Hollingsworth scored some 20 points and hauled 14 boards a game this past season for Judge Memorial's 3A state championship team. The 6-foot-9, 230-pound senior battled every game with opponents draping curtains from his shoulders to his knees, cloaking him the best they could, leaving his teammates open and isolated to do their business from the perimeter.
"We played all year with three guys on him," says Jim Yerkovich, the longtime Judge coach.
Until this past weekend.
That's when the Bulldogs went back to the Alhambra Catholic Invitational Tournament, an annual postseason prep event that includes top hoop schools, mostly from the Washington, D.C. area, but also from other eastern cities. Judge, on account of Yerkovich's connections with coaches there, has been invited for years.
At last, Hollingsworth was allowed out from behind the tapestry, if that's what facing a 6-9 All-American from Benedictine High School, who is headed for North Carolina, in the tournament's first game and a 6-11 center from Mount St. Joseph, who will be playing for Georgetown next year, can be called.
Neither seemed overly concerned about a nobody low-post player from Salt Lake City who had been blown off by Stanford, Princeton, and Rice, who was badly wanted by Lafayette and MIT, and who ultimately signed with Brown.
"Yeah," Yerkovich says, "they played him one-on-one."
Bad idea.
Davis, the Tar Heel-in-waiting, who was rated by somebody who's supposed to know about such things as one of the top two power forwards in the country, got eight points and six rebounds against Judge. Hollingsworth put 20 points and 13 boards on Davis.
When the highly touted one started complaining to the refs and to his opponent about the way the game was being called, and after he threw an elbow with bad intentions toward his head, Hollingsworth couldn't help but allow himself one small bit of smack: "You're the All-American. Why do you need the refs' calls?"
The Utah kid had the time of his life, banging at the defensive end and throwing up all kinds of fade-away jumpers and hooks at the other, keeping the Bulldogs close until Benedictine pulled away in the final four minutes.
"You don't often get a chance to play against guys that good," Hollingsworth says. "I just tried to prove that I was the better player."
And he walked away believing exactly that: "The stats don't lie. I was able to shut him down and he didn't do the same to me."
The fun was just beginning for Hollingsworth.
In the second game, against Mount St. Joseph, the Judge big man scored 30 points against Henry Sims, who averaged 18 points and 14 rebounds this season, and is expected to be the Hoyas' next dominant center. He had 14 points against the Bulldogs.
Hollingsworth, who went for 34 points and 12 rebounds in Judge's third and final game, was named to the event's all-tournament first team, alongside some of the country's best high school players.
His weekend of self-discovery included this nugget: "I can play against the best around. I feel really good about that."
The fact that he was not highly recruited is something of a mystery to him, but part of it may have been his own fault. He attended a camp at Stanford and expressed interest, but Cardinal coaches never responded. Princeton acted interested, but, as Hollingsworth puts it, "kept delaying and delaying it." Davidson wanted him, as did Wichita State, but those schools didn't offer the courses he wanted. MIT was eager to have him, but Hollingsworth wanted more than Division III basketball - still, not at the expense of academics.
The best part of Hollingsworth's story is his commitment to class work. In an era of basketball factories and one-dimensional athletes who make a sham of the often laughable term student-athlete, he makes a mockery of nothing.
Hollingsworth, a national merit scholar finalist, has a 3.95 grade-point average at Judge and he scored a 34 on the ACT. That score blows past brainiac and straight into the stupid-smart range.
Although he says he wouldn't mind balling in Europe as a pro for a period after college, engineering is his true calling.
He'll pursue it at Brown, where basketball practice is sometimes shifted around according to the players' academic schedules.
"It's a good spot for me," he says. "It's what I always wanted."
The whole deal is a refreshing blend of study and sports, the latter of which is important enough to Hollingsworth for him to have coupled tennis with basketball at Judge, where he played No. 1 singles for the Bulldogs and made it to the quarterfinals of the state 3A tournament each of the past two years.
"I like competing," he says. "But I want a great education, too. Academics has always been important to me. It's my future."
Judge's Noel Hollingsworth excelled against some of the best players in the nation at a recent tournament back East. (Leah Hogsten/Tribune file photo )