If you are into basketball recruiting (and never heard of this guy) you will find this a very interesting read....
Howard Garfinkel, Who Discovered and Groomed Top Basketball Talent, Dies at 86
Howard Garfinkel, who changed the landscape of college and professional basketball through an innovative high school scouting service and a celebrated instructional camp that helped groom top young players like Michael Jordan and LeBron James, as well as a roster of now-renowned coaches, died on Saturday in his native Manhattan. He was 86.
The cause was complications of lung cancer, said a spokesman at Mount Sinai West Hospital, where Garfinkel died.
“He helped shape the game of basketball as we know it today,” Duke Coach Mike Krzyzewski, a frequent speaker at Garfinkel’s annual Five-Star Basketball Camp in Pennsylvania, told The New York Times in a 2013 interview.
Garfinkel, the son of a Manhattan garment worker, was a modest high school basketball player more than 70 years ago at the now-defunct Barnard High School in the Riverdale section of the Bronx.
“I could shoot a two-handed set shot, but I really had no moves because I didn’t work at it enough,” he told The Times in 2013. “I was more of a schoolyard-type player.”
In time, he made his basketball name as a high school scout — a conduit of information to college coaches in the early years of their battle for schoolboy talent. His typewritten reports on players he covered from West Virginia to Maine in the 1960s and ’70s, long before the arrival of ESPN, email and YouTube, gave coaches everywhere, especially those on the West Coast, an opportunity to widen their geographic recruiting boundaries.
Among the many subscribers who paid $50 a year for his scouting services was John Wooden, the great coach of U.C.L.A. Wooden was inspired by Garfinkel’s notes of praise about a tall, skinny center from Power Memorial Academy in Manhattan named Lew Alcindor, who later changed his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Alcindor led Wooden’s teams to three straight N.C.A.A. championships, from 1967 to ’69, and as Abdul-Jabbar, he had a Hall of Fame career in the National Basketball Association.
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Entire article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/s...ed-top-basketball-talent-dies-at-86.html?_r=0
