There was a kid out of El Reno that was POY when we got Stacey King that signed with OU. Somehow he didn't make grades and transferred out.
That was Leonard Flowers. Grades weren't his problem as much as a bad attitude was, from what I remember. The scuttlebutt was that he had an older gal-pal who had Flowers convinced that he was better than Choo Kennedy. And when he didn't beat out Kennedy it made his attitude that much worse.
He transferred at the semester break to Southwest Louisiana but never played there either. And, the capper in the 80's was that he transferred back to El Reno JC (now Redlands), then left there at the time without playing a game.
People from that area might remember this - the folks in El Reno became convinced that Flowers got the shaft from Billy Tubbs and started badmouthing him and the OU program. The El Reno newspaper chimed in with an "investigative report" that I always suspected was a poorly veiled attempt to embarrass OU, after their homeboy was allegedly wronged by the OU staff. The worst thing they found was that an OU assistant was eating a meal with Flowers and King, and a booster offered to pick up the tab, without realizing it was a minor violation.
The El Reno newspaper's little dirt-digging expedition caused Tubbs to want all El Reno media credentials yanked. It almost cost that buddy of Switzer's, the photographer named Joe Garcia, to lose his, and he wasn't even from the newspaper.
A weird irony was that Flowers reportedly turned on the citizens of El Reno when he bailed on El Reno JC back around 1987, after they'd been led to believe he got a raw deal in Norman. An even weirder situation came up around 1996 when Flowers tried to make a comeback at the age of 29 and was going to play for Redlands. People there STILL wanted to use that as an excuse to bash both Billy Tubbs and Stacey King, because King got lit up by Flowers as a Lawton High senior.
