On one side was Tisdale, then a high school basketball phenom playing for Tulsa’s Booker T. Washington High School who would go on to become a three-time All-American at the University of Oklahoma before leaving after his junior year to play for the NBA’s Phoenix Suns.

On the other side was Mark Price, the future Georgia Tech Yellowjackets and Cleveland Cavaliers great who was the sparkplug shooting guard leading my alma mater, the Enid High School Plainsmen, in a battle for conference supremacy.

Though I would go on to watch scores of college and professional basketball games, the 1981 game played by then-high school seniors Tisdale and Price remains in my memory as perhaps the best one-on-one battle I’ve ever witnessed. The fact that my team won on its home court made the game only slightly sweeter due to the fact that it was just that good a match.

Though I didn’t know Tisdale personally and knew Price only by virtue of the fact that I sold a refrigerator to his parents several years later, I will always feel like I knew them both well — thanks, in part, to that game.