Zimmerman's Pic of Delph Spread Leads to Shift in Perspective

Former Razorback assistant kept 1970s magazine pages touting Arkansas player as jump shot revolutionist, Larry Bird as low profile high flyer

Author:
Kent Smith
Publish date:
May 27, 2023 11:27 AM EDT

In this story:

Arkansas Razorbacks

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Yesterday former Arkansas Razorback assistant coach Matt Zimmerman surprised everyone with a photo of his childhood wall that has apparently been preserved ever since the 1970s featuring a magazine spread on former Hog sharp shooter Marvin Delph surrounded by several old newspaper clippings.

Former Arkansas assistant coach Matt Zimmerman's childhood wall featuring several basketball articles and a spread of former Razorback basketball star Marvin Delph. — (Matt Zimmerman)

While the many fans, especially those whose time dates back to when Delph was on the team at Arkansas, were delightfully surprised to see the image, I was more surprised by the contents of the short article that accompanies the photo series. It's about how Delph helped make the jump shot mainstream in college basketball.

Now Delph's time never felt ancient to me like when my elders talk about all white Arkansas teams facing all white Texas teams back when the two schools were really good at football. Delph was from an era that I barely missed having been born a few months after he completed his Razorback career in 1978. That's why it was so jarring to to read the article.

"Arkansas' Marvin Delph has good reason to be waving his index finger. After all, he's got the No. 1 shot on the No. 1 shooting team in the country. That is no mean accomplishment these days, when every college from little Indiana State, with its low-profile but high-flying Larry Bird, to superpowers like North Carolina, which has deadly Phil Ford, seems to list at least one player on its roster who hits better than 50% of his field-goal tries. The reason for the soaring percentages is that shooters are leaping every time they launch the ball. The jump shot began revolutionizing the game about 30 years ago, when says Adolph Rupp, "It busted on us out of nowhere." As Delph demonstrates the motion-picture sequence below, the jumper has the advantage of allowing the shooter to release the ball from high above the defense while keeping a steady eye on the hoop. And in an era when almost all players have perfected the jumper, none has sharper aim than Delph and the hot shots on the following pages."

I figured there were videos glorifying the full acceptance of the jump shot in the 1940s narrated by a midwestern news style voice showing a court full of white players in Kentucky uniforms running drills shooting jumpers while Rupp looked on. The voiceover would talk about how some crazy guy decided to jump and shoot over opponents back in the 20s and it spread like wildfire and stuck, becoming a staple of the Wildcat offense you see today. Yet, here's a magazine writer acting like the jump shot was a fad that finally caught on in the late 1970s and is the biggest thing to hit basketball in a time that can reasonably be measured in hours before I arrived on this planet.

Perhaps I see the jump shot in a way that my children perceive cell phones. They are unable to perceive a world where people walked over to a phone that is connected to a wall and lifted it off the receiver, stretching its tangled cord to talk to someone. They can barely comprehend the idea that the phone they have is actually used to dial a number and physically talk to another human being. If I tell them we used to write letters by hand and mail it to someone who got to read it a few days later, their heads might explode. They don't understand how close they came to living in a world like that.

It's hard to wrap my mind around a world where shooting a jump shot was not only a big deal, it was big enough to warrant a full magazine spread with several pages filled with other players demonstrating that they too know how to shoot a jump shot. The only thing more perplexing to my basketball world is either half of the statement describing Larry Bird as low profile and high flying while also describing some guy named Phil Ford as a bigger name.

Bird wasn't low profile in my time. He stood on a podium with Magic Johnson as the highest profile players of my elementary years. Even once Jordan really took over the scene, if anyone ever drifted out a decent distance in the driveway for a shot, the words "Bird for three" or "Bird at the buzzer" always preceded what was often an air ball that required chasing the basketball down the middle of Cloverhill Drive in Warren. He was on our television every day between GI Joe and Transformers showing up Jordan while trying to win his McDonald's meal by out-shooting him for it. He even had most of the best lines in Jordan's "Space Jam" movie.

As for high-flying, I don't recall Bird ever taking flight. I've seen a few videos of him barely getting it over the rim for a dunk, which throws off my memories of Bird, but even that version would be considered far from high flying.

Either way, it was clearly a much different world back then and it was cool for Zimmerman to share that image. It's strange to think how the difference of even a few years in age can greatly alter someone's perspective. Perhaps that's a good lesson for all of us to learn to better relate to those even a few years removed from our own timelines.