By HOWARD TSUMURA
Varsity Letters
(Today we finish our short series celebrating the 40th anniversary of the three-point shot in B.C. boys high school basketball)
LANGLEY — Ever wonder how important it can ultimately be to save score sheets from high school basketball games?
As I began my research on three-point shooting in B.C. boys high school basketball for this pair of stories in the run-up to the opening of the B.C. senior boys basketball championships, I soon realized that even with an actual way-back time machine, one which would have enabled you to go back to the opening day of the 1984-85 season, it would still have been darn near impossible to determine who it was that hit the first three-pointer in the history of B.C. high school basketball.
Think of how tough that would be even today, to cover the province like a blanket from Vancouver to Vanderhoof, and from Vernon to Victoria.
And it would have been a non-event anyways, based not only on the mentality of the times, but in regards to the absolute anonymity that greeted the three-pointer on its way to becoming — like it or not — the game’s signature shot.
And it was only because of the archival bent contained within the mind of B.C. boys basketball historical curator and cartetaker Ken Winsalde that we have been able to access what can only be called the Holy Grail, the actual scoresheets in question, all of which were able to provide the answers to what was going to be my next big question: Who hit the first three-point basket in the history of B.C. senior boys high school basketball provincials?
Armed with all of the scoresheets from Day 1 of both the 1985 Single-A and top-tiered Double-A B.C. tournaments, Winslade was able to provide me with a tremendous amount of information regarding the new shot, it’s impact on the two tournaments as a whole, and the best part… the names of the first two boys in B.C. to hit a three-pointer in each of the two championships.
In historical hindsight, we have caught a huge break here, because the three-pointer was so rare that first season, that looking at the by-quarters column, there is no disputing who was first.
At the risk of making myself a nuisance, however, I had to ask Ken one more question: Do you know what day each tournament started that year?
Finally we had our answer!
That year, the Single-A tournament started on Wednesday, March 6, followed by the Double-A tournament on Wednesday, March 13.
And it wasn’t until the second game of the 1985 Single-A tournament that a three-point bucket was finally sunk.
The Aldergrove Totems opposed the Carihi Tyees, and in the fourth quarter, a senior named Raj Bagry hit paydirt from distance for the Totems. It was the only three-pointer hit on opening day.
So does the name sound familiar?
Really? That Raj Bagry? The guy who has seemingly forever (25+years) coached either the junior or senior varsity boys teams at Lord Tweedsmuir Secondary in Surrey, not too far from his old alma mater in Aldergrove.
Yup.
Now 57, Bagry is as active as ever, coaching the Panthers to the Final Four when the B.C. junior boys championships wrapped up a week ago today at the Langley Events Centre.
But want to know the funniest part, the part when I asked him if he knew why I was calling him?
Q: Do you remember your first game of the provincials that year?
A: You know what, I don’t remember the first game.
Q: You played Carihi in the first game… ring any bells?
A: I honestly don’t remember it.
Q: You hit a three-pointer in the fourth quarter. It’s the first three-pointer in B.C. boys high school provincial championship history… and it was 40 years ago this March. How about that?
A: (Long silence) Really? I was the three-point shooter of that team but I didn’t know that. I don’t remember it at all. You know what? This is all a surprise to me.
Bagry is a kind, humble man. And believe me, learning that bit of news, coming about as out of the blue as you could imagine, really meant something to him.
And for that I was happy to deliver the news.
Yet as we explored in Part 1 of this story on Monday, Bagry’s absolute non-remembrance of the shot is totally in keeping with the times.
It just didn’t register as anything special back in the day It was nothing more than a rule change in a sport, a kind of ‘so what if you hit the first three’ kind of thing. After all, Dell Curry was still a junior at Virginia Tech and his first-born, some kid named Steph, was still three years from being born.
When the three-point shot was mentioned in newspaper articles as it pertained to B.C. high school basketball, I could find no reference of a reporter speaking of it as a new rule.
And yet if you keep looking a few seasons down the road, it gets mentioned as if it had been there all along.
There was no internet, so of course there was no social media.
But more than anything, we were all wired a bit differently in the early-to-mid 1980s.
And this is a lot of what I thought about when I watched Bagry coaching his explosive Lord Tweedsmuir Panthers to fourth place in the province at the junior B.C.’s with players like Gurtaj Hayer and Jaideep Athwal, each a part of a generation so accustomed to and so refined in the art of three-point shooting.
Some of the history of three-point shooting at the two B.C. boys championships in 1985?
The Single-A tournament tipped off on March 7 of 1985 at Pitt Meadows Secondary where the late, esteemed Rich Goulet was in the process of soon moving his Marauders up to the ‘big-school’ tier of Double-A.
There was not a three-point hoop made in the opening game of the Single-A’s, and when Bagry made B.C. history with his triple in the fourth quarter for Aldergove, it was the only three hit in any of the eight games on opening day. He also added another on the second day.
As per Ken Winslade’s research, Carihi’s Scott Ibister was the only player with multiple threes in one game at the tourney… he sunk a pair.
Nobody hit three triples total for the tourney, and there were a grand total of only 10 scored overall.
The Double-A championships were a week later at the PNE Agrodome, beginning March 13.
Ken Winslade notes that Oak Bay’s Peter Dryden was the first player to hit a three in top-tiered tournament history when he hit one in the fourth quarter of Game 1 of the B.C. Double-A championships against Vancouver College.
Correliu’s Craig Anderson was the high man for total threes, sinking a trio of them over the three games in which he played.
In total, there were 19 threes hit in the Double-A tournament, a total which is certainly not unattainable these days in a single boys high school game.
A BLUE-CHIP CRADLE FOR COACHES WHO CARED
Aldergove Secondary School, as it pertains to its high school basketball heritage, just might have had the most under-appreciated cradle of coaches in the history of B.C. high school hoops.
In Bagry’s era there as a player, there were Pat Lee, George Bergen, Tom Antil, and later, of course, Neil Brown, who well ahead of his days as Brookswood senior girls coach, was guiding the fortunes of the Totems senior boys and its remarkable point guard Randy Nohr, the father of current Brookswood Grade 10 point guard Jordyn Nohr.
All of this is brought to light to illustrate the nurturing environment Raj Bagry found as a kid needing direction.
Born in India, he arrived in Canada in 1971, and life was not always easy.
Bagry lost his father at an early age and thus he and his four siblings were raised by their mom.
For him, navigating through daily life meant encountering the daily struggles of his day, including racism.
But through it all, fate seemed to push him towards the gym, and it became the place where the people he met and the lessons he learned all made sense.
It was truly a shelter from the storm.
“We had a phenomenal team overall and the coaches were the biggest part of my life,” explained Bagry, these days a successful businessman in the auto body and auto glass industry. “They took over as my dad figure. My mom supported all five of us. We didn’t have the luxury of having cars to drive everywhere. My coaches were everything, and my mom was my mom and dad.
“But my coaches, they saved my butt a lot back then,” Bagry continues. “Racism was in there a little more. That era was tough, but back then, the coaches meant everything to myself. That was a safe spot to be at school and the coaches I had — Pat Lee, Tom Antil, coach Harrower — they have done wonders for me, where I am, what I have done in life, how far I have gotten. Those people are the ones who started me in the right spot.”
There’s even what you could call a three-point shooting origin story tucked neatly in the details.
Pat Lee, enjoyed a long and highly-successful coaching career highlighted by an incredible span at the helm of the what is now the University of the Fraser Valley where he led the team to three CCAA national titles over a five-year span and helped usher the Fraser Valley Cascades program into the U SPORTS ranks.
“Back then, Pat Lee was always on the girls side,” Bagry says of those days in the early-to-mid 1980s at Aldergrove Secondary. “I was always in the gym because I didn’t have rides back and forth from school. I lived about five miles away so for me to truck back and forth with a bicycle it was… So I just stayed there, worked on my game and did my homework.”
So Bagry got the best of both worlds.
Tom Antil, who would himself coach the UFV Cascades men (2006-07), was Bagry’s senior high school coach at Aldergrove.
And Lee, who coached the Totems’ senior girls team, would often times talk with Bagry about hoops and life while the youngster tried to crack the books while being allowed a two-hour harbour each day after school if there wasn’t a practice.
There was also a senior men’s basketball league which played out of the Aldergrove Secondary gym, and as far as Bagry can remember, it was at some point in the early 1980s that three-point lines were put in at the gym, although not for use in high school games.
So in gym class, at his own practices, and even the moments when the floor was open as he waited for those after-school rides back home, he’d go out on the floor and let it fly from beyond the arc.
Bagry was the kid who was just always there in the gym, and the coaches could see his obvious love for the game and the sense of belonging it brought him.
“The coaches were mentoring me through that and let me play in the men’s league with them as a student,” said Bagry. “Pat Lee, the way he played, he was like Air Jordan up there. Everybody seemed to land before he came down. He seemed to hover up there. He was a star.
“And you could see that talent on the court and the shots they made,” Bagry continued of the almost surreal environment of playing, as a 16-year-old with grown men on a court that featured a three-point line about two years before it became a fixture in the high school game.
“The three-point line was so incredible but they made it look like an everyday thing.”
Following his graduation in 1985, he returned to the school to begin his coaching career, this time as an assistant to the legendary George Bergen with the senior boys team.
“George Bergen,” Bagry begins of the legendary MEI Eagles star who would, in the next century, go on to coach the Walnut Grove Gators of Langley to provincial glory, “when he first came to out school, I think I was in Grade 8 or 9, and everyone thought he was a cop. We were absolutely scared, and he is this father figure, he cared. You’re supposed to give back to the kids that need that help. It’s not about basketball, the sport you coach, it’s about the relationships and mentoring these young kids into men, and that is what I am proud of. Basketball is the side thing and everything else that goes with it is so much greater.”
FATE FOR THREE… BINGO!
And so what starts out as a story about the first boy to hit a three-point basket in the history of the B.C. high school championships is actually about so much more. And for that, everyone invested in the joyous, fragile infrastructure that is our game to love, can smile and be thankful.
Through the community of teachers and coaches Bagry found at Aldergrove, his entrepreneurial bent was stoked.
In fact it was right in the same time frame in which Bagry hit the first three-pointer in B.C. high school provincial tourney history that he started, still months shy of his graduation, an autobody business out of the backyard of his family’s home.
He had his opportunities, a welcome letter to try out at UFV, an invite as a walk-on at Eastern Washington.
A year out of high school, he kept building his business, drawn to cars through his auto shop classes and the fact that such niceties were few and far between through his youth.
By 1993, Bagry had added auto glass to the his bodywork business, and the rest has been history.
Through the struggles of his childhood, he was indeed a long shot.
But what makes high school sports so special saved him, and he’s never stopped giving back to the kids.
And he’s pretty tickled to be finding out, 40 years after it all happened, that he’s the one who hit the very first three-pointer in B.C. high school boys provincial championship history.
“It gives me giggles,” he says, “because I love the three.”
Sounds to me like there was nothing random about any of this.
Sounds to me like the kid who sunk a landmark bucket 40 years ago, one that he can’t even remember, is the man who was supposed to do it all along.
If you’re reading this story or viewing these photos on any website other than one belonging to a university athletic department, it has been taken without appropriate permission. In these challenging times, true journalism will survive only through your dedicated support and loyalty. VarsityLetters.ca and all of its exclusive content has been created to serve B.C.’s high school and university sports community with hard work, integrity and respect. Feel free to drop us a line any time at howardtsumura@gmail.com.
This story and the first one on the three-point shot are just tremendous. Great research. Well written. I can’t say enough about both of these stories. Congratulations Howard.
Another lovely story, Howard. I’ve not met Mr.Bagry but I’d like to. Thanks
Great articles, Howard, as always. Faint memories of my coaching Argyle at that time and having a player who could actually shoot 3’s, but rarely did. As mentioned in the article, they were available but coaches seldom looked at the 3 point line as anything meaningful over the first few years. Too many years of telling kids that if they shot from that far out they would be sitting!
Another fabulous “weave” of the facts after you collected the details Howard. Coach Bagry also spent time as Referee Bagry for a few years. He remains humble and, this light shining on him is deserving for all the time and dedication he’s giving back to the game. Fantastic story.