NEW YORK — Growing up in Chicago, Phil Greene recalls when a much smaller Anthony Davis was not nearly the player he would become.
“I played against him,” Greene, a 6-foot-2 freshman guard at St. John’s, recalled of their grammar school days in the Windy City. “He came off the bench. He wasn’t that good. He was a shooter, though.
“He barely played.”
After Davis shot up nearly half a foot from 6-3 to 6-8 during his junior year, Greene said he didn’t recognize him the next time they met with the Mean Streets AAU program.
By then, Davis was 6-10.
“I didn’t know who he was until we started playing and he was good,” Greene recalled. “He was long. He could block everything and he could shoot the ball, so he made everything easy.”
Now a freshman at Kentucky, Davis blocked eight shots in a 97-53 exhibition win over Transylvania Wednesday, including several launched from beyond the 3-point arc.
“I kept yelling to my guys, ‘Quit trying to shoot threes over Anthony Davis. He’s 6-foot-15,’” Transylvania coach Brian Lane said, according to Kentucky.247sports.com. “I would have never dreamed we’d have that many shots blow up in our hand from the three-point line.
“With (Davis’) athleticism and being that long, it really surprised our three-point shooters. He’s 10 feet off of us and still blocking them.”
Added Kentucky forward Terrence Jones: “You’ve got to shoot it faster or you can’t shoot it. It’s really hard to judge when he’s so far back and you think you’re open.”
Davis is projected as the No. 1 overall pick in the 2012 NBA Draft — read more about that here –and his old friend Greene teased him about it by saying, “You’re No. 1 in the country, you’re bound to be the No. 1 pick.
Davis’s response?
“He just laughed,” Greene said.
