Spoonhour remembered as basketball 'pied piper'

His college basketball teams won 373 games and, with high school and junior college, the total was just short of 700. But what Charlie Spoonhour really had wanted to do growing up in Rogers, Ark., was to play second base for the Cardinals. Spoonhour, the former Missouri State and St. Louis University coach who died at age 72 in Chapel Hill, N. C., Wednesday after battling a lung affliction for two years, was a Cardinals fan his entire life. He regularly would come to spring training in either St. Petersburg, Fla., or Jupiter, Fla., after whatever team he was coaching had been eliminated from postseason play. Once, after his University of Nevada-Las Vegas club had lost at South Carolina in the NIT, he bolted immediately to the airport, flew to Atlanta, spent the wee hours in the airport there...

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