It doesn’t quite register in North Carolina the way it does in Indiana, but high school basketball in the Hoosier state is more or less a religion. The rest of the world got a glimpse of it through the movie Hoosiers, the best basketball movie ever made and one of the best sports movies period, but only a glimpse.
So it’s almost impossible to understand the impact Rick Mount had in that state from high school in Lebanon through his time at Purdue.
And Mount was a brilliant talent.
He shot a higher percentage
than Pete Maravich while in college, and averaged 32.3 ppg for his career.
He had a solid career in the ABA, starting with his home state Pacers, but a shoulder injury forced him to retire after the 1974-75 season, before the ABA merged with the NBA.
You can make an argument for a lot of people as the game’s greatest shooting talents – Bird, Curry, and others – but Mount has a place in that conversation. He saw the game in a way that no one else did. For instance, he could tell if the rims were unbalanced simply by looking at them, and this was confirmed when they were measured. He may have had the purest stroke in the history of the game as well.
Interestingly, both Mount and his father, Pete, are in the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame, and his son, Rich, was named to the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame’s Silver Anniversary Team.
All three played at Lebanon High.
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