I Can't Believe Flight White Never Made it Big

Growing up in the DC area, it didn't took take long to figure out that my area was a hotbed of athletic talent.  By "my area", I mean roughly the 50-mile radius of DC that covers northern Virginia and Maryland up to Baltimore and its suburbs.  Outsiders usually don't realize how much talent there is in this corridor.  They look at our sorry pro sports teams and our decent but unspectacular college ones and think that the area isn't anything special. I won't write a long monologue with stories from when I was a kid, but I can say that watching guys growing up, you figure out how to distinguish pretty well the guys that you know will be NBA stars by the time they're 16 (Kevin Durant, Carmelo Anthony and, I thought, Mike Beasley), guys who will definitely make the league (Keith Bogans, Tywon Lawson and Joe Forte), and guys who might struggle to make it even though they dominated high school (anyone remember the Jewish Jordan, Tamir Goodman?).

But there is one guy I saw in high school who I'm still shocked didn't make it in a big way.  Not in the "He should have made the league but didn't" sense, but in the "I thought he'd be an NBA star" sense.  

That guy is Flight White.  James "Flight" White played his high school ball at Newport "School".  The "school" is in quotation marks because it was really a basketball team with a few classes attached.  Newport moved from building to building, and no one ever knew anyone who went there who wasn't on the basketball team.  And a SUPER good basketball player at that.  One of the best to come through Newport was Flight.  By the time, he was 15, Flight was a local legend.  I used to get my parents to drive me out to every corner of the county to see Flight play.  If that sounds nuts, it won't be in a second.  See, Flight was the best athlete I've ever seen.  Not had seen to then, but still have ever seen.  Better than Dwight Howard.  Better than Blake Griffin.  Better than Jordan in his prime.  Don't believe me? Check this out.

Yeah, that's Flight dunking from the foul line.  And, unlike Jordan's dunk from the foul line, Flight looks like he could do the same thing from three.  And he was doing the same things in high school.  But things kind of went off the rails for Flight after high school.  He went to Florida, didn't get too much run his first year, then transferred to Cincinnati, but never quite reached his potential.  He was drafted in the second round, bounced around the league for a bit, and I think plays in Europe now.  He should still be under 30 years old now, so he's probably still playing somewhere, but I'm shocked that he wasn't at least a very good NBA starter for a long time.