A pioneer
There are a lot of great players who went into the ABA and have largely been forgotten. It’s not that Louie Dampier has exactly been forgotten - he played his college ball at Kentucky and spent his entire professional career with the Kentucky Colonels and no one like that is going to be forgotten in the state of Kentucky.
The rest of the country?
Probably very few younger fans have any idea who Louie Dampier was and that’s too bad.
At Kentucky, he played for the 1966 team that beat Duke and played Texas Western in the iconic title game featuring segregated UK against five black starters for the Miners (Texas Western is now UTEP).
When Dampier joined the Colonels, it was the debut season for the ABA and the new league was doing things differently. The ball was the immediate distinction but the league also started up play with a three point shot and Dampier was the first player to master it.
He was not just a three point shooter though. Dampier was a superb offensive force. His size - he was just 6-0 - worked against him and he might not have made it in the NBA. In the ABA, he was a natural though and showed the way for later players like Larry Bird and Stephen Curry who would unlock the three point shot as a profound weapon in the NBA.
