Shane Battier 1 on 1, August 2000, by David Wilezol

From MemoryArchive

Who: David Wilezol
What: One on One 
When: August 2000
Where: Villanova Basketball Camp, Pennsylvania

I was fourteen years old and for a week of that summer before my freshman year of high school, I went to a basketball camp at Villanova University outside Philadelphia. The competition was pretty intense, and in retrospect this was what killed my basketball career, just the exposure to such a wide range of competition and realizing how hopeless it was. Anyway, alot of the Villanova players and players from other colleges could be seen around the campus over the course of the week, helping out with the camp and just working to get in shape for the season. At that time one of the best basketball players in college was Duke's Shane Battier.

I was standing by a payphone when I heard this voice on the phone next to me. As I overheard bits and pieces of the conversation that sounded unusual (the details I forget), I turned and realized that it was, in fact, Shane Battier. I patiently waited for him to get off the phone, coyly pretending that I wasn't too interested when inside I was bristling with excitement.

After he got off the phone, he stepped on to one of the courts that they had set up for just shooting around and pickup games. Instantly about two dozen kids swarmed him, and he organized a game of knockout, a game of eliminative free throw shooting. The last three contestants were myself, some kid, and Battier (I was always nice from the stripe), and somehow I knocked out this other kid to earn the right to play against Shane Battier to five. Thankfully, not many kids where around to see me get humiliated five to one against him. But I did score one point against a future Naismith award winner.