Harper Kamp after five years and countless bumps and bruises, one missed year due to injury and the firing of the coach, Ben Braun, who recruited him to Cal. When Braun was shown the door after Kamp's freshman year, Harper almost followed Kamp out the door to UNLV. He decided to stay with the Bears and the rest is history.
Jorge Gutierrez was Montgomery's first recruit at Cal. It was a lucky break for both sides as it turns out. There was a slot open for Jorge only because another player had asked out of his scholarship when Braun was fired. Jorge was available only because he was not highly recruited out of a prep school in Las Vegas.
The part of the memory will be our luck to be chosen for the pre-game experience to take in the Bears' pregame practice from court-level. The only way this could've been better was if they allowed to remain in the court side seats for the game.
This means that we also got our photo up on the big screen during the second half of the game. The kids were pretty excited about it especially Ryan. At first when I told him that we were going to be able to see ourselves on the big screen, his reaction was, "I don't want our picture up there." Later during the game, he kept asking when our photo would appear.
What made the evening perfect was that the Bears won!
Everyone went home happy. Even the larger than life posters of Jorge and Harper.
And also the large contingent of Jorge fans who were at the game wearing yellow matching T-shirts. In the group were Jorge's parents with his father trying to capture the moment with a video camera. That's his mother holding up the Mexican flag and his father to the left of the flag in the photo below.
