Kelvin Grady-Ludington Gus Macker
Thought I would share what I thought was a very cool situation from this weekend. A few friends and myself headed up to Ludington for the Gus Macker 3 on 3 tourney. Before our 1st game I took a look at the brackets and see our opponent's captain's name, Kelvin Grady. I think to myself, out of the 946 teams here, let alone us not playing in the top men's division which is reserved for players with college basketball( I played football) experience, I highly doubted that it was the Kelvin Grady I was thinking of. I messed with the guys saying that they better get ready for a 2 sport division 1 athlete of sorts. As we get to the court at 8 am, I quickly realize that it was in fact Kelvin. We played a tight, respectable game with them but ended up losing that one 15-10. No doubt, he still has some skill on the basketball court. He is a very cool guy with a good sense of humor. We were going back and forth both on the court and with our words, jokingly of course. My favorite quote of his from the game was "Let's see what this weightroom has been doin' for me." As I am a good amount bigger than him, we went at it a little bit. After the game we chatted for a minute. Kelvin is a very cool dude and very down to earth. Definitely was a highlight of the weekend playing against an athlete of that caliber.
Sounds like a cool experience. Did you ever find out why they would let a 2-sport Big Tean athlete into a division lower than the top one? It's good that you managed to have a fun and relatively competitive game but I could picture a situation like that getting out of hand quickly into 15-2 beatdowns if the tournament doesn't check more carefully.
Yea no doubt. The tournament gets set up by player's height and experience. So i'm assuming they lied a little bit about his experience. I'm not sure why, thought. They could've competed with the top men's league. Regardless, it kind of geared us up, so it was good competition and a very cool experience as I said. With the wrong combination of things, there is no doubt things could get ugly if Macker lets that slip very often. Luckily, our entire division was fairly equal and Kelvin didn't completely take over. Whether that was by choice or not remains to be seen ha
Not to mention a quick google search of his name shows him sporting both jerseys ha
on his team when I was younger. He was the best athlete that I've played with. He has good handle and is very quick. He could've get into the lane whenever he wanted to but chose not to do it because he wanted to be a distributor which is one of the reason why he's a PG. I've had several easy buckets as a result of his quickness and passing which is nice for me because I can boost my scoring average.
I've actually played against Stonum and Hemingway along with Kelvin in pick up basketball. I got to guard both Stonum and Hemingway. Both are completely different player in terms of style. Hemingway is much more physical and is a lot harder for me to handle because he's so strong. He's a good athlete but Stonum is a better athlete. Good thing basketball is not their sport because neither of them are good shooter so I was able to sag when I was guarding them to compensate my lack of athleticism against them.
Yea he did a lot of the same in this tournament. Mainly distributed, and hit his jumpshots when he got them.
Gus Macker allows college athletes one time a year to be placed on normal courts. When I used to play in them all summer we would do top mens all summer and get our one normal court run in.
That makes sense. What was odd though is that he never played on the main court. His squad stayed in our division. I will say that the few kids he was running with were not anywhere near his level, so that could potentially be the reason for playing in this division.
Its always good to play against players like that. Especially when they turn out to be pretty cool. When I was in college we were playing in the Red Hacker at CMU (for those unfamiliar with Red Hacker its full court 9ft rims) and I noticed that there was a huge crowd around us watching our game. I couldnt really figure out why until after the game and then I found out that the guy that was dunking all over us was Mr. Michigan of that year Jason Richardson. I suddenly felt a little better about only losing by like 5 pts.
Ha that would be pretty crazy. J-Rich is not only a good ball player but a crazy athlete. Pretty respectable score as well, by the sounds of it.