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    The Time Dad Locked Down Elgin Baylor

    Elgin Baylor’s N.B.A. legacy will loom large in basketball history. But the time our columnist’s father managed to defend Baylor for a half became a cherished part of family lore.Memory fades, but simple tales we hear as children can drill so deep down into us we do not forget. It’s because of such a tale, short and sweet and told with some regularity by my late father as I grew up, that I will always hold tight to the memory of the basketball great Elgin Baylor, who died this week at 86.“Did I ever tell you about the time I played Elgin Baylor?” my father would say as he looked into my eyes, filled with wonder no matter how many times he’d begun this way.“Elgin couldn’t score on me, no he couldn’t. Not in that first half he couldn’t.”There would be more to this parable, which my three older brothers also grew up hearing. It would turn into a lesson about humility and a meditation on witnessing greatness, but that start was how dad hooked me in the years not long after Baylor’s 1971 retirement from basketball, when the Lakers’ great was still widely known as a star. With that opener, and the account that followed, Baylor came to be one of the great pillars of my early imaginings.This week, there will be many fond remembrances told about Baylor. Most will focus mainly on his All-Star years in the N.B.A. This is as it should be for a player who helped revolutionize basketball with his high-flying athleticism and all-around skill. Baylor’s decade of dominance in the 1960s foreshadowed Julius Erving, Michael Jordan and the dazzling, acrobatic game we love today.Less attention will be given to Baylor’s unusual college years in the 1950s, spent far from well-known training grounds like Kansas, North Carolina or U.C.L.A.Raised in Washington D.C., Baylor was overlooked by the major powers during an era when segregation was rampant in basketball and integrated teams tended to have no more than one or two African-American players. He ended up playing for the College of Idaho. Yes, the College of Idaho.Then he transferred to another western school, Seattle University, a small Jesuit university with a lightly regarded basketball team that he promptly led to the finals of the 1958 N.C.A.A. tournament.Memories fade. Baylor, one of the most superb men’s basketball players in history, graced Seattle with his talent for years. But in the city of my birth, the city where I grew up and now live, few outside of old-timers and rock-solid sports fans know of his history here.Elgin Baylor in a game against Gonzaga while he played for Seattle University.Associated PressAlso fading from collective recall are the 1950s years when A.A.U. basketball — then a nationwide league backed by local businesses and stocked with ex-college stars who could hold their own against counterparts in the still-fledgling N.B.A. — was a force.That’s where my father went shoulder-to-shoulder with Baylor.Mel Streeter was a talent in his own right then. He had played at the University of Oregon in the early 1950s, when he was the only Black player on his teams. (Imagine that as you watch the Ducks, bursting with Black talent, in the Sweet Sixteen of the men’s tournament.) After moving with my mom to Seattle, he thrived in the fast-paced, wide-open style favored in Seattle’s powerful A.A.U. league, where games were played in front of packed crowds and were often featured prominently in the sports pages.Baylor was a part of that mix. He suited up for a powerhouse A.A.U. team: Westside Ford.I wish now that I had asked my father more about his one-and-only game against Baylor, more about that league and those times. But dad died 15 years ago. As close as we were, some of his history will always be cut off from me. I don’t know what team he was on when he played against Baylor. I don’t know if it was a big game with high stakes — like the battles that helped decide who would head off to the A.A.U. national championship.Thankfully, I have a firm recollection of the look on my father’s face as he spoke of how, in a head-to-head matchup between two tall, lithe and powerful forwards, he held Baylor to two first-half points. Oh, and dad never let any of his four sons forget that while he was holding down Baylor, he was lighting up the scoreboard. Even before my older brother Jon knew I was writing this column, the moment he heard about Baylor’s death he sent me a text with his own recollections of our family’s well-told tale: “Dad scored 11 in the first half!”But how did the game end?Whenever he came to the story’s backstretch, my dad would always smile and bring me close, letting me know that this short fable was not actually about him.As it turned out, angered at being shown up, Baylor came out in the second half determined to teach Mel Streeter a lesson. As dad told it, the entire back half of the game was essentially a blur as Baylor whipped past my father for layups or arcing, orbital jump shots. Baylor didn’t just turn the tables: He made known that he was simply a different kind of cat. He shut down dad with lockdown defense, and torched dad for 24 points.Whenever my father told this story, which was usually while we shot hoops on the basket that hung over our old garage, he never ended it sounding defeated. His smile widened and his face lit up as looked straight at me and spoke of Baylor with awe. “There was nothing I could do,” dad would say. “He was just too much.”Dad had witnessed true genius, true athletic genius, right up close, shoulder-to-shoulder under the rim inside a packed Seattle gym. And he had loved every second of the opportunity, even as he got scorched.That’s what I’m left with. My father’s thankfulness.If only he’d still been alive to hear about the first time I met Baylor, who I crossed paths with while in my role as a reporter roughly a dozen years back. It happened in Los Angeles, at the old training center for the Clippers, which Baylor struggled to run as general manager for just over 20 years.As I introduced myself, he thought for a moment about my name.“Streeter, huh?”I could see he was thinking back, working his memory to make a connection.I nudged him a bit. Without going into details, I reminded him that he’d played Mel Streeter in an old A.A.U. game.Then he put it all together.“Your dad,” he said, “let me tell you, he could play. He could really play.” More

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

    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