A yearbook photo of artist Prince as a middle school basketball player is making the rounds on social media.
Minneapolis Star Tribune reporter Libor Jany tweeted the yearbook photo that was published by the paper as part of a series in 1984.
He also tweeted an image of the article, in which basketball coach Richard Robinson called Prince “an excellent player.”
"He was an excellent ball handler, a good shooter and very short (5 foot 2)," Robinson said in the article about Prince’s athletic endeavors at Bryant Junior High and Central High. "Probably with a different group of people he would have been a starter. But, as they turned out, they were probably the best ball team that ever came along at Central. I knew he wanted to be starting and felt he should be starting. He was unhappy and he expressed that many, many times."
Jon Bream, the reporter who wrote the 1984 stories that Jany tweeted about, weighed in about the viral
basketball photo in a Star Tribune article published Wednesday. The clippings were part of a multi-day series the newspaper published leading up to the premiere of Prince’s movie “Purple Rain.” The series accounted for the biggest newsstand sales of the paper to that time.
“At the post-premiere party for ‘Purple Rain’ in Hollywood, a member of Prince & the Revolution told me that the series ‘blew our minds,’” Bream wrote. “The musician said the band talked more about the series than about the movie.”
Twitter users commented about Prince's middle school photo.
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