CHARLESTON, S.C. — Faint yellow with a blue screened-in entrance, the house on Cypress Street is squeezed in among the others, easy to miss if you’re driving past. The roof is adorned with exposed rafters beneath the eaves. A blotch of grass buffers a short, black, chainlink fence from the street. Things are typically quiet inside, other than the chatter of daytime TV or an occasional developer knocking on the front door, trying to buy the place.
The looks shooting around the living room early last month weren’t accusatory, but cautious. Maybe confused. Jackie White and her mother, Mary Lee Rhodes, had known a stranger was coming down to visit, but never could figure out what any of this was about. Back when we’d first spoken, a few weeks earlier, they hung up the landline, looked at each other and wondered why, after all these years, anyone wanted to know.
Ronnie Gadsden introduced everyone. An old coach, one used to making connections, he made sure Jackie and Mary Lee were comfortable with the visitor on the couch. Then he pulled over a chair, positioned himself to the side and sat down. He wanted to hear this for himself.
That’s when Jackie removed her glasses, placed them atop her head, gave a smile that invited a hug and asked the stranger to remind her how all this came to be.
“All right, so there’s this webpage on the internet …”
MaxPreps.com is a longtime chronicler of high school sports, one offering rankings, recruiting headlines and highlights of whatever LeBron James’ son is doing at any given time. Down in the site’s archives, past the volleyball All-America lists and the 8-man football national rankings, are loads of historical pages chronicling everyone from American icons to the anonymous names of high school sports. That’s where you can find an assembled record book of the highest single-season scoring averages in boys high school basketball history.
Start scrolling and you fall into the page. A gorge packed with all varieties of names from all imaginable places. Each one a story. Bennie Fuller (No. 5, 50.9 ppg) once scored 102 points in a single game for Arkansas School for the Deaf in 1971, then played at Pensacola (Fla.) Junior College, then worked for the U.S. Postal Service. Bjorn Broman (No. 9, 49.4 ppg), a recent Minnesota high school legend, reached the 2017 NCAA Tournament at Winthrop and is now a TikTok creator with 1.4 million followers. Truitt Weldon (No. 23, 45.0 ppg) was raised in a strict religious home in Sabine Parish, La., and mocked for playing high school games in blue jeans.
You find college coaches. Current pros. A former Congressman. Wilt Chamberlain. Trae Young. You find Mickey Crowe, the Wisconsin schoolboy cult hero who witnessed John W. Hinckley Jr.’s assassination attempt on President Reagan and was the subject of a 2013 biography titled “Over and Back.”
You get lost for hours. One name after another. Records were compiled by Kevin Askeland, a 59-year-old math teacher from Yuba City, Calif. The self-described high school sports historian says he exhausted all available resources of the National Federation of State High School Associations record books, scanning all 50 state record books. He ended up with a list of 112 names. Each is a rabbit hole, one that should take you somewhere.
Except for the No. 1 name on the list.
55.6 ppg — Finnell White, Lowcountry Academy (Charleston, S.C.), 1987-88
Up comes Google. In goes the name.
F-I-N-N-E-L-L W-H-I-T-E
The search results land like a discarded scratch-off ticket. The only other mention of White’s name comes from the “Faces in the Crowd” section of a March 1988 Sports Illustrated. Kirk Gibson was on the cover that week, wearing Dodger blue. The blurb reads: “Finnell, a senior guard, scored 79 points, made a 64-foot three-pointer to end the first half and a game-winning three-pointer with :06 left as Lowcountry Academy beat Andrews Academy 90-89.”
That’s it. No wiki page, no link to a Hall of Fame induction, not even a link to an old story or two. No obituary.
How can this possibly be? Such empty results are an affront to our info-wired world. If 55.6 points is indeed the highest average ever by an American prep player, how do we know nothing at all about Finnell White of Lowcountry Academy? How does someone with such a mark vanish in time?
And why, more importantly, is there a headstone a few miles from here, over in Sunset Memorial Gardens, for Finell Demetrios White, where the name, apparently misspelled everywhere else, is etched correctly F-I-N-E-L-L?
Hearing all this, Jackie White, now 75, nodded and smiled, along for the ride, trying to get her hands around all this. She traded glances with her mom. Ms. Rhodes, 93, suffered a recent stroke but is still strong enough to walk to the corner store. She narrowed her eyes and nodded her head.
Then they began.
