As his family of seven moved from place to place in Fajardo, Puerto Rico, always searching for a safer neighborhood and a better standard of living, young Alfonso Plummer would almost always gravitate to the nearest basketball court and get up shots.
Now a standout shooting guard on the University of Utah men’s basketball team, Plummer would shoot all day, or work on his dribbling, passing and ballhandling skills, or get into pickup games when there was sunlight, and often when there was not.
“When he takes a good shot, and when he is open, there is nobody I would put my money on more than I would him. You just expect everything Fons shoots to go in.” — Utah basketball coach Larry Krystkowiak
The youngster, the youngest of Renan Plummer and Amara Torres’ five children, decided early that basketball was going to be his ticket out of the barrios in the seaside city of 30,000 or so, even if he was never the tallest, strongest or even quickest player on the court.
But nobody could quite shoot the rock like the little lefty, who had Jimmer Fredette-like range and, just as importantly, a Jimmer Fredette-like conscience when it came to firing up shots from anywhere on the floor.
As the saying goes, Plummer never met a shot he didn’t like. The kid was in range when he got to the gym doors. His birth came with a green light attached. Or so he believed.
“Shooting just comes natural to me, from a lot of practice, a lot of repetitions and consistency,” Plummer said last week. “Shooting is about being relaxed and comfortable and doing it with confidence. It takes a lot of dedication and concentration, instead of strength.”
All the while, Renan Plummer, who played pro basketball in Panama, not only taught his son the finer points of the game, he taught him how to be the toughest, meanest, most-driven player on the court.
“He taught me how to be a dog,” Plummer said in January after scoring 23 points in 15 minutes in the Utes’ rousing 77-74 come-from-behind win over Colorado.
That game was only the umpteenth time that Plummer had displayed his otherworldly shooting ability. At the Pac-12 Tournament last year, he hit a tournament- and school-record 11 3-pointers in a first-round loss to Oregon State. Against UCLA last New Year’s Eve, he scored Utah’s first 14 points on a dizzying array of 3-pointers and drives to the hoop at the hallowed Pauley Pavilion.
“When he takes a good shot, and when he is open, there is nobody I would put my money on more than I would him,” Utes coach Larry Krystkowiak said before No. 7 seed Utah prepared to open the 2021 Pac-12 Tournament against No. 10 Washington in Las Vegas. “You just expect everything Fons shoots to go in.”
Big decision ahead
Last August, the NCAA board of directors approved a blanket waiver that will allow fall and winter sports athletes to freeze their eligibility due to the COVID-19 pandemic wreaking havoc on their seasons. That means student-athletes like Plummer, who is wrapping up his fourth season of college basketball — two at Arizona Western College in Yuma and two at the University of Utah — can return next year and still be a senior.
What will he do? Plummer acknowledged it “will be a really hard decision” but had not made his mind up yet as of the day before the Pac-12 Tournament.
“No, not yet,” he told the Deseret News in an exclusive interview. “I know they are giving me a free year, and that is an opportunity to get another chance to play at this level. But I don’t know yet. I have to finish the season first, talk to some people, see what options I got.”
Krystkowiak has said several times he would love for Plummer to return. The NCAA has waived the 13-scholarship limit for college basketball teams.
“Well, when the NCAA came out and said you can come back, Fons was excited about that,” Krystkowiak said. “So that’s my hope.”
Playing professional basketball has been Plummer’s goal since he could walk, he said.
“That’s what I want to do. I want to be a professional and get paid for what I love,” he said.
Plummer will graduate this spring with a degree in international studies and minor in sports management. If he decides to stay, he will get a second degree in sports management.
“Right now, I am focusing on basketball. We will see what is going to happen after the season,” he said.
Krystkowiak said Plummer will make an outstanding pro some day — if not in the NBA then overseas — because he is that one commodity every team needs: a sniper.
“That shooting ability, when you look around the world, there is a great value if you can shoot the ball,” Krystkowiak said. “That would be a long-term goal for him, to be able to continue his career. I wouldn’t bet against him.”
Growing up poor
Krystkowiak’s faith in Plummer means a lot, because the odds have never really been in Plummer’s favor — until now.
Nobody in Fajardo, ever called him Fons, or Fonz, or Fonzie. Heck, nobody had even heard of Arthur Herbert Fonzarelli, better known as “The Fonz” or “Fonzie,” the fictional character from the American sitcom “Happy Days” played by Henry Winkler.
That’s because few families in the neighborhoods in which he lived owned television sets.
“Fons is a Utah thing,” he said. “I kinda like it. It has stuck with me. In junior college in Arizona everybody would call me Fonzie. Now up here they just call me Fons.”
Plummer describes his childhood as “kinda tough,” especially in the beginning.
“We were in an urban area where there was a lot of drugs and stuff,” he said. “Here, they call it ‘the hood.’ In Puerto Rico, it has a different (name). It is the same concept — there are a lot of drugs going on and a lot of criminal behavior. It was a rough neighborhood.” — Alfonso Plummer on his neighborhood growing up in Puerto Rico
“We were in an urban area where there was a lot of drugs and stuff,” he said. “Here, they call it ‘the hood.’ In Puerto Rico, it has a different (name). It is the same concept — there are a lot of drugs going on and a lot of criminal behavior. It was a rough neighborhood.”
When Plummer was 12, his family “moved to another place that was more safe and everything kept getting better.”
Renan Plummer now works at a pharmaceuticals production plant, while Torres graduated last year and is a nurse.
“Being poor, it was tough,” Plummer said. “It was a big family, and it was hard to sustain five children and two adults in the same house. It was hard on us. But at the end of the day, my mom and dad always worked hard. They were always trying hard to find a way to give us some food, give us some opportunities in school. So yeah, I would say the beginning was hard, but we are all strong people and we always fought for a better future.”
Through his teenage years, more opportunities came through basketball.
“Basketball opened a lot of doors for me to get where I am at right now,” he said.
College basketball recruiters don’t flock to Puerto Rico for prospects, but longtime coach Sergio Rouco, who was born in Cuba, raised in Miami and had coaching stops throughout the Southeast and Texas, told Arizona Western coach Charles Harral about the sharpshooter from Fajardo.
Plummer arrived at AWC early in 2017, and played the 2017-18 and 2018-19 seasons for the Matadors, averaging nearly 15 points a game his first year and 18.6 his second year.
Getting to Utah
As happens at almost every program in the country in March and April, but perhaps more at Utah than most places, players enter the transfer portal. In the spring of 2019, Utah lost Donnie Tillman to UNLV and Jayce Johnson to Marquette, and Krystkowiak and his staff went searching for a shooter.
They had known about Plummer from the year before, when he was a freshman, but jumped back in for his services immediately after his sophomore year in Yuma.
Plummer said Utah was the “biggest” school that recruited him — Akron, Charlotte, Coastal Carolina and Florida International were also in the mix late — and he figured he would like playing in the Pac-12.
Krystkowiak loved his shooting ability, but wasn’t in love with his indifference to playing defense — common to a lot of junior college players. He signed him anyway.
“It was undoubtedly his shooting ability that we noticed (first),” Krystkowiak said. “We hadn’t seen many guys (like him), and we specifically started that recruiting process where we were trying to find people to put on our roster that you couldn’t leave open. … Fons was like that. Every time he shoots it, it looks like it is going in. … He plays with a lot of confidence and he has a lot of range, and that is exactly what we needed for our roster.”
Plummer got off to a good start his junior season, but when Utah got into Pac-12 play his defensive deficiencies were exposed, and he had trouble getting into games. But when fellow guards Both Gach and Rylan Jones got injured, he got his shot. Plummer averaged 26.3 points and shot 60% the final three games of the season from 3-point range (21 of 35).
Then the pandemic hit. Plummer went home to Puerto Rico last summer, but rejoined the Utes in August with a renewed commitment to play better defense. He brought back that familiar trigger finger on offense.
“Shooters shoot,” he said. “That’s (an attitude) I’ve always had.”
He started the Utes’ first seven games, came off the bench for nine straight games, then got his starting spot back when Jones sustained a shoulder injury in practice. He started the last eight games of the regular season, and took a 13.2 scoring average to Las Vegas.
At a recent practice, he made 25 straight 3-pointers from the corner without missing, a personal record.
“Well, my shooting has always been there,” he said. “On defense, I got way better compared to last year. I am taking charges almost every game. Like, last year I probably drew two or three charges the whole year. This year I am taking more charges.”
Offensively, he’s no longer just a spot-up shooter.
“This year, teams have been double-teaming me, or putting pressure on me, so I have to put the ball on the floor,” he said. “That has helped me be a bigger playmaker and be more helpful to my team on the offensive side.”
Acclimating well
Plummer said if he decides to leave Salt Lake City, it won’t be because of the people. He loves it here, and says everyone he meets is “polite and nice and always positive and sociable.”
If he does depart, blame the climate.
“I don’t like the cold, to be honest,” he said. “It is because I am a tropical person. I go to the beach almost every weekend in Puerto Rico. … I love the fans here, though. The fans are really crazy in Utah.”
Even if they insist on calling him the name of a character from a television show he had never saw — until basketball became his pathway to a better life.