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By Roy Waters | The News Herald

Published: December 2, 2008

Less than an hour up the mountain on Interstate 40, Brad Daugherty was quite a basketball player at Black Mountain Owen High. I remember going to Hickory with Clyde Young to see him play in the state regional tournament his senior year.
At 6 feet 10 inches, Daugherty was the biggest high school player I had ever seen. I was amazed at how far from the basket he played on offense. Many times, he was 15 to 18 feet away from the goal and when his team was pressed, he helped bring the ball upcourt. He made a great outlet target for his teammates, but he could also handle the ball and dribble it upcourt as well.
He was always large for his age. He played all sports up through his freshman year of high school. However, he grew to 6 feet 10 inches that next summer and his coach at Owen, Bill Burrows, told him to give up other sports and dedicate himself to basketball.
It paid off quite well.
He earned a scholarship at the University of North Carolina.
At UNC, Daugherty joined with two of basketball's greatest legends: Coach Dean Smith, who had just led the Tar Heels to the 1982 NCAA Championship; and Michael Jordan, who hit the winning shot in that championship game and was returning for his junior year.
At that time, nobody thought of Jordan as the best player in the college game, as he became later on in the pros. He was very good and made several All-American teams, but the "best ever" talk was still years away.
Daugherty, who had received several hundred recruiting letters after high school, became one of the best big men in the college game at Carolina, leading his team to several championships, but never the "big one."
He was the No. 1 pick in the 1986 NBA Draft and he signed a multimillion-dollar contract with the Cleveland Cavaliers. The team became one of the best in the league during Daugherty's eight years there.
He averaged 19 points and nine rebounds a game before a serious back injury forced him off the court.
His No. 43 was retired and he finished as Cleveland's all-time leader in scoring and rebounding.
Having gone to Carolina at 16 years old, Daugherty was less than 30 when he began his business career after his final year of pro ball. He became the co-owner of a car dealership in Ohio and today the partnership owns five dealerships. He has a light- and heavy-duty truck fleet and along with a cousin, owns Daugherty Waste and Trucking in Swannanoa.
He was fascinated from his youth with horsepower. With his dad being a big racing fan, he became one also. Daugherty worked as a crew member on stock car teams at the Asheville Motor Speedway while in high school.
He became part owner of a Busch series team while a pro basketball player and he later moved to the truck-racing circuit as an owner. In 2002 he became a partner in JTG-Daugherty Racing.
Today, his team operates out of a 185,000-square-foot complex near Charlotte and employs more than 115 people, but his most visible role in NASCAR is with ESPN. Broadcasting was his major at UNC.
Every Wednesday during the racing season, Daugherty films his race analysis for the week from his home near Asheville. On the weekends he joins the ESPN race-day crew for their pre-race show and helps with the lap-by-lap commentating. "I thoroughly love it," he said.
Daugherty is one of three athletes from Owen to make it to the top of their sport. Sammy Stewart was a Major League Baseball pitcher for the Baltimore Orioles and Brad Johnson is the backup quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys.
Daugherty has separated himself from that group now, as he's made it to the top of yet another major sport.

Roy Waters is a sports columnist for The News Herald. Waters was baseball and basketball coach at Salem High School from 1955-1966, where his teams won 18 championships. In 2007, he was inducted into the Burke County Sports Hall of Fame.

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