This article was written by Jim Reese. Jim was a quarterback and assistant coach at the University of Minnesota and is now retired and lives in Tampa, Florida, where he reports on sports for a local newspaper.

I was covering a high school basketball game for a newspaper here in Florida this past weekend. It was a pretty good game for the first half and then the home team pulled away and both coaches emptied their benches in the fourth quarter.

The last player to get in for the losing team was a big husky kid, maybe 6’4″ or so, and quite uncoordinated. All the kids on his team kinda’ giggled when the coach came down to the end of the bench and told him to go in. He was only a few seconds on the floor when he got fouled while trying to shoot. He was visibly self conscious as he went to the foul line. He missed the first foul shot and then he banked the second one in off the backboard and all the kids laughed derisively, the way kids do. He turned around and ran hurriedly down the court to get on defense, just as serious as he could be. It was then that I wished I could have somehow had a video tape of my high school teammate, Bill Thieben, in his very first game fifty years ago when he, too, was an equally awkward 6’4″. And I also wished that Bill could have been here last weekend to talk to the kid.

I recall clearly fom many years ago when a similarly uncoordinated Bill handled the ball in a high school game for the first time. He took a shot that missed the net, the rim, the basket, and then clanged into the hardware holding up the backboard. I remember the crowd roared and laughed as Bill determinedly turned to run down to get on defense, every bit as serious as that kid was the other night.

I’d want Bill to put his arm around that boy and sit down with him. I’d want Bill to tell that kid that his own basketball career started the very same embarrassing way, but that now, nearly 50 years later, only one player has ever had a better NCAA career rebounding record than Bill did. I’d want Bill to tell the kid that anything is possible if you want it badly enough. And I’d want him to tell the kid that he (Bill) wanted it so badly, he eventually made it to the NBA.

If somehow that magical meeting between the kid and Bill could’ve taken place, that boy would probably be out shooting baskets tonight all by himself in back of the town fire house until two in the morning the same way my teammate Billy Thieben did fifty years ago.