If you are under 30, chances are you may not know the name. He's not in the Basketball Hall of Fame, won just one playoff game in a 12 year NBA career and has more YouTube videos detailing his music career than that of basketball. But for a period in the 1980's, Wayman Tisdale was the most dominant player in college basketball not named Patrick Ewing, and almost joined him on the court as a Hoya.

Born in Ft. Worth and raised in Tulsa, Wayman grew up as the son of Louis L. Tisdale, pastor of the Friendship Missionary Baptist Church. Wayman played music in the church as a young man but grew to 6-6 by the eighth grade and picked up basketball in high school, where he was the state player of the year and a Parade All-American in the 1981-82 season. With offers from nearly every major program in the nation, Tisdale narrowed his list in the spring of 1982 to three schools: Oklahoma, Tulsa, and a surprise entrant: Georgetown.

Tulsa, the 1981 NIT champions, was an early favorite with close ties to his friends in the community and its new coach, Nolan Richardson. Oklahoma, led by second year coach Billy Tubbs, saw Wayman as the ticket to revitalize a team that had just one NCAA tournament appearance since 1947. But the rapid rise of the Georgetown program in the 1982 NCAA Tournament interested Tisdale, and he was not afraid to say so.

"Georgetown had everything I was looking for: a good coach, good team," Tisdale told the New York Times. "To have Coach Thompson spend a day with me right after Georgetown played North Carolina for the national championship really impressed me.

"The idea of playing with Patrick Ewing appealed to me. Coach Thompson said I would be a power forward in pro ball and play facing the basket, and that playing the same position at Georgetown would make me a better pro player."

John Thompson figured to be recruiting Wayman Tisdale one way or the other. Thompson was offered $200,000 a year to come to the University of Oklahoma when Tisdale was a sophomore in high school, but turned it down to stay at Georgetown. But the man chosen in Thompson's place at Oklahoma, former Lamar coach Billy Tubbs, was not going to risk losing the best basketball player the state had ever produced.

Tubbs had signed Tisdale's brother, William, to a scholarship in 1981. He rearranged practice schedules so Wayman and William could be able to attend church in Tulsa, two hours away. He hired Tisdale's high school basketball coach to join the staff, and even arranged for a booster family to host Sunday chicken dinners for Wayman and William when the brothers couldn't make it back home on the weekends.

Tisdale had a recruiting visit scheduled for Georgetown in April, 1982. It was cancelled shortly before he committed to the University of Oklahoma. "By then I realized I did not want to go that far from home," Tisdale said the in New York Times interview noted above. "William liked it there. I knew this is where I should go.

"I was afraid if I visited Georgetown, I might commit to sign with them."

The thought of Tisdale at Georgetown would not have been merely dominant, but UCLA-dominant. The 1982-83 Hoyas returned Ewing, small forwards Anthony Jones and Bill Martin, and a freshman class that included David Wingate, Michael Jackson, and Florida Player of the Year Horace Broadnax, all top 75 incoming recruits. A power forward had eluded Thompson in this era, and the concept of a front line of Ewing and Tisdale (not to mention the arrival of Reggie Williams a year later) could well have produced not one, but three NCAA titles.

While no improprieties were publicly alleged with Tubbs' recruitment of Tisdale, this was also the era of rampant NCAA improprieties at Oklahoma under football coach Barry Switzer. The closest Tisdale came to any investigation was a 1985 bankruptcy case of a Tulsa sports agent which alleged promissory notes were paid to six OU football and basketball players, along with checks to a individual identified only as "W.L. Tisdale".

"All three of us--Wayman, William and myself are W.L. Tisdale," said his older brother Weldon, "and none of us signed anything with [agent] Brent Barnes. I don't have any knowledge of it, and it's all been denied by Brent Barnes." The case went cold, but some eyes must have rolled when the Daily Oklahoman reported that Barnes' wife had been employed as a secretary in the OU basketball office.

If there was any suspicion off the court about Tisdale's arrival, there was no suspicion on the court--he was the real deal, and more.

In his first collegiate game, Tisdale scored 24 points in 21 minutes. Ten days later, he went for 51 points and 17 rebounds. He scored 30 or more points 33 times in a three year career at Oklahoma, with over 2,600 points in just three seasons with a scoring average that is 109th all-time in NCAA history. Tisdale earned consensus All-Big 8 three consecutive seasons, Big 8 Player of the Year three consecutive seasons, and consensus All-America honors three consecutive seasons, the first freshman ever selected for the consensus team and one of only 11 players in NCAA history ever to earn three such awards. The list includes Oscar Robertson, Lew Alcindor, Bill Walton, Pete Maravich, Tom Gola, Jerry Lucas, David Thompson, Ralph Sampson, and Patrick Ewing, who earned three consensus selections in the same seasons Tisdale did: 1983, 1984, and 1985. Only one player, UNC's Tyler Hansborough (consensus in 2007,2008, and 2009) has done it since.

While they had played together on the 1984 U.S. Olympic Team, the 1984-85 NCAA season actually offered a chance for Ewing and Tisdale to meet for a championship. While Georgetown and St. John's battled for #1 and #2 in the Associated Press polls, Oklahoma stood at #4, and following a 20 point rout of Missouri in the Big 8 championship, earned the #1 seed in the NCAA Midwest bracket. The Sooners advanced to the regional final versus Memphis State, where Tisdale was held to a season low 11 points in a 63-61 Tigers upset. Had Oklahoma advanced to the Final Four, Tisdale's inside game would likely have overwhelmed Villanova, and set up an epic match with the Hoyas in the title game. It was not to be.

Tisdale passed on becoming the first four time consensus All-America to enter the 1985 NBA draft and was selected second by the Indiana Pacers, the team that lost the fateful NBA draft lottery with the New York Knicks, which selected Patrick Ewing. On a struggling Indiana team, Tisdale's star dimmed in the NBA as Ewing's grew, playing 12 seasons with three teams. Following the NBA, he returned to his first love, music, becoming an accomplished jazz instrumentalist, releasing eight albums over nine years that reached the Billboard charts in that category.

In 1997, Tisdale's #23 jersey was retired at Oklahoma, becoming the first athlete in any sport at Oklahoma, including its seven national championship football teams, so honored.

In 2007, doctors discovered bone cancer in Tisdale's right leg, necessitating its amputation in 2008. Nine months later, with his esophagus damaged from multiple chemotherapy treatments, he died at the age of 44.