Via Dave Sez, a good Washington Post article about the post-Maryland career of Byron Mouton:
Five years have passed since Mouton helped Maryland win the national title the last time it was held in Atlanta, but the significance of that weekend still casts a shadow over his daily life in the American Basketball Association. Since he started for Maryland during its 2002 title run, Mouton has played for 13 professional teams in nine leagues. Still, even in Wilmington, fans regularly ask Mouton to talk about his old college teammates and sign Terrapins memorabilia.
In the consciousness of basketball fans, Mouton is forever stuck in the NCAA tournament -- a fate that likely awaits some players from Florida, UCLA, Ohio State and Georgetown who will never eclipse the public pinnacle they experience this weekend at the Final Four in Atlanta.
As Dave sez, it's kind of sad, and ought to be required reading for every Div. I basketball player. The really sad thing about it is that it makes Mouton seem like a good person in a bad situation, in contrast to some of his ABA teammates-- he's doing his absolute best to make a career of basketball, and doing it the right way, and it's just not working out.
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A retrospective on the 1979 Bird-Magic championship game listed "where they are now". Several starting players (I think from Bird's team) were prison guards. Few played in the NBA. High school kids do not know this part of the story.
This reminds me of a guy I knew when I was temping at a trucking center in Maryland while waiting to begin grad school. One of the driver's assistants turned out to be a guy who had played on Tarkanian's UNLV team that won it all. He was a Sophomore that season, but he still scored a couple of points from the bench. The next year he got injured, lost his scholarship and dropped out of school. A decade on, he was making minimum wage and struggling to become a truck driver.