Talk about a missed opportunity by me.
Did you know that LaVar Ball, the bombastic father of UCLA basketball star Lonzo Ball, was once a Carolina Panther?
Yes, Ball was actually on the Panthers practice squad for about two months in the inaugural 1995 season _ from late September to late November (he had hurt his knee by then). Ball never played a down and so he is not on the team's 1995 roster.
But like all practice-squad players, he received a paycheck from the team and worked out alongside the starters. The Observer noted both when Ball signed a practice-squad contract with Carolina in its Sept. 27, 1995 editions and when he got replaced by someone else in its Dec. 1, 1995, editions. Both entries were one sentence long and were listed as simple transactions _ the kind every NFL team makes by the dozen every year.
I covered that 1995 team, and I never interviewed him. Nor did anyone else at The Observer ever talk to a young LaVar Ball _ or at least there's nothing in our archives to indicate it.
In our defense, Ball was a practice-squad tight end, and those guys don't get interviewed much. But my gosh _ how much fun would that interview have been?
For the uninitiated, LaVar Ball has been making nearly constant headlines this spring by saying things like his son Lonzo Ball is already a better player than two-time NBA MVP Stephen Curry and is "Magic Johnson with a jump shot." Or that LaVar Ball (who hardly got any playing time himself as a bench-warming college basketball player) could have beaten Michael Jordan in a game of one-on-one. Or that Lonzo Ball and his two younger brothers (who are high school basketball stars who plan to go to UCLA as well) will need a billion dollars to sign a shoe contract together.
So here I was standing near the Muhammad Ali of the Panthers locker room in 1995 _ well, at least a mouth like Ali, although not the actual athletic talent. And I never interviewed him! Shame on me.
