The World of Five-Star

The recruiting world ran through Howard Garfinkel’s Five-Star camp. That didn’t sit well with anyone outside of Garf’s orbit, especially as the money in college basketball continued to pour in from all sorts of different avenues. To help tell the story of how the NCAA and shoe companies took over Garf’s turf in the summertime, we focus on some new voices who lived through the transition: Iowa head coach Fran McCaffery, legendary broadcaster Bill Raftery, camp head coaches Jerry Wainwright and Dave Odom, and legendary coach Hubie Brown. Host Tate Frazier helps break down Five-Star’s fit in the new basketball landscape.

All eyes in the basketball world were on Howard Garfinkel’s camp, as TV crews began to flock to figure out why Five-Star had so much cache in the college basketball space. With firsthand accounts from the players who lived it, we’ll highlight the many standout players during the camp’s “Basketball Boom” starting in the mid-1980s up to the new millennium with the help of Coach K, God Shammgod, Ben Gordon, Metta Sandiford-Artest, Maverick Carter, and more legendary Five-Star alumni.

By the dawn of the 1970s, Five-Star was on the rise and ripe with young coaching talent. On this episode, host Tate Frazier dives into the three game-changing player discoveries, including the unparalleled exploits of the camp’s first true phenom Moses Malone, the rare origin story of how Mike really became Air Jordan, and a controversy involving a 5-foot-3 point guard from Baltimore who Garf nicknamed, “The 8th Wonder of the World.” With the help of Five-Star legends who witnessed it first-hand like Hubie Brown, Roy Williams, Muggsy Bogues, Dick Vitale, Dave Odom, Grant Hill, Mike Fratello, and Pete Gillen, we’ll show how these three unique players used Garf’s camp as a launching pad for their historic careers.