Talor Battle was just a toddler growing up in Albany, N.Y., when he sat with his mother, Denise Murphy, and watched her favorite team, the Steelers, play the Oilers in the NFL playoffs on New Year’s Eve 1989. During the broadcast, an NBC announcer mentioned that quarterback Bubby Brister had given his mother a black-and-gold Cadillac for Christmas. ‘Talor had been a huge baby, about 11 pounds [at birth],’ Murphy recalls, ‘and I said, ‘This is my Bubby. He’s going to grow up and buy me a black-and-gold BMW.” Brister led the Steelers to an upset victory, and he left Talor with a nickname that has stuck.
Bubby Battle grew up to become a 5’11’ point guard for Penn State, and last week in Colorado Springs he earned a spot on the USA Basketball roster for the World University Games in Serbia beginning on July 2. It was the perfect coda to a sophomore season in which he put himself and the Nittany Lions on the national radar.
‘How many game-winners did Bubby have last season?’ Penn State coach Ed DeChellis, a spectator at the trials, asked his assistant Kurt Kanaskie, who proceeded to catalog Battle’s big shots: a go-ahead three with 2:14 left against Iowa on Jan. 24; a banked-in runner with 0.3 of a second left to beat Illinois on March 5; and a game-tying three at the end of regulation against George Mason in the NIT on March 17, followed by eight straight points in the overtime victory that launched the Lions’ title run…