Snyder

Bucky Neal, a.k.a. No Intro 77, pointed out on the board tonight that Stephen had passed Dick Snyder on the career scoring list last week in the James Madison game. Considering I just posted a little something from the way-back book, well, I wasn’t going to post anything else.

But Bucky’s post got me thinking about Super Horse.

So: From Chapter 4 of the dusty old manuscript …

A blue-chip recruit before such a thing was specifically defined, Dick Snyder could have played just about anything just about anywhere he wanted. He was All-American on the gridiron, a six-foot-five mobile quarterback with a cannon for a right arm -- the National Football League prototype in 1999, but an absolute freak of nature in 1961. In the spring and summers, he earned all-state in baseball as a dominant pitcher and outfielder. Based on the pure power and potential of his arm alone, he was drafted by professional teams a number of times following high school seasons. Basketball, believe it or not, was his worst sport. He only earned honorable mention all-state accolades.

But he wanted to give it a shot in college. He didn’t like the general wear and tear that came with football. The plan was to get an education before ultimately signing with a professional baseball organization. The thing was, though, few schools gave baseball scholarships at the time. So Snyder figured basketball was his way of paying for school. The pigskin powers of the Big Ten, however, didn’t see it that way. Most of the Big Ten schools, including nearby Ohio State, offered Snyder a football grant-in-aid. So did the service academies.

Soft-spoken, pensive, almost shy back then, and even still today, Snyder never really let it be known that football was not what he wanted to do. Had any of the smaller schools in Ohio -- Miami, Kent, the schools that now make up the Mid-American Conference -- attempted to offer a basketball scholarship, Snyder said in November 1998 at his home in Arizona, he almost certainly would have remained in Ohio. Only Lefty, though, thought to ask.

Don Davidson’s dad saw Snyder rush for four touchdowns one night in an Ohio high school football game. He contacted Lefty. Lefty contacted some high school coaches in the area and got his hands on some game film of Snyder on the basketball court. The kid looked like a decent athlete. Down the road, he thought, this Snyder might fit into the Wildcats’ basketball plans. In the late spring of 1962, Lefty was coming through Ohio on a recruiting trip. On a whim more than anything else, he called Snyder. Had he made a college choice? No, Snyder said. His plans were somewhat up in the air. Not anymore. He soon was in Davidson for a visit.

“I felt very comfortable down there,” he said. “At the time, the basketball program was nothing. I knew it was a good school and I would get a good education. I had no idea our basketball team would be a top-ten team. To be honest, I didn’t know it was capable of playing at that level. But I fell in love with the campus. I was just looking for a place to play basketball because I liked it so much. And I thought I’d play pro baseball after my schooling. I figured, Hey, it’s warm down there. Baseball season is pretty long.”

The minute he set foot on campus, Snyder was a physical specimen unlike Davidson had ever seen before. Snyder compiled a record 633.8 points on the mandatory freshman fitness test, shattering Don Davidson’s mark from the year before of 547.6. In the softball throw, he heaved the ball some 288 feet -- 12 feet shy of an entire football field. During the first week of school he won the traditional freshman-class cake race.

One day before a baseball game, legend has it, Snyder tried the hop, skip and jump -- now known as the triple jump -- and set what would have been a Southern Conference freshman record and came within five feet of the national mark. And he did it wearing baseball pants and spikes. Jim Hyder, a student manager of sorts for the 1966 basketball team, remembers punting a football with classmates Ronnie Stone and Snyder. Snyder would kick it 70 yards, Stone 60, Hyder 50. “And here comes Bill Dole, the football coach,” Hyder recalled in an interview in Louisville, Kentucky, “and you just knew what was going to happen.”

The answer, Lefty told Dole, was no.