Basketball
Drollinger played basketball at Grossmont High School and was the CIF Southern Section MVP, as his team won the 1972 CIF championship as a high school All-American. He was a 7'2" (2.19 m) and 250 lb (114 kg) center and played collegiately at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He played for two national championship teams under coach John Wooden and after his first season, won the Seymour Armond Award as UCLA's most outstanding freshman. In his junior and senior years he was an Academic All-American.
Drollinger was the first player in NCAA history to go to four Final Four Tournaments.
Drollinger was taken in the NBA Draft three times. He chose to forgo the NBA during those years to instead play with Athletes in Action, an evangelistic basketball team that toured the world and preached the gospel at halftimes and represented America in the 1978 FIBA World Championship. He was selected with the 17th pick in the seventh round in 1976 by the Boston Celtics, with the 1st pick of the eighth round in 1977 by the New York Nets, and finally with the 17th pick of the fifth round in 1978 by the Seattle SuperSonics. Signing with the Dallas Mavericks in June 1980 as a free agent, he played in only six games due to a knee injury which led to his retirement from basketball in March 1981. In the Mavs' inaugural season in 1980–81, he averaged 2.5 points, 3.2 rebounds and 2.3 assists per game.
Some years later after his retirement, Dr. James Dobson invited Drollinger to play in an early morning pick up game with Pete Maravich. That morning Maravich collapsed in the middle of the game from a massive heart attack. Dobson and Drollinger administered CPR, but to no avail; Maravich was pronounced dead upon arrival at the hospital.
He was selected as one of the Fabulous 50 Basketball Players by the San Diego Hall of Champions in 2011.
Read more about this topic: Ralph Drollinger
Famous quotes containing the word basketball:
“Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.”
—Stephen Dunn (b. 1939)