Grayer's airballs: Urban Legend or Fact?
The only entertaining moment during last night's game between the Milwaukee Bucks and the Boston Celtics occured when Bucks C Jared Reiner left his free throw attempt five feet short. Bucks color commentator Dennis Krause said "He just shot an airball... embarrasing."
Then the television voice of the Bucks, Jim Paschke, said Reiner's freethrow airball doesn't even come close to being as embarrasing as a pair of freethrow airballs shot by former Buck Jeff Grayer. According to Paschke, Grayer had one airball that didn't even make it to the dotted circle five feet in front of the free throw line, and he had a second one that went behind him.
Now, I don't doubt Paschke, but I also do not recall seeing either of those airballs, live or on tape. Can anyone out there confirm that these hard-to-fathom shots actually occured?
posted by Ty Will @ Thursday, April 05, 2007
4 Comments:
I do remember those. But what is more interesting is that I just googled "Jeff Grayer airballs" and your blog entry from yesterday came up #1.
That tells me that google has implemented a new search engine that may very well be the damn most powerful thing on earth.
Sorry to get off topic...I'm just stunned to see a small blog site in Wisconsin get into the google box within 24-hours.
Google scares me in some ways too. But I assume the reason my material gets on their search engine so fast is that google bought, merged with, or some how or other joined forces with blogger.com. So my shit just goes straight into the belly of our information masters...
BTW, I forgot to ask you about the central topic: do you recall if the ball just slipped out of his hands, or how the hell did he manage such unusual results? French fry grease?
Ty, how old are you? Reason I ask is that you know a lot of the old stuff so I figured you'd remember the Grayer saga....
When we drafted him, everybody was hoping he'd replace Sidney Moncrief. Or at least Pressey.
Grayer played on the Olympic team in Seoul in September of 1988. During that time, the team lost the gold medal because guys like Grayer couldn't hit any outside shots. Grayer really lost confidence there. The National media ripped him apart as one of the reasons why we lost to Russia. Given the political climate at the time, it was a lot to place on a young kid.
Then I can't remember exactly what happened, but he got an injury and also got chicken pox right after the Olympics. The bottom line was he came into training camp that October just a mess mentally and physically, and never recovered. He wasn't that good to begin with but the mental pressure he was under caused him to really collapse as a player. And FT's really are a mental thing.
I can't explain his FT airball shots...they just happened.
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