Did Evergreen High School beat T.R. Miller, 104-57, in basketball in 1958?

The bracket for this year’s Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament was released Sunday night, so everybody was busy filling out blank brackets on Monday morning.

I too participated in this yearly ritual, thus rendering a sheet of paper worthless as it will undoubtedly become after the first few upsets. If you bet money on the tourney, you can bet for sure that there will be more than a few upsets and the team you’ve got picked to win it all, won’t. There are no other “safe” bets when it comes to the tournament.

On my bracket, I’ve got Kansas, a No. 2 seed, winning it all. My other Final Four teams include North Carolina, Arizona and Louisville. I look for Louisville to face Kansas in the championship game if they can get past the likes of Kentucky, Duke and Michigan.

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Hillcrest High School Athletic Director Larry Boykin and I got into an interesting discussion one day last week about how truly remarkable it is when a player signs a football scholarship with any university, whether it’s a big school like Alabama or a smaller school like Troy or Stillman.

In some ways, the odds of any high school player signing a scholarship are sort of like the odds of them hitting the lottery. According to the NCAA, 310,465 seniors played high school football last year, but only 20,042 (6.5 percent) will ever play college football. Only 1.5 percent of those players will ever play in the NFL and even fewer (about 150) will still be in the league four years later.

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Before I close this thing out this week, I wanted to mention that Ronnie Fowler Short of Monroeville sent me an interesting, sports-related note the other day that many of you will find interesting.

According to Ronnie, the Gadsden Times newspaper in Etowah County reported on Feb. 12, 1958 that Evergreen High School beat T.R. Miller, 104-57, in basketball. This was the first that I’d ever heard about this high-scoring game, and as best that I could remember, I’d never encountered it while researching my regular Sports Flashback feature each week.

On Monday, I began digging through old editions of The Courant from 1958 and as far as I could tell, The Courant didn’t report the result of this basketball game, that is, unless I just flat-out missed it.

While 104 points is a lot of points for a high school basketball game, it’s far short of the state record which was set earlier this year by the boys team from Wenonah High School in Birmingham. Wenonah scored 154 points in a sub-regional playoff win over Hayden, who scored 56 points. The record for most points scored in a game by a girls team was set during the 1997-1998 season when the girls team at Butler High School in Huntsville beat Bob Jones, 143-26.

In the end, if any of you out there in the reading audience know anything about the 1958 Evergreen-T.R. Miller game mentioned above, please call me at the newspaper office at 578-1492.