Laramie, Wyoming: where the jump shot soars
A UW Cowboy basketball player’s innovation is seen in town statues. See a local crackerbox gym to trace his roots.
A kid brother’s getting tired of his shot getting blocked. That set-shot is just not cutting it.
Patience, he’s on to something: Plant, lift and let it fly. There’s air under those rubber shoe soles. The pair’s skill gap is closing, see here. Big brother’s now playing a little catch up.
What’s just happened?
It’s called the jump shot.
Big deal.
There has been Flynn Robinson, “Downtown Freddie Brown,” Dell Curry, Jeff Hornacek, Ray Allen and Damian Lillard. Oh, wait, what about Dell’s son, Steph?
Hold on, corral that thought. Somebody had to invent the shot. Where’s the proof? Check out a public park’s statue and look skyward for clues. A 10-minute walk away is an arena with an even taller monument of the same Mr. Big Shot, photos to boot.
In Wyoming, a teenager named Kenny Sailors tinkered with a new-fangled release, coming up with the jump shot about the time Germany bombed Poland, in 1939. The cowboy kid from a ranch beyond Cheyenne moved to a college town called Laramie and played high-school ball there in a “Hoosiers”-style gym still standing . . .
. . . where yesterday a basketball clinic was hosted by former Cowboy starting point guard A.J. Johnson (1979-1982), chaplain to the UW basketball team and founder of Point Guard Ministries. The morning started with a free-throw contest, a quick sermon and movie on Sailors himself, “Jump Shot,” screened within the throwback gym, with its balcony and court patterned with wooden blocks on end.
“Jump Shot,” a documentary, was partially produced by Golden State Warriors star Stephan Curry. As Sailors did, the long-range bomber has changed the way basketball is played.
In between a pizza break in the school that’s on the National Register of Historic Places, another former Cowboy athlete, Aaron Frude, spoke to youth about Sailors and more.
“There’s someone who was incredible at basketball,” says Frude, 43, who played on the UW football team. “Can anybody guess who he was?” Hands go up.
Even more rise at the mention of Curry, the four-time NBA champion and all-time leader for three-point shots made.
“He takes mostly three-point shots,” says Frude, director of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes at UW, boiling down statistics to mostly middle-schoolers. “Every 10 shots, he makes four of them.”
Sailors, too, made plenty of high-arching shots, leading University of Wyoming past Georgetown at the 1943 NCAA title game, staged far from the original Laramie Plainsmen gym, at:
Madison Square Garden in New York City.
Named the tournament’s outstanding player, Sailors took his jump shot to the NBA, playing for teams like the Boston Celtics.
As a long-time Laramie resident, Sailors sat down for breakfasts where locals go. He died in 2016 at age 95.
“He was always up there at Perkins (restaurant),” says decades-long UW season ticket holder Mike Scott, who rubs elbows with ex-Cowboy players. “He’d talk to you. He was nice.”
At Washington Park, Sailors’ image looms over a full court. Feet away is a picnic shelter where a Laramie High class is celebrating its 60-year reunion, talking life over BLT sandwiches.
Across the street, a fresh UW graduate is on the job as a surveyor but takes a moment to sum up the hoops-star legend.
“They just don’t make ’em like Kenny Sailors any more,” says Cooper Perryman, 22, a who grew up in Cheyenne and studied civil engineering at UW.
“Pretty sure he invented the jump shot, and he was one of the greatest basketball players to do it.”
Out-of-state sports fans might want to ask themselves whether they’ve heard of Sailors. He didn’t have Fab Five (long) shorts like those worn by Chris Webber. Nobody did. He didn’t sport Air Jordans, yet to exist.
Getting at basketball roots is needed. How many of you are cool with leather balls being lobbed into peach baskets? The game’s got to start somewhere, so be it on the Great Plains, in towns like Lawrence and Laramie.
Fresh eyes in Laramie lead to shrines on hoops. Two statues of Sailors see fewer eyes than dogs getting walked. The other locale is found toward railroad tracks: a pair of dusty school gyms better suited to nostalgically set novels on basketball, as in author Pat Conroy’s “My Losing Season” and “The Great Santini.”
The key is pausing and looking through a town’s wind-blown cottonwood trees, across lonely parks and into a needy multi-floor brick school building, used for Saturday’s free-throw contest.
Through 1959, tricked-out hot rods raced around its block, at Custer and Eighth streets. Inside, spouses-to-be would bump into each other, back when a football letterman bent down to scoop up a girl’s biology books. There today, empty-locker hallways are just off an even smaller crackerbox gym, stomping grounds for today’s good ghost, Kenny Sailors.
If you come, you will see the stuff that makes kids life-time basketball fans, from a jump-shot innovator to UCLA-slayer Fennis Dembo to shot-block king Theo Ratliff to dunk-artist Larry Nance Jr. These days, there is chiseled power forward, Greham Ike.
All in Laramie, Wyoming.
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