By Darrell Laurant

Published: April 23, 2008

I felt bad. Not only was I the person who had to tell Robert Flood that Kenny Ray Smith was dead, but I had to wake him up to do it.

“What, huh?” he muttered when he answered the phone.

Then, a pause.

“Oh, man,” Flood said finally. “That’s a shame.”

I also felt bad for another reason. When I wrote a story a couple of years ago about how Flood (now living in Missouri), had come the closest of any Lynchburg-area athlete of making it in professional basketball, I got a call the next day.

“That’s true about Flood,” the caller said, “but he’s not the best player to ever come out of Lynchburg. Kenny Ray Smith was. People have forgotten all about him, and it’s too bad.”

And he gave me Kenny Ray’s phone number. I set the message aside, other stories came along, and I never made that call.

Kenny Ray Smith was a “pure shooter.” One of his former coaches, Otis Tucker, says so, and he should know.

For those of you who aren’t basketball fans, that describes a player who can launch shots from the outer limits of a basketball court. The ball rises and descends in a majestic parabola, honing in on the goal like those smart bombs we use in Iraq. And when it arrives, more often than not, it passes cleanly through the hoop without touching metal.

There is a soft, sweet sound attached to such a shot, akin to the whisper of drapes being drawn or the quick release of trapped air from an opened soda can. P-f-f-ft.

“Kenny Ray shot the ball from the top of his head,” Flood said, “and nobody could stop it.”

“He could turn a game around, all by himself,” added Pete Graves, a young sportswriter when Smith was playing for E.C. Glass.

As a high school junior, Kenny Ray Smith finished second in the state in scoring to the legendary Moses Malone, the first high school player to go directly to the NBA. Yet Smith came along before a rule change that rewarded longer shots with three points instead of two, or he would have left Malone far behind.

He also came along before the Internet and sophisticated recruiting methods left no promising player in America unnoticed. Landon Thomas of Brookville High School, a junior two-sport hero and the current flavor of the year in Central Virginia prep athletics, has already received 10 Division I scholarship offers.

I’m not sure Kenny Ray Smith got any. He tried a junior college in Florida, I’m told, then played a little at tiny Bluefield College, and that was it.

Nobody seems to know why he was ignored. He was big enough, at 6-4. He could rebound as well as shoot. According to Flood, his grades were adequate. No one knew of any debilitating injury he may have suffered.

“He was a good guy,” Flood said, “kind of a big teddy bear. I don’t remember him getting into any trouble in high school.”

It would be presumptuous of me to imagine that Smith spent the rest of his life watching basketball games on TV and feeling remorse. Maybe he didn’t really want to go to college. Maybe he didn’t want to leave Lynchburg.

This is what his obituary said, in part: “Kenny accepted God in his heart through baptism. He was a member of Christ Temple Church in Lynchburg. Kenneth was a very hard-working construction worker until his health would not allow him to work anymore. He was an extremely talented basketball player for E.C. Glass and is listed as the 16th of the Greatest 50 basketball players in Virginia in the last 42 years. He was an excellent companion and father. He will be sadly missed.”

Not a bad sendoff.

“We weren’t exactly friends,” said Flood, who played with Smith one year in high school said, “but we respected each other.”

I could make a few phone calls and fill in some of the gaps in Kenny Ray Smith’s later life. Maybe, as with a lot of people, some of it wouldn’t be complimentary.

But would be the point? However his last 30 years played out, I think most people who knew Kenny Ray Smith would prefer to remember him in his glory — the sweet sound of basketball passing through net, followed by cheers.