really knowing what I was doing.”
Coaches shook their heads at Barnett’s shot, tried to get him to change, but ultimately couldn’t argue with the results: he became the best player in the city of Gary. As a high school senior, his school, Roosevelt, lost the Indiana state championship game to Oscar Robertson and Crispus Attucks High of Indianapolis. Barnett went off to college in Nashville, eager to play for John McLendon, if not as enthusiastic about going to class. McLendon took a look at his freshman grades and wanted to send him home, but school officials persuaded the coach to give Barnett time. A scholar he was not, but he did enough to “get by.”
In Nashville, during his college years in the late fifties, he experienced lawful segregation for the first time. He unknowingly sat in the front of a bus and was ordered to move, in the stark language of the times. He tried to eat at a lunch counter in a whites-only restaurant and was spat on by the attendant. But if Nashville was jarring and occasionally humiliating, Syracuse, his first NBA stop, was downright depressing. Drafted in the first round in 1959, Barnett was paid $7,500 to play behind two established guards, Hal Greer and Larry Costello. After two years, he hated the snowy upstate New York outpost so much that he jumped at the opportunity to join McLendon, who had by then become the first black pro coach, with the ABL’s Cleveland Pipers.
The Pipers were owned by the son of a rich shipbuilder, a guy named George Steinbrenner, who was every bit the madman you might imagine the young Boss would be. He threw tantrums. He drove McLendon crazy, then out of town. Worse, his checks bounced like basketballs pumped with helium. But before the ABL folded, Barnett and the Pipers won a championship under McLendon’s successor, Bill Sharman.
After the Lakers purchased his NBA rights from Syracuse, Barnett went to Los Angeles, where he became the sixth man and third-leading scorer behind Jerry West and Elgin Baylor. Barnett’s new mates appreciated his game and loved his idiosyncratic ways. He had a unique personality that brought people together. On the road, he appointed himself commissioner of late-night wagering. He summoned teammates with a typically colorful telephone greeting: “Darlin’, they are playing the national anthem.” The poker game was about to begin.
There was little that Barnett said or did that sounded or looked conventional. He brought a school yard swagger to the court, a knack for dropping back on defense after releasing his jumper and advising teammates out loud that there was no point in them waiting around for an offensive rebound, either.
The Lakers’ famed announcer Chick Hearn soon incorporated the showmanship into his game call: “Fall back, baby,” he would cry after a Barnett release. In his first season in L.A., Barnett made good on enough of his mini-prophecies to keep the coach off his back. In the twenty-first-century NBA, Barnett’s antics would no doubt have set off a national debate, countless shouting matches on ESPN about etiquette and sportsmanship. Back then, Barnett figured if the game’s most successful coach (Red Auerbach) could light up victory cigars, why couldn’t he have a little fun? As Cal Ramsey said, it was the sixties, a decade devoted to shaking things up. Reporters and fans got a kick out of the man with the sleepy eyes and the gait so deliberate that Phil Jackson would later, in New York, give him yet another nickname: Molasses.
That the Lakers wound up trading him remains one of the more painful transactions in that franchise’s history. West said the team was worried about Baylor’s knees and the number of minutes he was playing, hence the need for Boozer. But during his three seasons in L.A., Barnett had helped the Lakers reach two Finals (they lost both) and developed all the trappings of a star—with the important exceptions of promoting and paying him as one.
West took issue with
Coaches shook their heads at Barnett’s shot, tried to get him to change, but ultimately couldn’t argue with the results: he became the best player in the city of Gary. As a high school senior, his school, Roosevelt, lost the Indiana state championship game to Oscar Robertson and Crispus Attucks High of Indianapolis. Barnett went off to college in Nashville, eager to play for John McLendon, if not as enthusiastic about going to class. McLendon took a look at his freshman grades and wanted to send him home, but school officials persuaded the coach to give Barnett time. A scholar he was not, but he did enough to “get by.”
In Nashville, during his college years in the late fifties, he experienced lawful segregation for the first time. He unknowingly sat in the front of a bus and was ordered to move, in the stark language of the times. He tried to eat at a lunch counter in a whites-only restaurant and was spat on by the attendant. But if Nashville was jarring and occasionally humiliating, Syracuse, his first NBA stop, was downright depressing. Drafted in the first round in 1959, Barnett was paid $7,500 to play behind two established guards, Hal Greer and Larry Costello. After two years, he hated the snowy upstate New York outpost so much that he jumped at the opportunity to join McLendon, who had by then become the first black pro coach, with the ABL’s Cleveland Pipers.
The Pipers were owned by the son of a rich shipbuilder, a guy named George Steinbrenner, who was every bit the madman you might imagine the young Boss would be. He threw tantrums. He drove McLendon crazy, then out of town. Worse, his checks bounced like basketballs pumped with helium. But before the ABL folded, Barnett and the Pipers won a championship under McLendon’s successor, Bill Sharman.
After the Lakers purchased his NBA rights from Syracuse, Barnett went to Los Angeles, where he became the sixth man and third-leading scorer behind Jerry West and Elgin Baylor. Barnett’s new mates appreciated his game and loved his idiosyncratic ways. He had a unique personality that brought people together. On the road, he appointed himself commissioner of late-night wagering. He summoned teammates with a typically colorful telephone greeting: “Darlin’, they are playing the national anthem.” The poker game was about to begin.
There was little that Barnett said or did that sounded or looked conventional. He brought a school yard swagger to the court, a knack for dropping back on defense after releasing his jumper and advising teammates out loud that there was no point in them waiting around for an offensive rebound, either.
The Lakers’ famed announcer Chick Hearn soon incorporated the showmanship into his game call: “Fall back, baby,” he would cry after a Barnett release. In his first season in L.A., Barnett made good on enough of his mini-prophecies to keep the coach off his back. In the twenty-first-century NBA, Barnett’s antics would no doubt have set off a national debate, countless shouting matches on ESPN about etiquette and sportsmanship. Back then, Barnett figured if the game’s most successful coach (Red Auerbach) could light up victory cigars, why couldn’t he have a little fun? As Cal Ramsey said, it was the sixties, a decade devoted to shaking things up. Reporters and fans got a kick out of the man with the sleepy eyes and the gait so deliberate that Phil Jackson would later, in New York, give him yet another nickname: Molasses.
That the Lakers wound up trading him remains one of the more painful transactions in that franchise’s history. West said the team was worried about Baylor’s knees and the number of minutes he was playing, hence the need for Boozer. But during his three seasons in L.A., Barnett had helped the Lakers reach two Finals (they lost both) and developed all the trappings of a star—with the important exceptions of promoting and paying him as one.
West took issue with
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