After 40 years, Romero cedes a record
Meet the former record holder. Or is that the new record holder? No, wait, it’s former. Again. The serpentine West Las Vegas videotaping saga — which has taken on a crazy life of its own — has, quite obviously, caused mass confusion in different pockets of north-central New Mexico.
This includes the number of career points being attributed to Dons senior guard D.J. Bustos (which today stands at 2,608, but this total has all the stability of the San Andreas Fault).
I’ll spare everyone the full recap: He broke the career record — for the second time in a week — on Tuesday night in the first half of a Dons victory over Pojoaque.
But now would be the right time to tell you about the man he supplanted. Twice.
“They say records are made to be broken,” Alfred Romero Jr. said. “But it took a long time.”
Since 1977, Romero had owned the career boys scoring mark, with 2,591 points over a five-year career with the Wagon Mound Trojans. That included a state championship in 1976.
Romero was in attendance last Saturday when Bustos broke the record against Taos inside the West Las Vegas gym. Then a judge’s decision Monday erased Bustos’ output of another game, giving the record back to Romero — for about 24 hours.
“I knew he was pretty close and I knew it would probably be broken this year,” said Romero, who will turn 59 in two weeks. He works for the Department of Military Affairs in Santa Fe during the week but lives in Wagon Mound on weekends.
He, like Bustos, played for five seasons and played for his father. Alfred Romero, ninth on the state’s all-time coaching wins list, died last year.
But unlike D.J. Bustos, Alfred Romero Jr. did not have a 3-point line, and his team’s yearly schedule featured fewer games than did Bustos’. Wagon Mound was 26-1 in its championship season of 1976, the first year of Class 1A basketball.
West Las Vegas, by contrast, played 32 games last season.
Plus, Romero said with a laugh — and still perhaps slightly, and understandably, in protect mode of his long-held mark — Bustos “doesn’t have a supporting cast like I did.”
But Romero realized that someday, his name would slide down a line on that alltime scoring list, the one that appears on the New Mexico Activities Association’s website.
“I knew once that 3-point line came around that my record would probably be broken,” said Romero, who added that he attends the state tournament every March. “If I had the 3-point line, I would have way more points than I did.”
If Bustos is as fortunate as Romero was and holds the record until 2057, that means the next record holder won’t even be born for about another 23 years. APPLES AND ORANGES? FYI, West Las Vegas is not the only school that has incurred a penalty for filming this season.
Santa Fe Indian School girls coach Christie Abeyta was given a one-game suspension when she apparently was caught recording a Sandia Prep game against LagunaAcoma in December. She got
suspended, a source told the Journal, for SFIS’ first district contest against the Sundevils. SFIS did not forfeit any games.
“Two totally different cases,” NMAA executive director Sally Marquez said. “West Las Vegas was on probation prior to filming.” WELL DONE: A shout-out to the junior varsity girls basketball team at Cibola, for a tremendous display of sportsmanship in a recent game against Rio Grande.
Cibola was leading Rio Grande by 27 points with a minute left in the game. The Ravens inserted Anjonette Diaz, a special needs player, into the game. She rarely gets onto the floor.
In that last minute, Cibola’s girls collected several rebounds and gave the ball back to Diaz until she scored.
“When the ball went through the basket,” read one eyewitness account, “the gym erupted.”
The Cougars were one of the recipients of the New Mexico Activities Association’s Compete with Class award for January.
A supremely classy gesture, ladies.
THIS AND THAT: For the first time, Albuquerque-based ProView Networks hit the road for a regular-season boys basketball game. A crew was at Tuesday’s Oñate-Las Cruces showdown in District 3-6A. … Sandia Prep’s Madie Trainor is about to break the school’s single-season scoring record (probably tonight at East Mountain) and in the next few games should eclipse the school’s career scoring record. … Bernalilo’s boys, after a stumble late last week against East Mountain, clinched the District 4-4A title Tuesday night, beating SFIS. … Although Oñate’s boys fell to Las Cruces 70-54 on Tuesday, the Knights, who lead District 3-6A, received a huge boost from Mayfield, which stunned second-place Hobbs, 59-56, in one of the more eye-opening upsets of the calendar year. … Sandia’s boys, 1-8 in District 2-6A, can still get to state if they win the district tournament next week. But the Matadors must be feeling a whole lotta angst. Of those eight losses, two were by a single point, two by two points and another one by three points. It’s the two losses to Clovis (59-57 in OT and 44-43) that are likely to keep the Matadors out of the playoffs barring a crazy run next week.