Bradshaw’s Record Is Not a Cheap Shot

If the Central Intelligence Agency ever gets kicked out of Langley, Va., I have an idea for a perfect home.

USIU’s campus.

Turn off Pomerado Road and through the gates and past the guard shack and keep on going and see if you can find anything looking like a college campus . . . or civilization, for that matter.

I made this trek Monday, which happened to be the first day of the spring semester. I was driving through the middle of this campus, wondering about the eerie absence of students or classrooms.

Surely, they were there somewhere.

One particular student was of interest to me, a 24-year-old senior from Gainesville, Fla., named Kevin Bradshaw.

Nothing very wonderful has happened at USIU of late, what with the university filing for bankruptcy and the trustees discontinuing intercollegiate athletics. Basketball was told it could finish the season and a couple of other programs are struggling to survive on their own.

Mr. Bradshaw was the subject of my search because he did something special for the sagging spirits of this university and its athletes.

All he did, to be sure, was score 72 points last Saturday night against Loyola Marymount. This represented the most ever scored against a Division I opponent, eclipsing the record 69 points scored by Louisiana State’s Pete Maravich in 1970 against Alabama.

I found Kevin Bradshaw in the athletics complex. Finding him was the easy part. Finding the athletics complex was more difficult, because identifiable landmarks, such as a gymnasium, are nonexistent at USIU.

Bradshaw was sitting alone in an office in a complex deserted by coaches who no longer had teams. This was hardly a pretentious setting for a man who had accomplished such a feat.

Most of this day had been spent fielding questions from the media, many of these questions suggesting it took some kind of audacity to just go out and break Maravich’s record.

“I didn’t think it would be like this,” Bradshaw said. “I didn’t think it would be this big. I’m surprised that a lot of people are looking at it like it’s a negative. I really haven’t had a chance to sit down and swallow it.”

Go ahead, Kevin. Swallow it. And it should taste good.

There’s nothing sacrosanct about a record set by Pete Maravich. He was controversial in his time. For example, he played for his father at LSU. There were those who thought he would never have had the freedom to shoot as often as he did had his father not been his coach.

Bradshaw has been criticized for being a gunner, for putting up 59 shots in that 186-140 loss to Loyola Marymount.

“Being called a gunner doesn’t bother me,” he shrugged. “I play within what we’re trying to do.”

OK, so gunner is fine.

So what was Maravich called? Pistol Pete? So he was a gunner by a slightly different name. He took 57 shots in what was a 106-104 loss at Alabama in his record game. Most of them were reportedly from within Tuscaloosa’s city limits.

What’s more, according to a wire service report, Maravich drew a technical foul in the first half and chased a spectator as he was leaving the court after the game.

What I’m saying is that beating Pistol Pete’s record for single-game scoring was not quite like hitting in 57 straight baseball games and erasing the elegant Joe DiMaggio from the record books.

Maravich was more the spoiled kid who got what he wanted, whereas Bradshaw impresses me as being a mature young man who has gotten what he has earned. Pistol Pete was Andre Agassi on wood.

Bradshaw has always been able to find the basket, whether he was in high school in Gainesville or his first two years of college at Bethune-Cookman. What he couldn’t find was his life’s direction, and three years in the Navy took care of that.

Gary Zarecky, USIU’s basketball coach, learned of this Bradshaw kid playing summer league ball in Muni Gym and liked what he saw. He did a juggling act with the Pentagon and NCAA, which may seem redundant, to establish his availability and eligibility.

Kevin Bradshaw was now on a collision course with Pistol Pete.

“You know,” Bradshaw said, “I had no intention of beating Pete Maravich’s record. I didn’t know what the record was.”

He didn’t then, but he does now.

The record belongs to Kevin Bradshaw. Conceded, he may be a gunner . . . just as Maravich was. That being the case, he can steal a page from the Naval air station across the freeway from USIU’s campus.

In college basketball, for one night and for all time, Kevin Bradshaw is now The Top Gun.

Ultimately, it may be all that is left of USIU to remember.