College Basketball and Baseball
Lofton accepted a basketball scholarship to play at the University of Arizona. Wildcats head coach Lute Olson said of Lofton, "He's quick and a great leaper." At one point Lofton performed a 360-degree slam dunk for his suspecting teammates. For the Wildcats, Lofton was the backup point guard (to Craig McMillan and Steve Kerr) on a team that made it to the Final Four of the 1988 NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Tournament. He was the starting point guard the following year when the Wildcats made it to the Sweet Sixteen. Lofton is one of only two men to play in a college basketball Final Four (1988) and a MLB World Series. (The other is fellow East Chicago Washington High School alumnus Tim Stoddard.) He left as the Wildcats' leader in career steals (a record eventually broken). "In strength and agility drills, he just killed it. He's a guy who could have played pro football or basketball or baseball", said former Wildcats teammate Bruce Fraser.
Lofton decided to try out for the Wildcats baseball team during his junior year. He played in just five baseball games and recorded only one official at-bat while at Arizona but his speed and potential were recognized by baseball scouts, including the Houston Astros' Clark Crist. The Astros later selected Lofton in the 17th round of the 1988 MLB Draft. He played minor league baseball during the summer while completing his basketball eligibility at Arizona. The Astros organization asked Lofton to play minor league baseball in the Florida Instructional League but Lofton declined, citing a promise he had made to his grandmother to obtain his degree.
Read more about this topic: Kenny Lofton
Famous quotes containing the words college, basketball and/or baseball:
“The mode of founding a college is, commonly, to get up a subscription of dollars and cents, and then, following blindly the principles of a division of labor to its extreme,—a principle which should never be followed but with circumspection,—to call in a contractor who makes this a subject of speculation,... and for these oversights successive generations have to pay.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.”
—Stephen Dunn (b. 1939)
“Baseball is the religion that worships the obvious and gives thanks that things are exactly as they seem. Instead of celebrating mysteries, baseball rejoices in the absence of mysteries and trusts that, if we watch what is laid before our eyes, down to the last detail, we will cultivate the gift of seeing things as they really are.”
—Thomas Boswell, U.S. sports journalist. “The Church of Baseball,” Baseball: An Illustrated History, ed. Geoffrey C. Ward, Knopf (1994)