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      Tamika Catchings Is Taking Her ‘Superpower’ to the Hall of Fame

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      Catchings, a 10-time W.N.B.A. All-Star, said her hearing loss helped her have greater court awareness and better anticipate her opponents’ moves.Over time, Tamika Catchings reached an understanding about her lifelong hearing impairment. If it had once led to childhood taunts and later to some communication breakdowns with her college basketball coach, Tennessee’s Pat Summitt, Catchings came to realize that her impairment wasn’t an impairment at all.Rather, it was her “superpower,” as she put it.She is certain she compensated for her “moderate to severe” hearing loss with a court awareness that was second to none — that she was more capable of discerning all that was happening around her and, crucially, more apt to anticipate what was about to happen. That was particularly true on defense, she believed, and who’s to argue? While her other career numbers — 16.1 points, 7.3 rebounds and 3.3 assists per game — reflect all-around excellence, she won the W.N.B.A.’s Defensive Player of the Year Award five times in her 15 seasons with the Indiana Fever. Five years after her retirement, as she prepares to be inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame on Saturday, she still holds the league’s career record for steals.So, yes, a superpower.Scientists have a name for it when a person deficient in one of the five senses sees the others sharpen: cross-modal plasticity. It happens automatically, not through any conscious effort. The body understands there’s a need, and adapts.In her 2016 book, “Catch a Star,” Catchings recounted a time in elementary school when she and her sister, Tauja, were engaged in a one-on-one game in the driveway of the family’s Illinois home. Things grew heated, as they often did.“He still drives me crazy, every once in a while,” Catchings said of her father, Harvey, who played 11 years in the N.B.A. “But you know what? That’s my dad.”Wade Payne/Associated PressThat’s when their father, Harvey, not far removed from an 11-year N.B.A. career, emerged from the house and demanded that the girls relinquish the ball. While Tauja repaired to her room, Tamika remained in the driveway, dribbling and shooting an imaginary ball — just going through “a silent drill in her head,” her mother, Wanda, said.Harvey was incredulous. Tamika, he says now, “took it to a whole different level.”She would, in time, lead two different high schools to state championships. She would win a national title early in her college career and a W.N.B.A. title late in her professional career. She would win four Olympic gold medals. As a pro, she would win the awards for rookie of the year and most valuable player and be named to 12 all-league first or second teams.This weekend, in a ceremony postponed from last August because of the coronavirus pandemic, Catchings, now 41 and an Indiana Fever executive, will be inducted into the Hall of Fame as part of a heavyweight class that also includes the N.B.A.’s Tim Duncan, Kevin Garnett and Kobe Bryant.She is the first women’s player from the University of Tennessee to be enshrined, news that gave her pause. Surely, she figured, another Lady Vol had made it, given Summitt’s success over a 38-year run that ended in 2012, four years before her death.But no. Maybe that shouldn’t be as big a surprise as it might seem.“I just had ‘it,’” Catchings told reporters after she learned of her induction in April 2020. “I had the drive, the passion, the determination, the focus, the attitude, the will.”Her story is a family story. It started with Harvey Catchings, a journeyman center who played for the 76ers, Nets, Bucks and Clippers before spending a season overseas.Harvey and Wanda Catchings’s children arrived early in Harvey’s career — a son, Kenyon, in 1975, Tauja two years later and Tamika not quite two years after that. Harvey taught them the game at a young age, regularly convening no-nonsense workouts. Kenyon and Tamika took to this approach. Tauja, not so much.“They tease me,” she said, adding, “Mika and our brother absolutely loved basketball, and I was kind of eh — I could take it or leave it.”Tamika was, in fact, “like an addict” when it came to the game, as her father once told The New York Times.She didn’t always appreciate her dad’s tutelage. As she put it in her book:For a lot of years, I couldn’t get Dad to hear me. His “coaching” made me feel, once again, like I didn’t fit in, that I wasn’t acceptable. I felt silenced. For a long time, I just took it all in and stuffed it, all the hurt and frustration and confusion about how to get him to see I could play the game well my own way.Ancient history now, in her eyes.“Yeah, it was a little crazy at times,” she says now, and laughs. “He still drives me crazy, every once in a while. But you know what? That’s my dad.”Catchings won four Olympic gold medals and the W.N.B.A. awards for rookie of the year and most valuable player.Tom Pennington/Getty ImagesLooking back, she said he might have pushed her to “a level that I might not have been able to get to on my own.” When she was in seventh grade, she scrawled on a piece of paper that it was her intention to play in the N.B.A. — not the W.N.B.A., as it did not yet exist — and taped it to her bedroom mirror.As a sophomore, she combined with Tauja to lead Stevenson High School, in Lincolnshire, Ill., to a state title. But the next year the family reached a crossroads. Harvey and Wanda divorced after 22 years of marriage, and Wanda decided to move to Texas, where the family lived when Tamika was in elementary school. Kenyon was at Northern Illinois University, his promising basketball career having ended in high school because of a health issue.But what of the girls?“As much as we’d already moved, it’s my senior year — I’m not moving,” said Tauja, who later played at the University of Illinois and overseas. “And I wanted to stay with my dad, too.”It was another matter for Tamika, who reluctantly headed to Texas with her mother. She won her second state title, at Duncanville High School, near Dallas, in 1996-97, a tribute not only to her growth, but also to her burgeoning superpower.When she was young, she watched TV with the sound off to learn how to lip-read. But elementary school bullies targeted her because of her clunky hearing aids, and in third grade, she chucked them into a field, never to be found.It wasn’t until she arrived at Tennessee in 1997 that she resumed wearing hearing aids regularly. Summitt noticed early in Catchings’s freshman year that she wasn’t immediately picking up on instructions and recommended the devices — smaller ones this time.Catchings, right, with Coach Pat Summitt in 2000, is the first woman who played at the University of Tennessee to be enshrined in the Basketball Hall of Fame.Delores Delvin/The Nashville Tennessean, via IMAGNThat was the year Catchings helped deliver an undefeated 1997-98 season and the sixth of Summitt’s eight national titles. Two years later, Tamika was named Naismith College Player of the Year, setting the stage for all that followed: the Olympic golds, the individual honors and a W.N.B.A. championship in 2012.Her drive was like that of Bryant, whom she met in Italy when their fathers, once teammates on the Sixers, played there. But she was most like her father. After each of her professional seasons, she asked for his advice. He told her something he had been acutely aware during his career: that somebody is always gunning for your job, so it’s vital to stay hungry, to just keep pushing.In August 2019, the roles were reversed. Harvey Catchings was the one in need of support, and Tamika was the one offering it. By then, he was 68, had settled near Houston and had just undergone a heart transplant.At his bedside, Tamika Catchings said, she challenged him in much the same way he once challenged her.“I told him, ‘This is God giving you another opportunity to live life, so what are you going to do with it?’” she said.Harvey Catchings, who lost nearly 70 pounds during his hospital stay, soon regained most of the weight — and with it, his stamina. He’ll be at his daughter’s side when she is inducted into the Hall this weekend.Yet she wasn’t certain this day would come. She went for a drive the afternoon of April 3, 2020, the day the finalists for the Hall of Fame would find out if they were selected, “just to get all this angst out.”Then the call came from John Doleva, the Hall of Fame’s president and chief executive.“I started to scream,” she said. “I took my hands off and was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m driving.’”She quickly regained her composure, once again aware of where she was — and, as always, where she was heading. More

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      Elgin Baylor, Acrobatic Hall of Famer in N.B.A., Dies at 86

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      Foreshadowing the likes of Michael Jordan, he was a star with the glamorous Lakers and was voted to the all-N.B.A. team for the league’s first 50 years.Elgin Baylor, the Lakers’ Hall of Fame forward who became one of the N.B.A.’s greatest players, displaying acrobatic brilliance that foreshadowed the athleticism of later generations of stars, died on Monday in Los Angeles. He was 86.His death, at a hospital, was announced on Twitter by the Lakers. The team did not specify a cause.In his 14 seasons with the Lakers, first in Minneapolis but mostly in Los Angeles, with another pair of Hall of Famers, Jerry West and Wilt Chamberlain, as teammates, Baylor played with a creative flourish that had never been seen in pro basketball.He was only 6 feet 5 inches — relatively short for a forward even then — but he played above the rim when he soared toward the basket. His ability to twist and turn in midair on his way to the hoop previewed the freewheeling shows put on by stars like Julius Erving, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan and LeBron James.When Baylor arrived in the N.B.A. in 1958, an All-American out of Seattle University, the pros usually scored on one-handed set shots or running hooks. Baylor added a new dimension.“You could not stop Elgin from driving to the basket,” the Hall of Fame guard Oscar Robertson recalled in his autobiography “The Big O” (2010), adding, “You sure couldn’t out-jump him, or hang in the air any longer than he did.”“Elgin,” Robertson wrote, “was the first and original high flier.”Baylor’s sturdy 225-pound frame complemented his finesse. He could muscle his way to the basket, and he followed up his missed shots by maneuvering to score over bigger players. He was also an outstanding rebounder and passer.Baylor driving to the hoop against Tom Sanders of the Boston Celtics, the Lakers’ perennial nemesis, in the 1962 championship series. Boston won, as it so often did against the Lakers. Associated PressBaylor was voted to the all-N.B.A. team for the league’s first 50 years. He was a 10-time N.B.A. first-team All-Star selection and averaged more than 30 points a game for three consecutive seasons in the early 1960s.He set a league record by scoring 64 points against the Boston Celtics in November 1959, then scored 71 against the Knicks in November 1960, only to see Chamberlain score 100 points for the Philadelphia Warriors against the Knicks in March 1962.Baylor joined with West and later with Chamberlain to turn the Lakers into a glamour team. He played in eight N.B.A. final series, but the Lakers lost seven times to the Celtics in the Bill Russell era and then to the Knicks in a memorable Game 7 at Madison Square Garden in 1970.He was elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1977.But Baylor had little success when he turned to coaching and front-office positions. He coached three losing teams with the New Orleans Jazz (now the Utah Jazz) in the 1970s and later spent 22 mostly frustrating seasons as the general manager of the Los Angeles Clippers.In the days when the N.B.A.’s TV coverage was limited, Baylor had never viewed a pro game before he played in one.“I had never seen anyone else do my moves,” he told Terry Pluto in the N.B.A. oral history “Tall Tales” (1992). “It starts with talent; you have to be able to jump. But more than that, things I did were spontaneous. I had the ball, I reacted to the defense.”And he had a nervous facial twitch that sometimes made defenders think he was setting off in one direction only to find him heading the other way.As the center Johnny Kerr put it, “You didn’t know if it was a head fake or what was going on.”Baylor, second from right, as coach of the New Orleans Jazz in 1979. With him, from left, were Kent Benson of the Milwaukee Bucks and Tommy Green and Jimmy McElroy of the Jazz.Associated PressElgin Gay Baylor was born in Washington on Sept. 16, 1934. He was a high school basketball star, then played for one season at the College of Idaho and two seasons at Seattle University, leading his team as a senior to the 1958 N.C.A.A. tournament final, a loss to Kentucky.The Minneapolis Lakers selected Baylor as the league’s overall No. 1 pick in the 1958 draft. He took them to the 1959 N.B.A. final series, where he averaged nearly 25 points a game in a losing cause, the Lakers being swept by the Celtics. He was named rookie of the year.The Lakers moved to Los Angeles in 1960, the year West arrived to provide an outside game to go with Baylor’s all-around skills.Baylor was eventually hampered by knee surgery that diminished his spring, but he remained an offensive force. He retired after his injuries limited him to two games in 1970-71 and just nine at the outset of the 1971-72 season, when the Lakers went on to defeat the Knicks for the championship.“Winning that championship was marred for me by the sad, conspicuous absence of Elgin Baylor,” West recalled in his memoir “West by West” (2011), written with Jonathan Coleman. “The guy that shared all the blood, sweat and tears wasn’t there to realize what it felt like.”Baylor averaged 27.4 points and 13.5 rebounds for his career and played in 11 All-Star Games.He was fired as the Jazz coach in 1979. He became the head of basketball operations for the Clippers, essentially their general manager, in 1986.The Clippers made the playoffs only four times in Baylor’s tenure, which ended before the 2008-09 season opened. The Clippers said he had resigned, but he filed a lawsuit in March 2009 against the Clippers’ owner, Donald T. Sterling, and the N.B.A., maintaining that he had been fired as a result of age and racial discrimination.The lawsuit contended that Sterling had described Baylor as “a token” and that he had wanted the team to be composed of “poor black kids from the South” with a white head coach. The N.B.A. was accountable, according to the suit, because league officials knew of a large salary disparity between other general managers and Baylor, an African-American.A jury decided in the Clippers’ favor, concluding that Baylor had lost his job because of the team’s poor showings.But in April 2014, the N.B.A. imposed a lifetime ban on Sterling shortly after a recording obtained by TMZ caught him making racist comments in a conversation with a female acquaintance. The team was sold to the businessman Steve Ballmer in August 2014.Baylor is survived by his wife, Elaine; a daughter, Krystal; two children from a previous marriage, Alan and Alison; and a sister, Gladys Baylor Barrett.Long after Baylor’s playing days ended, his reputation endured.Tom Heinsohn, the Hall of Fame forward on Celtic teams that bested Baylor’s Lakers, marveled at his feats.“Elgin Baylor as forward beats out Bird, Julius Erving and everybody else,” Heinsohn told Roland Lazenby in his biography “Jerry West” (2009), referring to the Celtics’ Larry Bird. “He had the total game: defense, offense, everything, rebounding, passing the ball.” (Heinsohn died in November at 86.)Bill Sharman, the Celtics’ sharpshooting guard who coached Baylor in his brief, final season, was even more succinct, telling The Los Angeles Times back then, “Elgin Baylor is the greatest cornerman who ever played pro basketball.”Alex Traub contributed reporting. More