Elgin Baylor, 1934-2021, and an #OlympicsIsOver party
The death of the NBA's first great leaper should be prompt about what to elevate; what if sports events had the same product cycle as TV and movie franchises?
What we talk about when the energy of a notable sports figure returns to the earth — the way that of basketball’s Elgin Baylor did on Monday or baseball’s Henry Aaron did so two months ago — is telling. It is not wrong to share your random memory, or spout stats as though ESPN, Sportsnet, et al., do not have entire departments dedicated to doing that and then have other departments which push it out on socials. As a fan, you do have the ability to remind people about who that person really was, and what they stood for beyond being really, really good at a sport.
Baylor basically invented the small forward position, and he is third all-time in the NBA in points per game after a couple fellows named Chamberlain and Jordan. However, there were at least two notable instances during his career, as a Black star in a majority-white NBA during the first Civil Rights Movement, when he stood up to the white power structure in protest of undignified treatment. Both connect to this sociocultural moment the world is having in 2020s, so it seems worth mentioning, even if it has to come from some mangiacake up in Canada who was born too late to see Baylor play live. (I was born the year Baylor was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame. )
On Monday, Deadspin ran a column from Carron J. Phillips entitled, “White America still doesn’t get why athletes stand up for Black people.” Like most anything in the Incited States, and sadly to extent in Canada (the Pent-Up Provinces? Peeved Provinces), how people feel about whether athletes should use their platform to speak out on issues in society breaks down by party and racialization.
Here is Phillips, breaking down public polling:
“Eighty-three percent of Democrats, 62 percent of Independents, 83 percent of Blacks, 78 percent of Asians, and 67 percent of Hispanics think that it’s having a positive impact. Compare that to 68 percent of Republicans who think the impact is a negative one. And when it comes to white people, it’s an even split, with 49 percent on either side of the question. Privilege is being able to live in a grey area when it comes to situations as serious as these.” (Deadspin, 22 March 2021)
One cannot presuppose what the historical frame of reference is for anyone who responds to a pollster who is fluent in loading their line of questions to support a narrative. Do they realize the long history of BIPOC athletes realizing they could not hang out in the grey area has been an ongoing counter-current in North America? Who knows?
Regarding Elgin Baylor, though, as a Black athlete in mid-20th century North America, he had “situations as serious as these” that demanded standing up. It is worth revisiting two in particular, since it affirms that the players in the WNBA and NBA who led the social-justice strike on 26 August 2020 were not just jumping on something trendy.
Whose water do you carry?
In January 1959, when Baylor was on his way to being the NBA rookie of the year, the Lakers played a neutral-site game against the Cincinnati Royals in Charleston, West Virginia. The NBA went off-site for games a bit in the bad old days. Off the top of my head, Wilt Chamberlain had his 100-point game in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Well into the ’80s, the Celtics used to play the odd game in nearby Hartford, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar actually broke the career points record during a Lakers-Utah Jazz game in Las Vegas, but I digress.
Upon arrival at a hotel in Charleston, the Lakers and Baylor “were told Baylor and two other black players would not be allowed to stay. The Lakers subsequently picked their stuff up and stayed at a black motel as a team in the height of the Civil Rights Movement.” Baylor took it another step: he refused to play in the game, effectively telling a white power structure that they had a choice. They could be apologists for racism and segregation and resort to awkward workarounds, or treat their players with dignity and respect.
Not to single out any medias, since no one has time to audit every obit piece, but maybe-just-maybe that was what CBS Sports meant when they said Baylor was the progenitor of the star structure with the Lakers. Or not, since they did not directly mention it, but did play up that Baylor was an Army reservist. (Every dude was an Army reservist in those days.)
The site wvculture.org has preserved some of the local newspaper coverage of Baylor’s boycott. It does read like it was one live-laugh-love sign away from being a home white-whine kit. The rub with systemic racism is that the privileged often do not feel like they are acting with bad intent since having it their way is so internalized. It is a mind-effer to be countermanded by that.
In this instance, the chamber-of-commerce types who had paid to bring the NBA to their town felt put out since “they figured Baylor should have taken his protest out on someone besides the promoters of the game, who have nothing to do with local hotels.” Of course, now we know change is effected through exert economic pressure that leads the well-connected toward carefully considering their business partnerships. People are not altruistic. They respond to imperatives.
A column referred to the 24-year-old Baylor and his two Black teammates with a racist code word and minimized his concerns by evoking a stereotype about African-Americans and food. Anything to keep the onus from where it should have been, eh?
Thirdly, the game promoters wanted the league commissioner to discipline Baylor for sitting out. We’re the aggrieved ones here! That sort of has the ring of that corner of Twitter which, in 2014, thought the NBA should fine and suspend the Los Angeles Clippers players who protested against racist team governor Donald Sterling by turning their warmup jerseys inside-out.
Like Baylor 55 years earlier, the Clippers told the powers-that-be there is an option. Sterling was bounced out of the league. And, of course, the Clippers, under new investors, grew up and ceased to be the Lakers’ little brother, building a superteam around Kawhi Leonard and Paul George … yeah-no, that did not happen, and it is was just a setup to share a tweet about Southern Ontario’s housing market.
Baylor had another moment of truth in 1964 at the NBA all-star game in Boston. The league had secured national TV coverage, which was rare for the NBA at that time. Concomitantly, the league had refused to recognize its players’ association. Led by Tom Heinsohn of the archrival Celtics, Baylor, Lakers running mate Jerry West and others refused to take the court. Of course, they were threatened with being forced out of the league by their benevolent employers. But they made good on their threat, and the commissioner, as Heinsohn said in 2011, “formally recognized the players’ association and agreed to the pension plan and all the other things.”
There have been times in sports history when management has tried to pit the stars against the rank-and-file replaceable players. From a half-century’s remove, it seems as though Elgin Baylor understood he was obligated to use his clout to try to stand up for the generations of basketball players who were coming up after him. And he took that on as a BIPOC athlete at a time when, in other parts of North America, Spencer Haywood, a recent guest on SportsLit, was a child in “indentured slavery” in Mississippi.
History does not move in a straight line. But one can connect the dots from those episodes of Elgin Baylor’s playing career to the current athlete activism. The latter is not new. And while sports are fun and a way of avoiding real-world responsibilities — Homer Simpson voice, “I have a to-do pile?!” — it only helps, as a fan, to take on signal-boosting what is really important. You don’t need to spout off stats since ESPN, Sportsnet and the like have entire departments of worker bees to do that and then spread it across their socials.
Sure, it might mean trending toward knowitallism, but the media (naive, I know) should not get away with sanding off parts of a pioneering BIPOC athlete’s life in order to make the narrative palatable. There was a lot of that with Henry Aaron, and probably a bit with Baylor too.
Best reads on Elgin Baylor
The man himself worked with Alan Eisenstock to tell his story in Hang Time: My Life In Basketball (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018). There is also an illustrated children’s book by Jen Bryant and Frank Morrison, Above the Rim: How Elgin Baylor Changed Basketball (Harry N. Abrams, October 2020).
Tangentially …
When the revolution comes, and assuming I am not among those who get lined up against the wall, I hope to be the commissioner of using sports statistics in context. It is a trigger when people flog numbers without any context.
But Sags, won’t this interfere with simultaneously being commissioner of baseball, major junior hockey or ‘age group hockey’ as you are trying to rename it, and Canadian football? No, and Jim Mullin will be commissioner of Canadian football.
This came up in the flood of well-meant tributes to Baylor. There is no beef with saying he is third in career points per game. Baylor, who played from 1958-59 to early in 1971-72, is also one of just four players who averaged 25 points and 10 rebounds across his entire career.
You can just bet North America’s uncles might be wielding that funfact against the Lakers’ current small forward. LeBron James, at this writing, boasts career averages of 25.4 points and 7.9 rebounds. James has never been a double-digit rebounder, but he also is the only dude who could win a scoring title in one decade and an assist title in another.
However, the capacity to rack up big rebound totals has varied over the years. In the last completed NBA season, the average team took about 48 unsuccessful shots and five unsuccessful free throws per game (some of which would not been in play since the shooter had at least one freebie to come). For a random comparison, let’s use 1962. The average team launched about 60 unsuccessful shots and bricked about 10 free throws. So that is at least 25 extra rebounds up for grabs in a typical game, during an era where starters played more minutes per game.
So of course no modern superstar is 25-and-10 career player. It is amazing Baylor did that at 6-foot-5, but there is no need to shade current stars.
Two other silly tangents … one, this might be galaxy brain talking, but in today’s “five out” basketball, the all-time Lakers starting five might not necessarily include Abdul-Jabbar or Shaquille O’Neal, both classic centres. In a positionless system, James and Magic Johnson would probably play the four and five spots as point forwards. Baylor and the late Kobe Bryant would be the wings, and Jerry West would be a combo guard.
The second is that the NBA trade deadline comes up on Thursday. The Toronto Raptors will say goodbye to some guys who were part of their 2019 title, circle of life and all that.
There should be a four-team swap between Los Angeles, the Minnesota Timberwolves, New Orleans Pelicans and Utah Jazz involving franchise names. Los Angeles has no real lakes, but Minnesota has over 12,000. New Orleans is jazzier than Utah, which has wolf sightings. Make it happen.
#OlympicsIsOver party (of one, but more are coming)
A few years ago, a wise friend observed, “The Olympics are gonna die before we do.” Figuring out how to cool the spectacle and refocus on essentials — a global multisports game is a good thing, generally — is going to be a major challenge for the world of international sports in the next few years. Presently, the International Olympic Committee wants to just forge ahead with the Tokyo Games.
Where that starts, no one knows. In the absence of that, we can go a flight of fancy: what if only sports events and teams had the same product cycle as a TV show, or movie franchise. They just get cancelled or go away for a while, and someone makes a new event or a team.
After all, eventually a TV show starts losing the central narrative. Then it becomes a matter of when the suit dummies clue in, usually around the time production costs rise and ad revenue crests.1 The decision is made to call it a day, the audience returns for a big finale, there is a shared experience, and we move on to another enthusiasm.
A few years later, the franchise gets a reboot, usually with fresher faces and — this is key — a leaner ’n’ meaner biz model.
That needs to happen with the Olympics like yesterday. It costs way too much to make, due to security theatre and the IOC’s insistence that governments paying the full shot.
Looking back, the 2012 London Olympics should have been the series finale for the Games As We Knew It. It seemed like the last ‘good Games’ and it was easy enough to indulge the Rule Britannia! vibe, right under the wire before Brexit and Britain’s double-down on knob rule.
Sure, Britain has put a lot of bad into the world, but it also gave us The Beatles, Fawlty Towers and Fleabag.
What are the TV equivalents to the three games since London? Season 4 of Community, Season 8 of The Office and Season 9 of Scrubs.
Sochi 2014: Mother Russia cheated. A lot. Right after the party guests cleared out, Vladimir Putin annexed the Crimea.
Rio de Janeiro 2016: Rio was a financial disaster that left the state “unable to pay teachers, hospital workers and pensions.” Then Brazil elected its own goof of a plastic hardman as its president, which you might not have noticed since Bolsonaro’s signal-to-noise ratio was not quite so high as whatshisnuts. I forget his name, but he had a Twitter account.
Pyeongchang 2018: The live sports were in the middle of the night and Canada went 0-for-4 on the main gold medals in curling and hockey. At least there was that great Scott Moir meme.
What is the convenient for talking about this today? Two of Team GB’s gold-medal superstars from the 2012 Olympics, cyclist Chris Hoy (45) and middle-distance marvel Mo Farah (38), are both celebrating birthdays today. They can never know that their shared birthday is some cranky couchbound colonial’s jumping-off point for an anti-Olympic oligarchy rant. And judging from the size of the readership, they won’t.
He’s already playing his greatest misses. Great.
Monday’s NFS was a literal rundown down the worst administrative and moral failings of the remaining schools in March Madness.
It is worth updating now that the tournament has reached the Sweet 16 stage.
East Region
No. 1 Michigan vs. No. 4 Florida State (Sunday).
On Monday, Michigan got by Lousiana State. That matchup involved large-scaleby Michigan with a now-deceased doctor who preyed on the athletes, but LSU has failed to do right by sexual violence survivors in the name of Winning, Duh very recently. Recency (and one’s own regional) bias meant riding with Michigan, and they won. Given the Jameis Winston saga at Phlarra State not so long ago, that applies to their matchup.
No. 2 Alabama vs. No. 11 UCLA (Sun.)
Taking ’Bama just to play against type.
West Region
No. 1 Gonzaga vs. No. 5 Creighton (Sun.)
A matchup of private Catholic universities. Creighton’s coach stooped to using a racially insensitive remark in front of the players last month, and the Bluejays are also the lower seed, so go Gonzaga.
No. 6 Southern California vs. No. 7 Oregon (Sun.)
College admissions scandal vs. the University of Nike. No one wins, except Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott, and he could sure use that these days.
South Region
No. 1 Baylor vs. No. 5 Villanova (Sat.)
Baylor knows what it did, and as a Texas school, there is a non-zero chance they lose in a no-contest after a Big Rona outbreak. Villanova all the way, in order to stay on the good side of Philadelphia lawyers.
No. 3 Arkansas vs. No. 15 Oral Roberts (Sat.)
If Villanova is knocked out, there is the nice nostalgist back-pocket option of a Baylor-Arkansas matchup in the Elite Eight. They used to be same-conference friends, a long time ago.
Midwest Region
No. 8 Loyola Chicago vs. No. 12 Oregon State (Sat.)
Cannot go against Sister Jean and Loyola.
No. 2 Houston vs. No. 11 Syracuse
I should be for Syracuse. But Houston has not reached the Final Four since 1984, when Jim Boeheim was still a grumpy young coach. Sen. Elizabeth Warren is UH alumna and taught there. Nothing came up specifically for Very Bad Things that Houston Cougars athletics has done recently. Let’s just bet that both teams have fun, as a way of hitting the over on Simpsons references.
That wraps it up today, for whatever this is. Stay safe out there.
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The only readily recalled exception in TV franchises in the last 25 years has been Seinfeld — the ratings were still going up in 1998 when Jerry Seinfeld famously looked at projected revenue and decided, “I don’t want to see where that line stops.”
"There should be a four-team swap between Los Angeles, the Minnesota Timberwolves, New Orleans Pelicans and Utah Jazz involving franchise names. Los Angeles has no real lakes, but Minnesota has over 12,000. New Orleans is jazzier than Utah, which has wolf sightings. Make it happen."
AKA, have LA and Utah give their franchise names back to the original cities that hosted them. Those are easy. I think the real art would be in figuring out a logical swap of all 32 team names. That might be a dangerous suggestion to make to anyone who likes to obsess about esoteric sports questions.