When Tim Duncan came to Winthrop Coliseum

Winthrop athletic trainer Jeff Lahr showed me a photo last winter, an innocuous image of a mid-1990s Winthrop basketball player dribbling the ball in transition.

Behind the player in the foreground, guard Mike Fayed, is a tall figure loping up the court the night the photo was taken, Feb. 4, 1995. That’s the Saturday night that Tim Duncan played in Rock Hill.

Twenty-one years after he graced Winthrop Coliseum with his presence, Duncan announced his retirement from the NBA Monday morning in a release as unassuming as Lahr’s photo.

There wasn’t even a quote from the notoriously media-shy Duncan.

Plenty of writers will do the gushing for him. The 40-year old is probably the best power forward in NBA history, and his career numbers back up that assertion.

About 4,000 college hoops fans got an early in-person preview 21 years ago. Eagles athletic director Steve Vacendak used his relationship with Wake Forest coach Dave Odom to coax the Demon Deacons down to Winthrop Coliseum as part of a two home games-for one road game deal with the ACC school, easily the best team to ever play the Eagles in Rock Hill.

Duncan’s performance against Winthrop in the Demon Deacons’ 68-54 win was in a way symbolic of the career to come. He only scored 13 points, but swallowed up 23 rebounds and the Winthrop Coliseum crowd was left with the feeling that they had witnessed greatness, even if it wasn’t inherently obvious.

“That was what I remember,” Winthrop’s then-head coach Dan Kenney said when reminded on Monday of Duncan’s 23 boards. “He didn’t look like he did anything spectacular, except for when you looked at the box score. I think the ooh’s and the aah’s were more for Randolph Childress than they were for Tim Duncan that night.”

Winthrop led the Demon Deacons narrowly at half time. Carolina Panthers coach Dom Capers - who was using office space at the Winthrop Coliseum while the NFL team built its downtown stadium - was introduced to the fans during the intermission.

Childress, the Demon Deacons’ sweet-shooting guard, scored 15 of his 17 points in the second half to help the visitors pull away.

Chad Steele was a 6-foot-7 forward for Winthrop that became well acquainted with Duncan’s budding stardom in the mid-90s. He faced Duncan three times during his four years at Winthrop, including his first game as a college player in 1993.

“I had aspirations of, ‘I’ll just go mid-major, refine my game and then go to the NBA,’” Steele said. “And I remember after playing him for 5 minutes, I was like, ‘yeah, I better start studying.’”

Unheralded from the Virgin Islands, Duncan was an All-ACC pick his freshman year and showed flashes of greatness as a sophomore. He developed a style of play that was as un-sexy as it was effective, a perfect embodiment of the person he is.

“He was Zen-like, he just knew how to conserve his energy and you would get trapped into thinking he was lackadaisical or nonchalant,” said Kenney.

Duncan’s affinity for smooching jump shots off the backboard on their way through the net made the mid-range bank shot kind of cool, and caused Shaquille O’Neal to nickname him “Big Fundamental.”

“Everything with him was smooth,” said Steele, now the Baltimore Ravens’ media relations director. “Every time I tried to guard him it was like trying to push a wall. He was so strong and so long that you couldn’t do anything with him once he got down in the post. You were kind of at his mercy.”

Post passing, defending without fouling, creating space to shoot... it seemed like there wasn’t a minute facet of the game that Big Fundamental didn’t completely master. Steele said he’ll tell his kids about the times he squared up to one of the game’s greatest players. He may or may not include the following:

During that game in Rock Hill, Steele received a pass on the right post with Duncan on his back, power-dribbled into the middle of the lane, faked like he was going back to the left and rose for a right-handed hook shot.

“My hook was my go-to,” he said. “And (Duncan) threw it right back in my face. And he barely had to move.”

Steele’s basketball self worth improved over the coming years as Duncan gave a phone book’s worth of NBA 7-footers the exact same treatment.

Duncan rarely, if ever, openly reveled in the success that included five NBA titles. He would have been a bittersweet chore for San Antonio Spurs media relations folks to deal with.

“You love it because he’s one of those guys that you know where, if I set up an interview for him, number one, I know he’s going to show up on time and two, I can go do something else, I don’t have to sit there and listen,” said Steele. “Tim is that kind of guy.”

The bitter part for people in Steele’s line of work? One of the best players in league history didn’t want to be in the spotlight. He might go down as the least marketed star in modern sports history.

A star he was, though, and anybody in Rock Hill on that Saturday night over 20 years ago would have seen it.

Lahr has the photo from that game, but he wasn’t actually there, and for good reason. His son A.J. was born that night, and he remembers listening to the action on the radio.

This past season, Lahr and A.J. went to a Hornets game in Charlotte. They were playing Duncan and the Spurs. Twenty-one years later, Lahr got to see Duncan play in person and it couldn’t have been better timing.

This story was originally published July 11, 2016 at 4:25 PM with the headline "When Tim Duncan came to Winthrop Coliseum."