This business of getting old has a number of drawbacks.

One of those drawbacks is that more and more of the obituaries you see feature familiar names. That happened to me again Saturday when I read of the death of Kenny Sailors.

Wyoming basketball fans know about Mr. Sailors, the man who, as far as anyone has been able to determine, invented the jump shot. He was at the heart of the Wyoming Cowboys in 1943, when they became the first team from the Rocky Mountains to win the NCAA championship, beating Texas and Georgetown in what has come to be called the Final Four.

I never saw Kenny Sailors play basketball, though. I did, however, have an encounter with him many years ago, and I remember him, not as a famous athlete, but as a man who once made a non-athletic high school kid feel like he had an important role to play.

Even so, I can’t ignore his achievements on the basketball court, which are, as kids say these days, awesome, and the 1942-43 season is worth reviewing. The Cowboys were 32-2 that year, an especially remarkable record since all but nine of those games were played on the road. Their only loss to a college team was to Duquesne. Their other was to a semi-pro team representing the Denver American Legion in the semi-finals of the National AAU tournament. That loss didn’t hurt much, though because the Cowboys had already beaten the Phillips 66 team, eventual winners of that tournament, twice in exhibition games.

Also remarkable was that in those days, basketball was a city game, and the leading college players and teams were mostly from big cities. The 15 men on the Cowboys’ roster, though, included 11 players from small-town Wyoming, including Lew Roney from Powell. Sailors’ home was the smallest of the small, the ranching community of Hillsdale northeast of Cheyenne.

The story doesn’t stop with the NCAA win, either. In those days, the National Invitational Tournament was a bigger deal than the NCAA finals in college basketball. St. John’s won the NIT, and their coach cited that as proof that his team was better than Wyoming. Naturally, that invited a challenge, and an exhibition game at Madison Square Garden was arranged.

Wyoming won that game in overtime, 52-47, and that win, coupled with their wins over Phillips 66, put the Cowboys at the very top of amateur basketball. Within weeks, Sailors and many of his teammates were in different uniforms. Sailors served the next three years in the Marines before playing a last season at Wyoming followed by five years of professional basketball in its early years.

My encounter with Kenny Sailors began when he was campaigning for office. I don’t remember what year that was, but I think it was 1960, when he was one of four Republicans challenging Wyoming’s incumbent congressman, William Henry Harrison. Harrison was a descendent of a signer of the Declaration of Independence and two presidents, but despite that pedigree, Harrison only received 29 percent of the votes in the Republican primary. Sailors finished second, by just a few votes more than 2,000.

While campaigning in the Worland area, Sailors visited Worland High School, where he presented a non-partisan talk to the student body. It was during one of those scary periods of the Cold War years, so naturally, we were preoccupied with what the Soviet Union was up to, and I think that was the focus of his talk. At one point, he described communism as government by “a bunch of godless gangsters,” which I think was a pretty accurate name to pin on Nikita Krushchev and his cronies.

Some of us got a closer look at Sailors when he attended our lunchtime meeting of the Key Club. It was a question and answer session — I can’t remember whether I asked one or not. The ’60s were a long time ago — but he encouraged us to take an interest in politics and participate actively in government. More than what he said, I remember that he didn’t talk down to us, but treated our questions and us with respect, and shook hands with all of us as we left to go back to class.

I don’t remember anyone saying a word about basketball.

Many high school boys encountered Sailors at Boys State, which he led for many years. I did not have that opportunity, but I encountered Sailors a couple of times in the year following his visit to WHS. The first time was the following summer on Worland’s main street, Big Horn Avenue.

I’m not sure what I was doing at the time — like I said, it was a long time ago — but I probably was running an errand for my employer at one of the local drug stores when I met him. He surprised me by greeting me as we passed each other, because he hadn’t done that with two or three people who were walking ahead of me. The only reason I could think of for his greeting was that he might have recognized me from the Key Club meeting, and maybe that’s right, because I’ve noticed many politicians have a knack for remembering faces like that.

The next day, he came into the drug store while I was behind the soda fountain, sat down and ordered a drink. I remember asking him if he was in town campaigning and how it was going. He gave me a straightforward answer and then asked if I was still in school and if I planned on attending college. He encouraged me to work hard at my education and make a contribution to my country. Our causal conversation probably lasted fewer than three minutes before I had to go wait on another customer.

Sailors ran a third time in 1964, again in the Republican senatorial primary. He lost by fewer than 2,000 votes to a businessman who lost the general election to incumbent Sen. Gale McGee. After that, he moved the outfitting business he had operated near Jackson to Alaska, where his family lived until he and his wife returned to Wyoming in 1999.

Most people will remember Kenny Sailors for his contributions to the game of basketball and for Wyoming’s shining day at the pinnacle of the game in 1943, if they remember him at all.

I will remember that I only crossed his path, but in those brief encounters he impressed me with the importance of participating in government. I was further impressed by his willingness to face the long odds of challenging an incumbent with a famous name in a primary. Most of all, I remember the way he treated me when he talked to me, as a person who was important and had an important role to play for my country.

(Go to tinyurl.com/1943team to watch the newsreel report on the game with St. John’s.)