Remembering Howard Garfinkel

By Ed Odeven
TOKYO (May 13, 2016) – As the basketball world mourns the passing of Howard Garfinkel, who died at age 86 last weekend, tributes have poured in from all over, and rightfully so.

The one-of-a-kind hoop talent evaluator and co-founder of the Five-Star Basketball Camps made a profound impact on the game, from his native New York to the West Coast, where a coach named John Wooden famously read Garfinkel’s typed analysis of a high school phenom named Lew Alcindor back in the 1960s. (Wooden, like many coaches of that era, relied on Garfinkel’s vast East Coast scouting and beyond and paid for his scouting reports, The New York Times and other media outlets have written.)

Of course, Alcindor, the future Hall of Famer who later changed his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, wound up at UCLA, and the rest is history.

In its obituary, The New York Times…