playgrounds were closed to Black athletes at the time, so Baylor didn’t find basketball until he went to high school, where he became a three-time All-City player.Īfter one year at the College of Idaho, Baylor enrolled at Seattle University and sat out a season, as then required of a transferring athlete. Unlike so many athletes, Baylor did not grow up playing the game that made him famous. 16, 1934, in Washington, D.C., and later told how his father, John, consulted his pocket watch to mark the time of birth, noted that the watch was an Elgin and thought that would be a fine name for his newborn son. Don’t start someone off with a million dollars and give me a thousand dollars.”īaylor was born Sept. “We start with the same stakes, then see how we end up. “Everything that he said is coming to light today,” Johnson told The Times in 2014.īaylor always felt that comparison of the rich and successful Lakers and the always-struggling Clippers was not quite fair. Years later, when the NBA banned Sterling for his racist comments about Black players, former Laker great Magic Johnson said it appeared Baylor was right about Sterling. NBA legend and former Laker Elgin Baylor acknowledges the crowd upon reception of an award at halftime during the Los Angeles Lakers v Golden State Warriors NBA game at Staples Center in Los Angeles, California on November 16, 2014, where the Warriors defeated the Lakers 136-115.
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Baylor, who accused Sterling of having a “plantation mentality,” withdrew the racism claim as the case went to trial in the spring of 2011 and a jury of seven men and five women eventually rejected Baylor’s other claims, finding in favor of the Clippers. While West, Baylor’s former teammate, was taking the Lakers to unprecedented success as their general manager, the Clippers struggled for mediocrity, and although Baylor’s Clippers tenure ranked among the longest for an NBA general manager, it ended acrimoniously in the fall of 2008, when the 74-year-old Baylor was either fired (his version) or resigned (the Clippers’ version).Īmid accusations of racism, age discrimination and a hostile working environment against owner Donald Sterling and the Clippers, Baylor sued the club for nearly $2 million in 2009. 349 winning average - 619 games won, 1,153 lost - made the playoffs only four times and ran through 10 head coaches. He was named NBA executive of the year in 2006, after the team had advanced to the second round in one of its then rare playoff appearances, but during his 22 years with the team, the Clippers had a. Worse, in the eyes of many, Baylor, plagued by bad knees and trying to come back from surgery for a torn Achilles tendon, retired nine games into the 1971-72 season, the season the Lakers finally went all the way, beating the Knicks for L.A.’s first NBA championship.īaylor’s prowess on the court didn’t quite carry over to his duties as general manager and vice president of basketball operations with the Clippers. During Baylor’s career, the Lakers were beaten seven times in the Finals by the Celtics and once by the Knicks, leaving one of the NBA’s greatest stars without a championship ring.
West recalls his relationship with Baylor, who died Monday.īaylor and Jerry West, then a promising rookie guard from West Virginia, meshed beautifully and in only their second season in Los Angeles, the Lakers were back in the Finals.
The duo of Elgin Baylor and Jerry West made the Los Angeles Lakers a power in the NBA. Jerry West on Elgin Baylor: ‘A great human being’
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