10:38 AM EST on Thursday, February 24, 2005

The first time I saw Jimmy Walker was in November of 1964.

He was a sophomore at Providence College then, about to play on the varsity for the first time, and a friend said I had to see him play because "you've never seen anyone like him before." But I was 19 and thought I had seen everything, so what did he mean I had never seen anything like Walker before?

But one night over Thanksgiving vacation I was peering through the doors of Alumni Hall when Walker was fooling around with a couple of guys at a side basket. All of a sudden, as another player rushed out to guard him, Walker dribbled through his legs and eluded him.

Through his legs?

No one dribbled through their legs back then.

But Walker did, and in a sense, that one move became a metaphor for Walker's PC career. He always was showing you something you had never seen before, as though he were a sneak preview of the game's future. He was one of the first big guards in the college game then -- big and strong, the ball on a string, someone who played in a unique way, a combination of strength and skill.

He was so gifted then that there were guys who actually fell down trying to guard him. A spin here, a spin there, and Walker would be going in one direction while his defender was lost in space, like trying to cover a ghost.

And making it all the better was the fact Walker had seemed to spring out of anonymity, a Boston kid who somehow had found his way to Laurinburg Academy, a black prep school in North Carolina. It was a different time, of course, nowhere near the in-depth recruiting that now exists, this era where kids are so lionized before they arrive in college basketball, it's often a letdown when you actually see them play. Still, even in the early '60s, Walker was a basketball godsend, someone who simply seemed to show up on the PC campus in the fall of 1963, changing everything.

As a junior he scored 50 points in Madision Square Garden, and when he was done, sitting on the bench with a couple of minutes left in the game, kids lined up behind him. Without turning around, Walker put his right hand back, palm up, as kid after kid slapped him five.

The very definition of cool?

That was Jimmy Walker in those three years at PC.

Even now, so many years later, he's the best PC player I ever saw. That's no small statement, given the number of great players that have come through here. But from the time he arrived, Walker was like a man against boys, so advanced that even by his sophomore year everyone knew he would oneday be in the NBA. He led the country in scoring as a senior, averaging 30 points a game, and was the number one pick in the 1967 draft.

Journal files

PC great Jimmy Walker, handling the ball in 1966, scored 2,045 points in his 81-game career. That total was tops in the school's history until Ryan Gomes surpassed it last night.

Even more than that, though, was his presence. He was so unstoppable then that when the Friars were played man-to-man, then-coach Joe Mullaney just gave Walker the ball at the top of the key and had the other four players underneath the basket. Walker was so gifted he essentially could get his shot any time he wanted to.

He went on to play nine seasons in the NBA, a good pro certainly, but never reaching the heights his college career promised. When he retired, he seemed to fall off the radar screen, almost as though he and Providence College were like old lovers who had drifted apart. In the early '90s he surfaced natonally when it became public he was the father of Jalen Rose, but until the summer of 2001 he had never been back to PC, had all but become a mythic figure, a picture in a media guide, existing only in memory.

When he did come back, he said it meant so much to him he couldn't even put it into words.

"I got goose bumps when I walked in," he said of his first entrance into Alumni Hall, the little campus gym that once had been his own field of dreams, back when the students used to sit behind the basket and chant "Walk . . . Walk . . . Walk," as though they knew they were seeing something special.

Now it's 38 years after he left PC, and Walker was eclipsed last night as the school's all-time scoring leader by Ryan Gomes. No matter that Gomes has played four years to Walker's three, played appreciably more games. No matter that Gomes also played with the 3-point shot, something that didn't exist when Walker played. Records are made to be broken. Time moves on. The past eventually gives way to the present, even in basketball, and there's no doubt Gomes has had one of the great careers in PC history.

But anyone who ever saw Jimmy Walker play for the Friars will never forget it.

A player can leave no better epitaph.