Victor Page - great article

Morning all.....going to be quick here. Woke up and checked the normal papers.....found a great article about an old Georgetown hoop star, Victor Page, which you can read here. For those that forget, Page was a 2-year start at Georgetown, averaging 22.7 points/game for the Hoyas his sophomore year (96-97). He shared the backcourt with Allen Iverson for a year, and led the Hoyas to the Elite 8 as a sophomore. He declared for the NBA draft, but went undrafted....which turned out to be another bad decision in his long road of life.

The title of John Branch's article is titled, "Without Bad Luck, He'd Have No Luck at All", which I think is possibly misleading. The article describes in much detail the tribulations of the young man's life to this point. He was arrested in high school for cocaine possession and a "number" of gun-related charges......all that before he was kicked out of high school for fighting. That damn bad luck, those guns and blow just fell from the sky and into his pocket. He went undrafted and ended up in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.....where during a game he grabbed the broom from behind the hoop and chased an opponent down on the court. Sheer bad luck.

In 2003, he was shot three times, including one in the face, which robbed him of his eye. He now wears a black patch over the eye, a constant reminder of his "bad luck". He knew the person who shot him; there was no conviction. A year later he was shot again....this time in the leg. "Wrong place, wrong time," he mentions. Sure it was....perhaps it was an accident, but I'm not shot at too many times during my day (life). In 2004 he was arrested for a gun charge, plea bargained and got probation. A year later, he was arrested for theft, a charge later dropped on a "misunderstanding".

I dont want to get on this guy too much. He did have a tough childhood, losing his father at age 10 from pneumonia and his mother years later from complications from HIV. He lived with 10 other relatives in a three-bedroom house, one that operated from welfare check to welfare check. He got into "gunfire, drugs and women" during this time, developing his reputation thata would precede him as he entered college and as some NBA teams passed on the gifted gurad. Bad luck? You decide.

As a St. John's fan, I remember watching Page torch the Redmen (not Storm) and every other team in the Big East. His explosiveness off the dribble and smooth, silky jumper was a lethal combination. But, his demons took hold of the young man, and his life is now fatefully different ten years removed from Georgetown than he would originally imagine. Go read the article...it's very well written, but try and get the facts out of it and formulate your own opinions, especially about the title.