in NePal and recruit it. He'd walk into a Turkish prison and assist one of the prisoners in escaping so that he could come to LSU and take 3 seasons to get eligible and play a combined 12 minutes. When it comes to unorthodox, see Dale Brown.

Despite the cheating, the hot temper that cost LSU the '92 SEC tourney and a much better seed, and all of the crazy recruiting of athletes who couldn't spell their own name or those who spoke not a word of English, Dale made things happen. From the Superdome to the '92 Duke game to the Final 4 appearance from a team that suffered through academic ineligibility and chicken pox, Dale was behind it all. LSU basketball was only known for Pistol Pete and bad NIT teams before Dale Brown. 1981 might be one of the greatest sports teams to not win a championship of all time. 17-1 in SEC play? Whoa. LSU is never going to be a basketball school and NEVER was even under Brown's continuous post season sppearances, but it sure was a helluva ride.