Fifty Points, No Three-Point Line: Roger Galo

Roger Galo showed up at Juniata in 1975 because a coach promised him a new gym and his mother watching him on TV. The gym came late. Everything else more or less arrived. Four years later he was third in the country in scoring at 27.7 a game, holder of 19 school records, and the owner of a 50-point night against King's, February 3rd, 1979. No three-point line. He may have fouled out. Tom's going to fact-check that.

He's still third on the all-time list with over 1,600 points, and Marty Blake had him on the Seattle SuperSonics' radar. But the best part of this story starts after the ball stops bouncing.

Galo spent 17 years chasing one question: with better food, better training, better equipment, and a foul line that never moved, why has free throw shooting flatlined for 50 straight years? The answer took him to a physicist at Temple who told him his release was "stupid," an anatomist who explained the wrist is the weakest and most finicky link in the whole chain, and a laser at St. Joe's that found the rims were four and a half inches off. Somewhere in there he drove to Rucker Park at 11:30 at night in a suit to ask two strangers on the bleachers whether his ball was spinning.

Tom, Biz, and Coach Curley get into all of it. The gooseneck. Your dominant eye. Why nobody makes a step back. Why Steph might have 12 percent of the system and Harden about five. And how a liberal arts kid from coal country ended up doing STEM demonstrations in elementary schools and writing "The Pursuit of the Perfect Shot" for Triumph Books.

Before that: Tom drives seven hours round trip to drop his son at a camp where he's the only guy on the trip, the program takes home the NABC Team Academic Excellence Award with every player above a 3.0, and Ty Kozak is in Brazil with USA Select.

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