Best athlete you ever played against?

Wow. It's like an SportsJournalists.com rite of passage. One of my threads get dug up by the d_b police.

Since I told the Eric Moulds story on the other thread, I guess I'll just add that I once beat Clemson football coach Dabo Swinney to catch a touchdown pass in an intramural flag football game in college. And if any of you have ever met me in person, you know how funny that is (and if you haven't, I'm built like late-career Babe Ruth, though I was a little slimmer then).

 

Had Dabo walked on at that point or was he still a regular student?

 

Played Little League baseball against a future MLB player - Scott Pose & a future NBA player - Matt Bullard.

Pose had an up-and-down MLB career but he will go down in history as the first batter for the Florida Marlins.

Bullard was a pitcher and even then was tall for his age. From 45 feet away it looked like he was standing right on top of you when he let go of the ball.

 

It was the fall of 1993 or 94, after he had finished his playing career and was a GA. Fellow former player/GA Jeff Foshee (who is now a high school coach) was also on the team, the rest of which was comprised of student managers.

Alabama's intramural rules at the time stated that no former or current varsity athletes could participate in intramurals in the sports in which they played on an intercollegiate level. We lost the game 28-7 (with my touchdown as our only score), but turned them in afterward for rules violations and won by forfeit.

 

Stretching the criteria for this thread to its outer limits, I once caught a touch-football TD pass from Jay Thomas, at the time a DJ, later the guy who played Eddie LeBec in "Cheers."
It was a hell of a pass. Even I couldn't drop it.

 

Lifetime is pure evil. The one club here in NJ could have been run better by a bunch of retarded chimps. Without a shadow of a doubt, the most ass-backwards company I know of.

Anyway, as far as the best athlete I've played against, that's tough. I rode the bench when my college played against Tim Stauffer when he was at Richmond. Filthy stuff on an awful day. And though I wasn't playing against him, Dante Bichette said he thought I had a really good swing when I competed in a hitting derby prior to an All-Star game for a collegiate summer league in FL.

 

I once played in a pickup basketball game with Greg Gant of St. Bonaventure, the guy who took Bob Lanier's place at center at the 1970 Final Four after Lanier got hurt. He could jump to the moon.

A guy on my HS soccer team eventually had a cup of coffee in the NASL.

 

I've played golf with PGA Tour winners Brian Gay, Stewart Cink, Jerry Kelly and whichever Bryant brother is on the Champions Tour (Brad, I think). Had the future British Open champ on the ropes - then we reached the No. 2 tee.

Played on a basketball team in suburban Cleveland one summer with the 6-foot-10 starting center from Ohio U. (from the Danny Nee era), the backup point guard from California, Pa., University, and a swingman who played two years at Akron.

We played against a kid named Scott Roth, who played for Wisconsin. That kid was the best I ever tried in vain to cover.

 

I've done that before as well, and it's humbling, in every facet.

 

I played hoops with Kenny Dennard back in the mid 90's (think Gminski, Spanarkel, Gene Banks) and he was pretty big around the waist. I saw him and thought this guy, no way he's got any game now. Well, he showed me that no matter how large a guy gets, he's still got it. He was so smooth, his finger rolls were like the Iceman; he maybe did not get up and down as well as in his Duke or Nuggets days but wow.

 

Ray Lewis without a doubt. Kathleen H.S., he was about 195 pounds and I swear he ran a 3.4 in the 40.

His sophomore teammate at quarterback, Desmond Clark, was a pain to deal with as well.

 

When I was about 12 or 13 and really into competitive and travel roller hockey, one of my teammate's older brothers had some friends of friends of friends in town for part of one of those semi-pro beach roller hockey leagues (remember how bad/awesome that was?) and I got to play against a few of them on a tennis court at the high school I would end up going to.

Despite me and one or two of us clearly being children, they took no mercy and I remember returning home without a huge piece of my right thigh, which I imagined was still swinging in the breeze while stuck to the chain-link fence around the courts.

The goalie, for some reason that only seems bizarre now, brought a homemade, fold-up PVC net that must have been 2-3 times regulation size - like 10-feet wide by 6-feet tall. None of us, even the older kids, managed to score a single goal against him all day even though all he had was skates, a glove, a blocker and a stick. He even charged us if we had a good scoring late and made it a point to look us in the eyes with this wild, intimidating look.

At the time I thought it was a pretty cool experience, but now I realize these grown men were just taking out their frustrations on a handful of kids no older than 16 or 17. And it's worth noting I didn't know any of their names then let alone now.