Former Wagner College basketball player Terrance Bailey in good company

The question was simple enough.

Who is the all-time career scoring leader in the Northeast Conference?

Could it still be Wagner?s Terrance Bailey, an Island hoop fan wanted to know?

Bailey, the explosive guard of the mid-80s, led the nation in scoring with a 29.4 point per game average in his junior season of 1985-86.

A quick look in the record books confirmed that Bailey is still at the head of the class.

More than a quarter-century after his college career ended, Bailey sits atop the all-time NEC scoring list by a more-than-comfortable margin of almost 300 points (2,591 compared to 2,301 for St. Francis, Pa., Joe Anderson).

The finding prompted another question.

How many other Division I conferences, it was wondered, have career scoring leaders of such long standing?

And that is where things became really interesting.

The answer, it turns out, is just five. And three of those chart-toppers are truly bold-face names. ?

LIST OF LEGENDS? ?

How would you like to be included on a short list of players along with the great Joe Dumars (Southland Conference, McNeese State), the greater Bill Bradley (Ivy League, Princeton), and among the greatest, Pistol Pete Maravich (SEC, Louisiana State)?

It turns out, not surprisingly, that Bailey liked being included with those Hall of Famers a whole lot.

?Wow,? the 47-year-old said after hearing the list over the phone Tuesday night in his Trenton home. ?It?s the kind of thing you don?t think about until someone tells you, but that?s pretty great company to be in.?

And the other two names, former NBAer Alfredrick Hughes (Horizon Conference, Loyola-Chicago) and great early ?80s Centenary star Willie Jackson (Atlantic Sun), aren?t exactly slouches

Now, Bailey obviously wasn?t the transformative Maravich, who averaged an astounding 44 points per game for LSU in the late 60s while changing the game with his off-the-bounce pull-ups and dazzling dribbling displays.

Or the super-cerebral Bradley, who scored 2,503 points in three seasons at Princeton despite shooting far less than Tigers coach Butch Van Breda Kolff would have liked.

But in terms of a player, what was the burly 6-foot-1 rim-rattling Trenton-area product, who averaged 23.6 points per game in 110 career games for the Seahawks, keeping in mind he amassed those numbers despite having the boost of the 3-point line for only his senior season?

?He was a super athlete, and he was fearless,? recalled then-Wagner coach Neil Kennett. ?I remember seeing him in high school, and being stunned at how good he was.? ?

RECRUITING LUCK? ?

So, then, how did he wind up at little Wagner on Grymes Hill?

?Terrance slipped through the cracks,? Kennett explained. ?He didn?t qualify academically until the very end of his senior year, and his high school team was so good, he?d only play half of most games.?

Kennett stuck with recruiting Bailey from the first moment he saw the Ewing High School star catch a Rutgers-bound guard from behind at the end of what looked to be an easy fast break and pin the shot to the backboard.

?Wagner would never get him today,? said the former coach, now retired in Spring Lake, N.J. ?He is so much better than anyone else I?ve ever seen in that conference that I am still convinced he would have been a star at any school in the country.?

Bailey is a warehouseman for the Mercer County waterworks these days. He lives in Trenton with his chocolate lab, Kobie, and sometimes coaches local rec-league teams. His last foray into competitive basketball was the over-35s in the Ewing Township night league.

?We won it about five years in a row, and I stopped playing,? he laughed.

To this day, Bailey holds just about every career and single-season scoring record at Wagner. In many cases he holds both first and second place in the single-season section of the record book.

In his junior season, prior to the institution of the 3-point shot, he went for 49 points against Brooklyn and 46 vs. Marist.

And as a senior he scored 45 in a one-point loss to Morehead State.

?Back then everything was about getting to the rack,? said Bailey, who was famous for his power dunks over post players half a foot taller. ?I didn?t really become a good 3-point shooter until after I was out of college.?

Bailey is not only Wagner?s career scoring leader, he is sixth all-time in steals and eighth in assists. But scoring was what he did best. Dunks, jumpers, leaners, rebound put-backs.

Single, double, triple-teamed. The result was pretty much always the same.

?His eyes get big when he has the ball in his hands,? former Nets guard and Robert Morris coach Jarrett Durham used to say admiringly.

?I was blessed to be able to put the ball in the hole,? Bailey says now.

Following college, Bailey played in Europe and the Philippines for half-dozen years. That after being cut by the Mike Fratello-coach

ed Atlanta Hawks as a second-round draft choice.

?I would have liked to play in the league just to prove to myself that I could,? he said. ?But there were factors like guaranteed contracts that I had no control over.? ?

HALLEY?S COMET? ?

The bottom line is the guy who made the same list as Bradley, Dumars and Maravich has few regrets.

?When I was going for the scoring title during my junior year is the only time I ever felt any real pressure,? he said, looking back on his career. ?And that was more for the school and the conference than it was about me.?

How did he cope with the constant scrutiny?

?Getting on the court and playing,? said Bailey. ?That?s what I always loved to do, and where I was in my comfort zone.?

Back when Bailey was playing on Grymes Hill, the school?s sports information director, an erudite North Carolinian named John Stallings, would watch one highlight-tape play after another, and remark, ?For Wagner, Terrance Bailey is like Halley?s Comet; he might only come around every 75 years.?

Who knew back then how right Stallings might prove to be? ?

Source: http://www.silive.com/colleges/index.ssf/2013/02/former_wagner_college_basketba.html

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