Ivan Renko: An Anti-Retrospective
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A lot of people have forgotten Ivan Renko, one of the great Eurasian prospects that did not make it in college basketball or the pros.
In 1993, Ivan Renko was considered a serious prospect for both college and pro ball.
Bob Knight reputedly created Ivan Renko out of his imagination to expose recruiting experts for being something less than their informal titles suggest.
Knight’s wiki page indicated Knight told the media about a new player he was recruiting named Ivan Renko.
Note: Ivan Renko was not supposed to be a relative of one time KU quarterback and basketball backup Steve Renko.
Ivan Renko wash reputely subsequently listed on several recruiting lists of several recruiting experts as a noteworthy prospect…despite not existing.
Ivan Renko did not go onto D1 success.
Renko was also never drafted.
Renko’s potential went completely untapped.
Ivan Renko did not go back to European Ball.
He never married.
He never had children.
Renko never became a big man coach in Euro Ball.
He never returned to Europe at all.
He never returned anywhere.
Ivan Renko remains in the basketball ethers of what never was.
And the greatest irony of all is that we cannot even be absolutely sure that Bob Knight ever even actually made up the fiction about him, since wikipedia is hardly definitive, is it?
And THAT is NOT the rest…of…the story.
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Thanks for the smile. I do wish you had left Bob Knight out of the story. Thinking of him kind of ruined it for me–just sayin
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I hear he’s the father of Manti Teo’s girlfriend and Sidd Finch is his uncle.
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@wissoxfan83
…and Ivan Drago his cousin?
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This thread has received 60 clicks in google results in the month of February after being ignored by the larger world for 5 years. I guess I might have fixed our site ranking in some ways when I upgraded board and fixed the ssl issue and dns records.
Right up there with the Wilt thread which has gotten 243 clicks and a whopping 10 thousand impressions on search results. Basketball lore for the win!
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I was exited at first that Jaybate had rejoined us! Then the date sank in
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His posts are timeless, so expect to see him constantly resurrected!
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RIP @jaybate-1-0 The early years were good
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@dylans check back here periodically to see if he popped back up. I guess after about 2 years, assuming the worst. No one ever knew who he was, correct? Maybe that added to all of it !
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The funny thing about this someone this past summer made a fake Twitter account and recruiting profile for a football player and he was making posts about top offers and sites started ranking him. Heck guys like Graham and Mason shot up the rankings into the top 100 but only after we signed them. Media is just a circus in general lol.
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So, Zues Jackson isn’t real either, I suppose.
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@Marco what about Jesus Shuttlesworth??
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@kjayhawks I love that movie.
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@Marco ya it’s one of my favorites with blue chips. Denzel is one of my favorite actors, he’s seldom in a bad movie.
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@kjayhawks yeah, he even nailed a Shakespeare role - hard to do.
