PGA Tour pro Bo Van Pelt's favorite OSU basketball players?
Published: 3/2/2011 10:59 AM
Last Modified: 3/2/2011 10:59 AM
Oklahoma State’s victory over Baylor guaranteed the Cowboys will finish no lower than ninth in the Big 12 standings. They Cowboys could finish anywhere from seventh to ninth.
More will be known about tiebreaker scenarios for Big 12 Tournament seeding purposes after six schools -- Oklahoma, Texas Tech, Colorado, Iowa State, Texas A&M and Kansas -- play their next-to-last regular season games Wednesday night.
While waiting for seed news, here’s something random to occupy the minds of OSU basketball fans: Former OSU golfer Bo Van Pelt, who is coming off his best PGA Tour season, was asked this week to pick his three favorite Cowboy hoops players.
Van Pelt grew up in basketball-crazy Indiana. He said he loves football, but basketball was his first love and he even makes it to an occasional Oklahoma City Thunder game.
His three favorite OSU basketball players?
1, “I’ve got to go with Brooks Thompson. My freshman year he lived across the hall from me and we have stayed in touch since 1993.” (FYI, Thompson now is head basketball coach at Texas-San Antonio).
2, “I’ve got to go with Scott Pierce. I set him up with his wife. So he is still a friend of mine. He has caddied for me before in a golf tournament.” (FYI, Part II: Pierce is most famous for being the “Toothless in Seattle” poster boy for OSU’s 1994 NCAA Tournament trip. He had a tooth knocked out in a pre-Final Four game.)
3, “And then I’ve got to go Tony Allen after that. He’s just a tough guy. I think that’s the biggest thing right now we are missing. If you look at every great team in college basketball, when they need a bucket or they need a stop, they have a go-to guy and Tony was that guy. The main thing about Tony was he was that guy on both ends of the floor. He guarded the hardest guy on the other team and he was our go-to scorer when we needed a bucket and that’s very rare to find in the same person.”
--Jimmie Tramel.
Written by
Jimmie Tramel
Sports Writer
