As a 6-foot-2 guard at McKinley High School in Washington, D.C., John Battle was way off the Division I college basketball radar. When Rutgers head coach Tom Young and assistants Art Perry and Joy Boylan showed up to recruit him, he was shocked.

“When they offered me a scholarship I was almost like a deer in headlights; I was like, ‘Is this for real?’” Battle recalled. “It was Rutgers and a couple of junior colleges looking at me. For some reason they saw something in me. They needed a guard, and I’m under the mindset that I was their best guess.”

What a guess it turned out to be. Battle scored 1,385 points on the banks, averaging 21.0 points as a junior and senior, and helping the Scarlet Knights advance in the 1983 NCAA Tournament as a sophomore (he scored 18 points over two games in t

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