Arkansas Sports 360 - ArkansasSports360.com

4/6/2010 at 9:52am

What's the best path from Hamburg, Ark. to Springfield, Mass.? Former Central Arkansas/Chicago Bulls forward Scottie Pippen could tell us.

Pippen, a native Arkansan, was elected Monday to Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.

Travel-wise the trip from Hamburg to Springfield covers 1,450 miles. It's a little further away in a figurative sense as the Chicago Sun Times points out:

Pippen made one quantum leap after another: the fifth pick of the 1987 NBA draft, wingman for Michael Jordan, six NBA titles, seven All-Star Games, 10 All-Defensive Teams, All-Star Game MVP, one of the NBA's 50 Greatest Players, Dream Team gold-medal winner.

UCA retired Pippen's jersey in January. Our own Jim Harris offered his first memory of Pippen in a January 20 column:

We still remember the first night we saw Scottie Pippen. He was seven inches shorter than the 6-foot-7 he'd eventually reach late in college. He was barely pushing 6-feet alongside another player about his same size, Ronnie Martin. They were the starting backcourt at Hamburg.

...

We wouldn't see Pippen again until the 1986-87 season, when he was filled out as an adult and was towering at 6-feet-7. He was amazingly lithe compared with his peers and already the buzz was everywhere that Central Arkansas had a player considered good enough to play in the NBA. Marty Blake, one of the top talent scouts, was already extremely high on Pippen from seeing him the season before. A coach on the NCAA Division I level in state tried to convince Pippen to transfer and sit out a season, but he didn't have to waste that time with the NBA already noticing him.

What a remarkable journey.