Jack Taylor of Grinnell College dropped 138 points (yes, you read that right) in a single game in 2012, setting the single-game scoring record for any NCAA player in any division.
Taylor shot 52-of-108 from the field and 27-of-71 from beyond the arc.
“There was a point during the second half where I hit a number of threes in a row – maybe seven or eight – I felt like anything I threw up was going in,” he told ESPN’s Myron Medcalf in 2012. “I’ve been in the zone before but I’ve never taken so many shots.”
As you may have suspected, Grinnell won the game, 179-104, over Faith Baptist Bible. Perhaps even more crazy, though, is the fact that David Larson of Faith Baptist Bible had 70 points of his own on 34-of-44 shooting. Can you imagine putting up 70 points and still losing by more than you scored?
Jack Taylor became a national news story, and for good reason. However, the attention dried up after some time, and as he told Martin Kessler of WBUR in 2016, “basketball let (him) down.”
“It’d just been everything I had been dreaming about as a kid, and I slowly started to realize, when the media goes away, naturally my heart and my soul craved more,” he said. “I thought that, once I had made it, I’d be fulfilled – I’d be happy. But it didn’t fulfill me in a way that my faith did. And so I realized, like, ‘OK, basketball let me down.’ It made promises that it couldn’t deliver. I don’t even pick up a basketball any more. I don’t coach. I don’t watch.”
Even if Jack Taylor no longer plays nor watches hoops, we can still enjoy his unforgettably performance while wishing him and his family well in their post-basketball lives.
