CARLTON FLETCHER: Dontonio Wingfield belongs in Albany Sports Hall of Fame

When was the last time you thought of me? Or have you completely erased me from your memory?

— Adele

When I first got the email from Mario Meadows, I kinda didn’t believe him.

So I checked for myself.

Meadows, who eschewed a budding career as part of the exploding Atlanta urban music scene several years ago to return home to Albany and open his own Platinum Sound Studios, has been one of the mostly unsung heroes who helped put Southwest Georgia on the modern musical map. Virtually every hip-hop artist in the region — and others from various genres — have worked with the low-key Meadows.

This weekend Meadows and some of his old schoolmates are putting together a weekend of activities for what is expected to be a huge gathering of Westover High School alumni. Monroe High graduates hosted a similar event last year, and it was an overwhelming success.

What had me checking behind Meadows for factual accuracy was this statement: “As you know Westover High Alumni Weekend is coming up, and I have an after-party I’m doing with Dontonio Wingfield along with the Quad Squad hosting it. In talking to Dontonio, he was telling me how it’s a shame he hasn’t been inducted into the Albany Sports Hall of Fame.

“… Also a portion of the proceeds from our event will be going to a scholarship that we plan on funding called ‘The Westover Dontonio Wingfield Athletic Scholarship.’”

When I read the part of Meadows’ email about Wingfield not being in the local sports hall of fame, I had to look it up. There’s no way, I reasoned, that Wingfield isn’t there.

But he’s not.

I went back and looked at the group of Albany Sports Hall members from every year since the hall inducted its inaugural class in 1987 (which included, among others, Ray Knight, Lionel James, Cleve Wester, Pete Cox, Alice Coachman Davis, Bart Oates, Harley Bowers and local stadium namesake Hugh Mills). And there’s no Dontonio Wingfield.

I was dumbfounded.

Sports fans have a tendency to compare athletes of different eras and argue which are superior. I daresay any who saw Wingfield play couldn’t work up a legitimate argument countering the assertion that he is easily the best basketball player this city has ever spawned. And he’s one of the top three or four athletes. In any sport. Period.

Wingfield led Westover to back-to-back-to-back-to-back state Class AAA championships from 1989 to 1992, the first time that had ever been achieved in the classification, and he signed a scholarship to play for Cincinnati. After a year with Bob Huggins and the Bearcats, Wingfield opted to jump to the NBA. He was picked in the second round of the league draft by the Seattle Supersonics and played five years before a horrific car wreck ended his playing career.

Local media made much of Wingfield’s off-the-court issues while he was playing high school ball, and he certainly did plenty to fuel their reports. Few, however, took the time to try and understand what it was that made Wingfield tick, the fatherless home ruled over by a generally absentee mother who was out working several jobs to feed her family.

And few have followed Wingfield’s post-NBA efforts to establish a local youth basketball program designed to not only teach kids how to play the game the right way, but also to give them opportunities that he didn’t have when he was roaming the drug- and gang-infested streets of Albany’s rougher neighborhoods in his youth.

Fewer still in the community have bothered to acknowledge Wingfield for continuing to coach and raise funds for his youth program even after he lost a foot to diabetes, the results of years of unhealthy eating when “I didn’t know any better.”

I honor the members of Albany’s Sports Hall of Fame, salute you on your accomplishments. But an Albany hall that doesn’t include the best basketball player ever in a community of basketball players — Dontonio Wingfield — but does two others who played during the same era whose careers are no match for Wingfield’s, will forever be tainted by the omission.

Email Carlton Fletcher at [email protected]. Follow @ABH_Fletcher on Twitter.