Cancer hasn’t beaten Dwayne Schintzius yet

I’ll argue that the 80’s was college basketball’s last truly great decade.  By the mid-90’s, the best high school players weren’t interested in stepping foot onto college campuses, they were more interesting in walking across a stage to shake David Stern’s hand.

Oh, the sport is still insanely entertaining, and as an inclusive spectacle I will argue that March Madness is America’s best sporting event.  But for whatever reason - my nostalgia, intoxication or grumpiness - I just think that college hoops was more compelling in an era when George Michael was still in the closet and Eddie Murphy wasn’t picking up tranny prostitutes.

Back then, the personalities were larger than life:  Phi Slamma Jamma, Alfredrick the Great, the Round Mound of Rebound, Danny and the Miracles, you name it.  You can add Florida’s Dwayne  Schintzius to that list as well.

He’s most remembered for “The Lobster,” that train wreck of a mullet that predated Billy Ray Cyrus by a full five years.  Others remember him for wacking fellow Florida student Paul Sullivan with a tennis racket outside of a Gainesville nightclub called the Animal House.

When it came to actually playing basketball the guy put up some pretty damn good numbers for the Gators, going for 18.0 ppg and 9.7 rpg as a junior in 1988-89 in helping lead the team to an SEC title.

But when you play for a rogue coach like the late Norm Sloan, trouble is never far away.  Sloan was fired just a month before Schintzius’s senior season in the wake of an NCAA investigation and a federal drug probe.

In the scramble to find an interim coach, Florida brought in straight arrow Don DeVoe to play Ned Flanders to what had been Sloan’s Homer Simpson.  Needless to say, the no-nonsense DeVoe and the mulleted Schintzius didn’t get along.

DeVoe suspended him indefinitely 11 games into the season after a drunken altercation at a frat house.  Schintzius proceeded to make the suspension permanent by quitting the team a few days later.

He would go on to play eight unremarkable seasons in the NBA and then disappear from the sporting nation’s collective conscience.  But he was in the news again last year when word came out that he’s been battling leukemia.

Schintzius, now 41, received a successful bone marrow transplant in January with marrow donated from his younger brother, Travis.  He was in treatment for two more months and has now been released to an apartment near the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa in case complications arise.

Hey, the guy was a major league knucklehead back in the day who made some curious hairstyle choices.  But don’t a lot of people do the same damn thing?  The dude’s only 41 and that’s way too young to die.

The word coming from the Schintzius family is that he’s greatly improved and that his doctors are optimistic.  Here’s hoping one of the icons from college basketball’s last golden era is out of the woods.

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