Remembering when Bubba got 75

The Clovis High Wildcats were easily winning their district-opening basketball game that night, Jan. 11, 1980, in Roswell.

But Coach Jimmy Joe Robinson called time out about halfway through the third quarter anyway.

He needed to talk to his team.

“I realized that Bubba had a chance to set the school record,” Robinson told Clovis News Journal reporter Jeff Martin.

“I asked the team what we should do. Every team member said go for it, that they would block out for Bubba and help him in any way to make the record.”

The previous Wildcats school record for most points scored in a game was 57, set by Pascol Pollard in 1964.

On this night, Bubba Jennings finished with 75 points.

He broke Pollard’s record with 3 minutes to play in the game. He scored 17 more points after that.

Following the game, a 123-69, Clovis victory, Jennings thanked his teammates.

“I couldn’t have done it without you,” he told them in an emotional locker room speech.

“You are the best teammates that a guy could have.”

Today is a good day to remember Bubba Jennings because this weekend he will be inducted into the New Mexico Sports Hall of Fame.

He’s being honored for his high school career, which included a state championship in 1979, but also for his playing days at Texas Tech, when he was the Southwest Conference Player of the Year as a senior and won the Frances Pomeroy Naismith Award as the nation’s best player standing 6 feet or shorter.

Jennings, who is 5-foot-10 inches tall, averaged 15 points per game in his college playmaking career.

As a high school senior in Clovis, he averaged 33.8 points per game.

And that was before we had the 3-point shot, which would have been a Jennings’ specialty.

“We always joked,” his friend Mark Sanchez recently told the Albuquerque Journal, “that his (shooting) range was the minute he crossed half court.”

After his playing days, Jennings coached 28 years in high school and college before going into the banking business.

This year he returned to coaching, accepting a position at Peaster High School near Weatherford, Texas.

“He liked banking OK,” said his father, Brooks Jennings, who still lives in Clovis.

“I think he just couldn’t get that coaching out of his blood.”

He probably can’t get the basketball out either.

David Stevens writes about regional history for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at:

[email protected]