High School and Colleges
The eldest of nine children, Frazier attended Atlanta's David Tobias Howard High School. He quarterbacked the football team and played catcher on the baseball team. He learned basketball on a rutted and dirt playground, the only facility available at his all-black school in the racially segregated South of the 1950s. After having a great career at Howard, Frazier attended Southern Illinois University. Although he was offered other scholarships for his football skills, Frazier accepted a basketball offer from Southern Illinois University.
Frazier wasted no time in becoming one of the premier collegiate basketball players in the country. He was named a Division II All-American in 1964 and 1965. In 1965, Frazier led SIU to the NCAA Division II Tournament only to lose in the finals to Evansville 85-82 in overtime. In 1966, he was academically ineligible for basketball.
In 1967, with Frazier playing at point guard, SIU won the National Invitation Tournament (NIT), beating Marquette University 71-56 in the final at Madison Square Garden in New York. Frazier was named MVP of the 1967 tournament.
There was also controversy about SIU's "small school" status which kept them out of the more prestigious NCAA tournament.
Read more about this topic: Walt Frazier
Famous quotes containing the words high, school and/or colleges:
“Processions that lack high stilts have nothing that catches the eye.
What if my great-granddad had a pair that were twenty foot high,
And mine were but fifteen foot, no modern stalks upon higher,
Some rogue of the world stole them to patch up a fence or a fire.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“For those parents from lower-class and minority communities ... [who] have had minimal experience in negotiating dominant, external institutions or have had negative and hostile contact with social service agencies, their initial approaches to the school are often overwhelming and difficult. Not only does the school feel like an alien environment with incomprehensible norms and structures, but the families often do not feel entitled to make demands or force disagreements.”
—Sara Lawrence Lightfoot (20th century)
“I learn immediately from any speaker how much he has already lived, through the poverty or the splendor of his speech. Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and copestones for the masonry of today. This is the way to learn grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and the work-yard made.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)