'Long Shot' reveled in his Guinness record
Saturday, December 4, 2004 11:29 PM PST
By Venice Buhain
Printable version
E-mail this articleSteve Myers' famous basketball shot was a longshot.
But when he sank it, the sports nut secured his and Kelso's spot in basketball history.
"He loved talking about the long shot," his sister Janice Fisher said last week.
In 1970, at age 21, Myers set a world record for the longest basketball shot that counted in a game.
"I've never met anyone prouder of anything he'd ever done in his life," former teammate Bill Ammons, owner and barber of Pacific Barber Shop, said with a laugh last week.
Steven Wayne "Long Shot" Myers, who died on July 13, would have turned 56 last month. The Kelso High School graduate moved to California more than 30 years ago. He and his wife, Mary-Ann, lived most recently in Vallejo, Calif., where he worked as a juvenile counselor at a boy's camp.
According to a Vallejo newspaper article written in 1995, Cowlitz Redi-Mix had six minutes left in a game at Pacific Lutheran University against the school's junior varsity squad. Myers was inbounding the ball from under the opponent's basket, but he found no teammate open for a pass. Cowlitz Redi-Mix trailed by 50 points.
"I was so frustrated, I just chucked it down court and it went in," Myers was quoted as saying in a 1980 interview. "I figured it was just another screw up."
"He was strong, and he just heaved it," Ammons said last week.
Myers sunk the ball from 92 feet and 3 1/2-inches away. A college basketball court is 94 feet long. According to legend --- and the 1981 Guinness book --- the referees did not count it at first, but the crowd of 1,500 booed until the referees gave the team the points.
"It was a lucky shot," Ammons said. "He could never make that shot again in 100 years."
The feat no longer is listed in the 2005 edition of "Guinness World Records," but the most similar record listed was a shot in an exhibition match that swished through the basket at 90-feet 6-inches.
Guinness recognized the record in 1980, 10 years after the shot. Myers' record ended a dispute between two college shooters who both made claims to the record.
Fisher said her brother was a private man --- except when he hammed it up as "Long Shot." He even had T-shirts and business cards made celebrating the feat, she said.
Having souvenirs of his own record must have been a dream-come-true for the collector of sports memorabilia. Football jerseys greeted visitors in his and his wife's front room, and a clear plastic box in the kitchen encased a football signed by hall of fame quarterback Joe Montana. Myers' also owned slugger Dave Winfield's World Series ring.
"He could rattle statistics off," Fisher said, adding that Myers was the guy friends called to settle bets on any sports statistic.
Myers stayed active in sports until he was 42, when he had a massive heart attack. He had sextuple by-pass surgery but never regained his former health. Fisher said their father, Floyd Myers, suffered a fatal heart attack at age 38.
After Steve Myers became ill, he started to write poetry for his family members and friends.
"Some of them were talking about death. Some of them were about being a kid," said his niece and Fisher's daughter, Laurie Roberson. "A lot of reflection."
The man who had been strong enough to heave a basketball into the hoop from the opposite baseline was on dialysis at the end of his life and was unable to work or play sports, his family members said.
He was so ill in his last year "they said he was living on sheer willpower," Fisher said.
The pain and medical treatments depressed Myers, Roberson said, but she and her mother could count on at least one topic that would lift his spirits.
"It was a shot in a lifetime," Fisher said. "He was so proud of being 'Long Shot.'"
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