Yesterday, SMU won its first regular season conference title since 1993. It was still a member of the old Southwest Conference back then, on the verge of being cast out into the margins of college sports, a two-decade walkabout from which it only recently returned. As American Athletic Conference champions, the team will go to its first NCAA tournament since that SWC-winning season. But SMU hasn’t actually won an NCAA tournament game since 1988, when it beat Notre Dame behind 29 points from its star point guard Kato Armstrong.
I was 13 then and Armstrong was my favorite college player. He may have been my favorite player, period. His game was exactly what I naively hoped mine might one day be, and better yet, he was the size of a normal person. Only 5-foot-10, Armstrong was a vicious dunker with a silky jump shot who did a little bit of everything else, too. Plus, his name: Kato Armstrong. That’s a name made of Kevlar-wrapped steel. A few years later, I wore No. 22 as a varsity basketball player because that was his number at SMU. Of course, wearing that on my jersey didn’t allow me to dunk with two hands without a running start like he could.
And then, what feels like now was overnight, he was gone. Twelve games into the 1988-89 season, Armstrong was playing better than he ever had, averaging almost 20 points and improving in every aspect of the game. But in January, as the entire SMU athletic department tightened up in the wake of the football team’s death penalty, he was declared academically ineligible. And that was it for him. I mean, that was it: Armstrong never played another meaningful basketball game in his career.
He went undrafted in 1989. Armstrong went to training camp with the Indiana Pacers as a free agent, but was cut before the regular season. That same year, just a month later, he was waived by the Tulsa Fast Breakers of the Continental Basketball Association. By 1992, he was being dropped by the likes of the Dayton Wings, which I had to look up to find out played in something called the World Basketball League and didn’t even finish its first and only season.
The last I heard of Armstrong, he was a volunteer coach at South Garland High School, his alma mater and the source of the only Kato Armstrong highlights I could find anywhere. SMU was a good team when he was there, but Southwest Conference basketball was not a national draw. He only really had two chances in the spotlight: that dominant game against Notre Dame, and an off-night against Duke a couple of days later, when the Ponies got knocked out of the second round. That was it.
Armstrong, to me, is a what-if more than a never-was. He might have been a star in the 1989 tournament. He might have used that to propel himself to a NBA career. If he came along now, in the age of Vine and Basketball Twitter, Armstrong would have been on SportsCenter so often he could have collected a W-2 from ESPN.
But his career was over before it really began, and there is almost no trace of it. It feels like I might have imagined all of it.
