Alex Rodriguez — yes, A-Rod — hit a $10k halfcourt shot for a Bucknell student from Ambler. First, he called his shot.
“I just jumped into his arms, and he twirled me around a bit,” Owen Garwood said. He went viral after the former MLB star hit a clutch shot during halftime of a Bucknell game.
Owen Garwood almost missed the notification that he’d been randomly selected to participate in the halftime contest at Bucknell’s game against Army.
The Ambler native, a wide receiver on Bucknell’s football team and St. Joseph’s Prep grad, was on his phone during the timeout break when his friends started prodding him to look up at the video board — but he still had no idea what was to come.
“I didn’t know at first what I was going to be doing, so I just walked down onto the court, and then they told me what I was going to be doing, and my eyes lit up, I was so excited,” Garwood said.
Garwood went viral over the weekend after former Yankees star Alex Rodriguez hit a halfcourt shot to win him $10,000 during halftime. But first, A-Rod had to win a three-point contest against his business partners and Minnesota Timberwolves co-owners, Bucknell alum Jordy Leiser and Bucknell trustee Marc Lore, with Garwood rebounding for him.
Once he won, it was all up to A-Rod to sink the halfcourt shot.
“One of my buddies had given me an Alex Rodriguez baseball card for him to sign,” Garwood said. “He said, ‘Yeah, I’ll sign it after I make this shot.’ And then he made it, and I just jumped into his arms, and he twirled me around a bit, and then I started running and screaming with my friends, and A-Rod came and celebrated with us, too.”
Garwood, a sophomore economics major, plans to donate part of his winnings to charity, and use the rest toward his Bucknell tuition.
“And yes, he did sign the card,” he added.
After hitting the shot, Rodriguez said in an on-court interview that he’d converted Garwood from a Phillies fan to a Yankees fan, but Garwood said he wouldn’t go quite that far.
“They did an interview after, and he asked me where I was from, and I said, Philadelphia,” Garwood said. “I did say, ‘Go Phils,’ and then he said, we might have to convert him to a Yankees fan. But I’m still a Phillies fan, still a Birds fan, still everything Philadelphia sports — but I am now an A-Rod fan, that’s for sure.”