For years, it has been Internet Truth that Scott Rolen was runner-up in Indiana’s Mr. Basketball voting in 1993. Sports Illustrated says it. The Associated Press says it. The Indy Star says it, as does the official website of Minor League Baseball. The earliest mention we’ve found comes in January 2019 from the Evansville Courier & Press, but given the Scott Rolen article barrage this last week—he was announced as a Cooperstown inductee on Tuesday—we may be missing a lot of the history, buried under an onslaught of people honoring Rolen and, in the process, sharing this same impressive bit. Internet archaeologists point out that there’s a dead link on Twitter from The Lima News (Ohio, not Peru) which recites the phrase in 2010. This has been going on for a while.
The problem, as we learned yesterday when we ran a whole darn blog post talking about how cool it was that Scott Rolen was the runner-up for Mr. Basketball in the state of Indiana, is that it isn’t true.
It isn’t true.
Scott Rolen was not the runner-up for Mr. Basketball.
The 1993 runner-up for Mr. Basketball, as the Indy Star itself published in a comprehensive list back in 2015, was Kojak Fuller from Anderson, and then kind of Matthew Graves of River Valley when the original Mr. Basketball, Sherron Wilkerson of Jeffersonville, quit the Indiana All-Star Team and forfeited the title. Scott Rolen was on that Indiana All-Star Team—that much seems to be real, and we do have those highlights of him making it rain—but he did not finish second in voting for Mr. Basketball, as the phrase “runner-up” implies.
How did this lie get this big?
Our best guess is that someone used the phrase “runner-up” in a way where they counted a lot of people as “runners-up.” Take this 2018 announcement from the IU baseball program when Rolen joined the staff (emphasis ours):
“A native of Jasper, Ind., Rolen attended Jasper High School and was named Indiana’s Mr. Baseball during his senior season in 1993. He additionally played basketball and tennis, and was a runner-up for Indiana’s Mr. Basketball. He was drafted by the Phillies in the 1993 MLB Draft.”
A runner-up.
Not the runner-up.
A runner-up.
Some of the outlets linked above don’t make the mistake. They just say “runner-up,” without a grammatical article to specify with certitude. Sports Illustrated says “the,” and the Indy Star says “the,” and that Lima News link says “the,” but the AP and Minor League Baseball and the Evansville Courier & Press leave it vague. They mislead, but maybe they don’t think they’re misleading. Maybe they’re using a different definition of runner-up than we assumed. Us? We assume that when someone says “runner-up” and doesn’t specify that it’s only “a runner-up,” they’re talking about the second-place finisher.
Let’s get the truth out there. Maybe by doing so we can find how the confusion—or the outright lie—first began.
Credit to Dan O’Brien in our comments section yesterday for calling our attention to this. It’s not our place to share such accolades, but were it our place we’d say you’re a good Hoosier.
