B'ball and Twinkies: The Aftermath

It's amazing how far off you can be when trying to picture how someone looks, especially someone you haven't seen in years.

I was looking up stuff about our hometown basketball team over the last weekend, and decided to see if I could find a picture of one of the guys on the team, Marty Simmons. I figured he couldn't have changed much over the years. My conception of athletes is that they pretty much stay the same. They get older, naturally, but you can still see the former glory of their youth behind the graying hair and maybe couple of extra pounds.

Then I saw Marty. I spliced together the pic I found with a scan of him during his senior year:

Long story short, Marty got big.

When I came across this picture, I found myself laughing out loud for a moment; not at Marty, but at how far off my concept of how he might look now was. It's actually not too surprising, I guess. After all, we're talking about 23 years since the picture on the left was taken. It just goes to show you that not everyone stays exactly the same, athletes definitely included.

According to the write-up that accompanied the picture I found, Marty, for the last couple years, has been the coach of the men's basketball team at SIUE, and doing pretty good, from what I read. Congrats, Marty. It's good to read about someone from home doing good...away from home.