Athletes - Sam Bowie

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	Athletes - Sam Bowie

Samuel Paul Bowie (born March 17, 1961 in Lebanon, Pennsylvania) is a former National Basketball Association center who is best known for being selected ahead of Michael Jordan in the NBA Draft.

After playing collegiately at the University of Kentucky, he was infamously selected second overall, after Hakeem Olajuwon and ahead of North Carolina shooting guard Michael Jordan at pick number three, by the Portland Trail Blazers in the 1984 NBA Draft, where he went on to play four seasons. On June 24 1989, Bowie was traded, along with a draft pick, to the New Jersey Nets in exchange for Buck Williams where he played for another four seasons. He rounded out his pro career with the Los Angeles Lakers before retiring in 1995.

A well-regarded college player, he suffered serious leg injuries at Kentucky, and his injury problems continued into the early years of his NBA career. Although he recovered from these injuries and went on to play several more seasons, he was never able to shake the image of being a "draft bust", most probably exacerbated by the fact that he would always be regarded as the player picked ahead of the much more talented and successful Jordan.

He holds career averages of 10.9 points, 7.5 rebounds and 1.78 blocks per game. He is the last American player to make the United States Men's Basketball Olympic Team before playing college or professional basketball; however, the United States boycotted those games in Russia.

“You Can’t Blame the Portland Trailblazers”

In 2005, an episode of ESPN Classic's series The Top 5 Reasons You Can't Blame... examined Portland's drafting of Bowie and explained why the Blazers cannot be blamed for drafting Bowie instead of Jordan:

5. The Draft is a crapshoot. Every draft has hits and misses. Nine of the members of the Trailblazers' 1977 Championship team were drafted by Portland, including Bill Walton
, Lionel Hollins
, Dave Twardzik
and Larry Steele
. While the Trailblazers did make some bad selections in the past (case in point: LaRue Martin
in 1972), they also drafted Clyde Drexler
, Jerome Kersey
and Terry Porter
, three players who formed the foundation of the team that advanced to the NBA Finals in 1990 and 1992 (and had the NBA's best record during the 1990-91 season).
4. Size matters. Until (and, to a certain extent, even after) Michael Jordan changed the face of NBA basketball, the long-held theory was that a team couldn't win a NBA championship unless it had a dominant center. George Mikan
, the NBA's first big man, led the Minneapolis Lakers to three NBA titles during the 1950s; in the 26 years (1959-1984) prior to this draft, NBA championships would be won with Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain
, Willis Reed
, Dave Cowens
, Wes Unseld
, Jack Sikma
, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
, Moses Malone
and, just that 1983-84 season, Robert Parish
. Only one team during the aforementioned time period, the 1975 Golden State Warriors, with Clifford Ray
, had won a NBA championship without an All-Star center. (1975 was also the only season from 1960 to 1980 in which the NBA MVP Award was not won by a center; that year, power forward Bob McAdoo
won the award.) Later titles would be won by Abdul-Jabbar, Parish, Bill Laimbeer
, Hakeem Olajuwon
(the first pick in the '84 Draft, ahead of both Bowie and Jordan), David Robinson
, Shaquille O'Neal
, Ben Wallace
and Tim Duncan
. The Blazers' own history bears this out:
3. Bill Walton
. In 1977 Portland won a NBA championship with Walton, a multi-talented center with exceptional passing ability. Seven years later, the Blazers coveted another like him. Portland was also smarting from letting Moses Malone
go before he'd even played for them. They had acquired Malone, who had played for the ABA's Spirits of St. Louis the year before, in the ABA dispersal draft, only to trade him to the Buffalo Braves just before the start of the regular season.
2. Dean Smith
. Jordan's vast array of talents was hidden under his team-oriented system at North Carolina. A long-standing joke was that “The only guy who can hold Michael Jordan to under 20 points is Dean Smith.”
1. Clyde Drexler
. After drafting Drexler in 1983, Portland had no room for Jordan. He wasn't even the Blazers' starting shooting guard at the time—Jim Paxson
had averaged 20 points/game over each of the previous two seasons. Jordan was a shooting guard; Bowie was a center. At the time, the Blazers quite simply needed a center much more than they needed another shooting guard.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Sam Bowie ]

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