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IllustrateD volume 24, issue 5 67 f BY MARK MONTIETH Special to Gold and Black Illustrated H e averaged 1.5 points per game as a college fresh- man, after which some coaches dropped hints about taking up football instead. He averaged 1.9 points over an unlikely seven-season NBA career, where he was a classic end-of-the-bench crowd favorite. Between the bookends of his college and professional basketball careers, Steve Scheffler wrote one of the most unique stories a Purdue player has ever produced. It's more than just some underdog-makes-good tale. It's about triumphing over adversities on and off the court, including the roadblock that resided in his psyche. Ultimately, it was a career that required some good fortune, but provided hard-won justice. "The whole career was much better than I deserved," he says today. That's Scheffler for you. Humble to the brink of lacking esteem, perhaps, but also practical and sophisticated in his worldly view. Why him? How did he manage to grow from a player who barely qualified as an afterthought as a freshman at Purdue to the Big Ten's Most Valuable Player as a senior in 1990? Why did he, of all the players on the outstanding Purdue teams of 1988 and '90 — a player who once told coach Gene Keady that he hated basketball — have by far the longest NBA career? He wouldn't dare hazard a guess. "Let's really look at this," he says. "Did I earn that? Did I make myself 6-9? No. How many guys in Indiana grew up being 5-10 and worked just as hard or harder than I did?" Scheffler loves to debate, so maybe it's better not to get into that one. He could argue with you forever on whether or not he should have had the basketball career he had, but he'd wind up arguing against his case. Maybe it's better just to tell what happened. He grew up in Grand Rapids, Mich. His older brother, Tom, had played at Purdue as a 6-10 center, graduating in 1977, and wound up playing overseas for several years ex- cept for one season in the NBA, in 1984-85. Steve was more highly recruited for football than basketball coming out of high school, and the idea of being able to "haul off and deck somebody without anyone getting mad" appealed to him. But, he was turned off by the risk of injury and the cattle mentality of that sport, where injured players are moved aside and new ones brought in to replace them. In basket- ball, at least, he'd be directly involved in more plays and was less likely to wind up with a collection of surgical scars. He narrowed the list of basketball offers to Purdue, Duke and Central Michigan. He chose Purdue because it p r e s e n t s l a f a y e t t e l e g e n d : s t e v e s c h e f f l e r OVERCOMING ALL OBSTACLES Scheffler's learning disability didn't hold him back Wayne Doebling Steve Schefffler worked his way from being at the end of the bench to being the Big Ten's Most Valuable Player by the time his Boilermaker career was done.