Some of IU basketball’s all-time greats were almost never Hoosiers.
The Big Ten’s all-time leading scorer and IU’s current Director of Player Development Calbert Cheaney has told the story many times how he played one of his worst high school games when Bob Knight came down to Evansville to watch him.
Knight had already assembled the nation’s No. 1 recruiting class for 1989, and he wasn’t interested in Cheaney.
“All he does is shoot, plays soft, doesn’t rebound,” Cheaney recalled was Knight’s evaluation of him on a guest appearance on Mike Woodson’s radio show last year.
But assistant coach Ron Felling eventually convinced Knight to take a flyer on Cheaney, who would go on to score 2,613 points for the Hoosiers and play in the NBA for 13 seasons.
Indiana’s fifth all-time leading scorer also needed some good fortune to earn an IU basketball scholarship offer, and this time it came because of the mistakes of another Hoosier.
Indiana held a former player’s reunion last weekend, and A.J. Guyton shared a story about how he landed an offer from Knight.
Guyton’s story involves former IU guard Sherron Wilkerson.
A picture was posted on X of Guyton and Wilkerson together at the reunion, and Guyton responded to the post.
“Sherron shared some kind heartfelt words with me that day (at the reunion on Saturday),” Guyton said on X. “The irony is, if it weren’t for his mistake, a scholarship wouldn’t have opened, and there wouldn’t have been an AJ Guyton at Indiana. Crazy world we live in.”
A 1993 McDonald’s All-American, Wilkerson was kicked off IU’s team in 1996 after a series of issues, the final one an assault on a girlfriend his junior year. He played overseas, was an assistant coach at Lamar under Pat Knight, and eventually got his life back together.
Wilkerson has now come full circle, a head coach himself. He’s leading the boy’s team at Jeffersonville H.S., one of the favorites to win the 2025 Indiana 4A state title. He credits the Knight family for their role in turning his life around.
And Guyton, well, much like Cheaney, he more than capitalized on the opportunity. The Peoria, Ill. product arrived in Bloomington for the 1996-97 season, the year that would have been Wilkerson’s senior year.
And Guyton is fifth on the IU all-time scoring list with 2,100 points.
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