Time for a little SJU history lesson. He was a 6'8" man-child at LuHi ranked either 1 or 2 coming out. Looie landed him in '77 and he never reached the lofty expectations many expected of him. His body matured early. He teamed with Reggie Carter at LuHi and they both wound up here after Reggie transferred in from Hawaii.
I think he may have been ranked #2 next to..... Magic.
Earvin and Wayne were high out of high school, but not THAT high nationally. Still remember the Street & Smith cover that year - The big 3 were Gene Banks, Kenny Dennard and Albert King. Albert was the defacto #1, but S&S had a special 3 page feature on the "real" #1 - a 6'10 soph in West Virginia named Earl Jones....
CR, I seem to remember Magic, like Felipe Lopez years later, being on the SI cover prior to the start of his freshman season ... and that's bigger than the S&S cover.
SI vault shows THIS as the first Magic Cover.
And FYI, when it came to HS hoops, SI was nowhere close to being as prestigious as S&S.....There was Street and Smith, and there was Parade covering HS on the national scene. And if you paid your subscription fee, a six time a year Newsletter called Blue Ribbon (still around today, tho evolved into the best collegiate annual you can find but with decreased HS reporting). There wasn't a "Sports Illustrated High School All America team - just the occasional national article on a single player or two. They never did live down the 1970 cover of Tom McMillen (of course, lucky for them due to NCAA rules, it took 2 years for them to actually play Varsity basketball for folks to realize how silly McMillen over Bill Walton really was).
