As I’m sure most of you know, the Detroit Free Press has been running old Mitch Albom columns. Today’s piece (and I use “today” loosely — it originally ran on October 1, 1992) is a reaction to the Pistons signing Terry Mills. I guess I forgot how controversial his arrival was:
I don’t want to be a wet noodle, but we shouldn’t throw a party just because the Pistons signed Terry Mills. I know Terry. I like Terry. But facts are facts. He’s a question-mark NBA player with a history of weight problems and only a half- season’s worth of decent pro basketball under his expandable belt. Terry is a nice memory here, we watched him grow up, we cheered his championship season at Michigan.
I was hoping YouTube would have some old Mills footage, but the best I found probably isn’t something he wants us to remember him by. I was actually a pretty big Mills fan growing up, but that was probably just because 1) I had partial season tickets during the years he started, and 2) he was one of the Pistons’ best players during some awfully lean years. I hear he’s still living in metro Detroit, though regrettably I haven’t seen him around any of the Pistons games this year.
Man, I have vivid memories of Sugar Mills trailing the fast break and hitting some 3’s. A friend of mine used to laugh that he was shaped like a Barbapapa (it’s a Canadian thang) but he could bury the long ball. I swear one of these days I’ll figure out how to convert my old VHS tapes into mpgs or something, because I have tonnes of highlights and footage and good things from the mid-to-late 90’s when I was in highschool and watched pretty much every game ever.
watch those headlines, matt. first thing i thought was “terry mills is DEAD?!?”
JD — yikes, I didn’t think about that, but I see what you mean.