Like a steam locomotive.
Rollin’ down the track.
He’s Gaw-haw-haw- haw-haw- nnn..
An’ nothing’s gonna bring Him Back.
-The Grateful Dead, “He’s Gone.”
1 Shiva
“Elgin died last week,” I kept repeating, reminding myself of Camus’ cadences at the beginning of L’Etranger, as I mulled over the loss of someone so vital to my adolescence, my understanding of modern basketball, and my sense of the miraculous.
Elgin Gay Baylor’s expansion of the game’s boundaries completely redefined its essential nature. A 1995 poem by an old friend, perfectly captures that sea change[1]:
SUSPENDED
The traditional tale of Sir Isaac Newton
and the falling apple is of significance
for its stress upon the fact that
bodies tend to fall towards the earth.
They fall because they have weight,
and the cause of their weight is the
attraction that exists between the
matter of which they are formed
and the matter that comprises the earth.
Then along came Elgin Baylor.
To paraphrase the name of Nelson George’s book [2] which traces the parallel development of Black musical genres and styles of playing basketball, Elgin Baylor “elevated the game,” lifted it into the air; added a needed third dimension to a game whose popularity had no more taken flight than many of the bulky forwards of the 1940’s and ‘50’s. He moved the game of basketball away from football, toward ballet and trapeze.
Elgin’s death was that of not only a legend and a great man, but also the sport’s quintessential tragic hero. Having brought West the hallowed Laker franchise (to begin to end the anthropocene of professional basketball), when slow-moving giants and thick legged lumberjacks [3] like Jim Loscutoff emulated the whirling short-armed hook shots of the George Mikan Era, Elgin saw his knees turn to sawdust just as the Laker juggernaut (by then including both Jerry West and Wilt Chamberlain) was about to bring the city of Los Angeles its first title.
We’d dearly love to deny his passing, but the appearance of Baylor University, both sexes of them–pronouns in tow–in the NCAA Elite Eight offered a chance of reflect. The two Baylor teams were playing consecutive games on the Monday night that marked the seventh day since Elg’s passage; kind of like Shiva(4). Yeah, dammit, but nothin’s gonna bring him back.
The task of eulogizing Elgin Baylor is an onerous one, fraught with the twin dangers of Hyperbole and Amnesia, laying in wait like Scylla and Charybdis.
On the one hand, as the decades have passed, and the limits of the human body have expanded, along with the development of advanced training methods and materials, we’ve become used to seeing others do much–if not all–of what Baylor did instinctively in his canvas Converses. Carrying 225 pounds on a 6’5” frame, without the latest advances in shoe technology to help him absorb the shock, his incredible leaping ability left him hobbled for the last few years of a career that saw him average 27.4 over 14 seasons (the last two of which saw him play a total of just eleven games), with a full decade of first team all-star selections.
During the 1961-62 season, Baylor broke the league scoring record twice, in the same season in which Wilt Chamberlain’s 100 point game in Hershey, Pennsylvania shattered all marks. That same year, Baylor tallied sixty-one points (before the advent of the three-pointer!) in Game Five of the NBA Finals, in Boston Garden.
The two physically overwhelming phenomena of their time, Wilt and Elgin were also linked by their playground duels [5] in Baylor’s home territory of Washington, D.C, which he turned into a third playground mecca, forcing New York and Philadelphia to move over and make room.
On the other hand, Elgin shares with Charles Barkley (in many ways his closest archetypal successor) the sad distinction of never having had his legendary status stamped by having won an NBA title, despite several trips to the Finals.
As fate would have it, Elgin ‘s giving way to Jim McMillian as the Laker starting small forward after just seven games of the1971-72 NBA season was immediately followed by the Lakers’ embarking upon their record-setting 33 game win streak, and finally winning their first championship since coming to Los Angeles in 1960, a move made possible by Elgin’s having rejuvenated the once- dominant franchise in his two years in Minneapolis.
So there I was, struggling to get back into the flow of a tournament that felt light years away from its nearest predecessor two years earlier, and without the usual anchoring hegemony of powerhouses like Duke, North Carolina, Kansas, and Kentucky, none of whom reached the Sweet Sixteen, with Duke and Kentucky not even making the field of 68.
We were moving toward the climactic weekend of a remarkably successful replication of the NBA’s bubble experience last summer, and I, with Elgin gone forever (6), was unable to think–on that final day of my week of shiva–that basketball was still just a game,
II Getting Gone Again
Last year, in the wake of the NBA’s March 11 Rudy Gobert COVID-19 alarm, closing up shop sneaked up on college ball fans. The NCAA cancelled its festivities, but this year, both the men’s and women’s tournaments decided to adopt versions of the NBA’s highly successful bubble model of last summer.
But oh, the uncertainties, looming large! Elaborate protocols were prepared to deal with possible scenarios of infection, such as keeping the announced brackets tentative from Selection Committee time on Sunday to Tuesday night. Actual tournament play began Wednesday, with two of the four “play in” games necessary to reduce the field to a power of two, from 68 to 64.
In case of forced withdrawals, “replacement formulas” were designed but even before the seeding, Virginia and Duke had to drop out of their respective conference tourneys, with Duke’s exit marking the definitive end to their season. As it happened, only one game had to be forfeited, a first rounder for which Virginia Commonwealth could not answer the bell against Oregon.
The first two rounds [7] produced the usual complement of upsets, but undefeated and top-ranked Gonzaga appeared so dominant that only Baylor was given any chance of beating them, of slowing down an offense that is quintessentially tuned to the modern style of play. Baylor fans could take additional hope from the fact that all four Finals meetings of the two top seeds in the Finals since the AP began its top twenty-five polls in the 1960’s had been won by the second seeded team. Baylor, too, might have gone unbeaten, had not a three week COVID disruption cost them two mid-season losses (their sole blemishes) and weeks of full team practices.
III The Women: Exit Baylor
Riding the woke wake of rebirth and redemption of Joe Biden’s initial trimester, the women’s game was showing off Uconn’s freshman star Paige Bueckers, whose masterful feel for the game enables her to throw oh-so-soft-passes, arriving pre-buttered and ready to shoot. Though never very far from the ground, she seems to float, a bit like Elgin used to soar.
Yet I have to admit that, through the medium of television (not so for seeing games live), apart from the amazingly fluid Bueckers, the women’s game doesn’t sustain me for the full forty minutes (they do quarters, unlike their male counterparts), however much its progress and spirit may impress me. Explosiveness has not yet taken off, it seems.
The Baylor women were edged by Uconn, 69-67, on a superior performance by Bueckers, aided by an egregious missed call on Baylor’s last possession. Baylor’s Dijonai Carrington, trailed by her awesomely long braids, was hammered, but not honored with a call. The no-call was so egregious that Lebron James went public to disparage it.
So Baylor’s women were gone, and we could now get back to thinking about Elgin, as the multi-weaponed Baylor men raced off to a 13-2 lead, and stayed comfortably ahead all the way, securing their Final Four berth: one game away from Gonzaga.
Coach Mark Few’s Gonzaga team entered the tourney at 26-0. Against the prevailing conservative ethos, they had somehow succeeded in scheduling extra games, the better to test themselves, and were blowing out all opposition. They were bidding to record the first undefeated season since Bobby Knight’s 1976 32-0 Indiana Hoosiers.
IV In the Heartland: College Ball Goes For Broke
With Clark Kellogg presiding with ever-increasing dignity (looking a bit like Harry Edwards in the pre-tourney Selection Committee Show, Sir Clark returned to his regal clean-shaven self once action began; eschewing that goatee, he still comported himself with the kind of dignity and aplomb that Charles Barkley generally eschews), college basketball returned to public scrutiny with a format designed to eliminate travel.
The tourney was crafted to take place exclusively in Indiana, whose heartland heritage includes such disparate paragons of excellence and virtue as John Wooden, Oscar Robertson, and Bobby Knight. Mecca! There would be only three venues; all in the state of Indiana [8].
Even without the Ivy League (which makes its money from donors, not NCAA revenue), you had to love that the tourney was back, whatever your feelings about the NCAA, its faux amateurism, and its shameless advertisements citing the off-court success of ex college athletes who did not play sports professionally, but distinguished themselves otherwise. Black poet Terrence Hayes was their perfect poster boy!
Not only Kellogg (remembered extra-fondly for his game of HORSE with Barack Obama), but the whole cast of post Billy Packer celebrity announcers (Billy Raftery, Dickie Vitale, Bill Walton) was on display, many repurposed for various conference tournaments.
And the celebrity coaches, many of them representing the only continuity for loyal fans during the One-and-Done Era. Even Rick Pitino, college basketball coaching’s smartest and shrewdest variant, was back: after winning championships at both Kentucky and its major in-state rival Louisville, he made Iona the fifth team he’s escorted to “The Dance.”
Once things got going, even without many of the traditional heavyweights (North Carolina, Duke, Kentucky, Virginia, Michigan State), we still had Villanova, Kansas, and and a bunch of teams from what seemed to be a powerhouse Big Ten, along with Baylor and Gonzaga.
The portentous “First Four” match-up of Michigan State and UCLA was to produce a Final Four team for the first time. As always, there were teams representing schools you’ve never heard of, smuggled into consciousness through familiar coaches: think Bryce Drew at Grand Canyon.
By the time we were down to the Sweet Sixteen, to everyone’s surprise, it was the Pac Twelve that was making the most waves, with Oregon State, the conference’s regular season doormat (only included because, improbably, it won its conference tourney) one of four Pac Twelve teams to advance that far. The show had started with nine (!) Big Ten teams, but the eventual semi-finals represented just two regions: the West and the South West (though brackets are no longer determined by geography)
V A Double Climax
Everyone was anticipating for a Gonzaga-Baylor Final. These two powerhouses were on course to clash in last year’s ill-fated title game, and were actually scheduled to play earlier this season (December 5), but COVID considerations forced a cancellation.
Gonzaga looked invincible all season, having won all but one of its games (versus West Virginia) by at least ten points. They seemed to represent the ideal 2021 college team: multiple engines, with interchangeable parts, running a perpetual motion wheelhouse offense, with five shooters and all-around good size. Baylor, its stalking horse, had victory margins in the tourney that were all at least ten points.
But this seemingly inexorable march toward a match-up between the nation’s two best teams was jeopardized in the semi-finals by a thrilling performance by UCLA, which extended Gonzaga to overtime, in a 93-90 game decided by a buzzer-beating 35 footer by Gonzaga freshman star Jalen Suggs, a projected NBA lottery pick. Suggs had raced the ball up-court in less than the 3.3 seconds left on the clock. It took stunned viewers considerably longer to realize that this had been a “real shot,” so much did it seem to be a heave. Coach Few said he’s seen it before in practice. “Every day.”
This had been one of the all-time great tournament games, but it shattered Gonzaga’s invincibility mystique. Baylor (27-2) awaited, with the kind of thick bodies that would make Elgin proud. Gonzaga was now 31-0, and in no way anticipated what came at them next.
Exuding power, confidence, abandon, and joy, Baylor came out blazing hot. And they had overwhelming bodies. What a group of athletes! In addition, they were the more rested team. Going up 9-0, then 11-1, they simply overpowered Gonzaga. It was scary, and it didn’t help that Suggs committed two early fouls, and had to sit while Baylor was on their early rampage. From the outset, they contested Gonzaga’s every movement; disrupted their patterned offense, with superior strength, physicality, and tenacity. Their margin grew and grew. Soon it was 16-4, 21-6, then 29-10 after ten minutes, then 35-16 before Gonzaga began to chip away, getting as close as 47-37 at halftime, the closest it had been since 11-1.
In the second half, Baylor’s margin quickly re-swelled to fifteen, before Gonzaga finally got within nine (58-49), but soon it was 67-51, then 73-53. It ended 86-70, having looked like a battle of men against boys most of the way. A post-game interview with reserve guard Mark Vital (whose vital statistics are 6’5, 249 pounds, 24 years old, with the Baylor program since 2016) epitomized the difference in bodies between the teams. Confident of their superior strength, Baylor played with abandon and joy. Their thoroughgoing domination made perfect sense. Charles Barkley remarked that he was certain that Baylor had a weight room!
Except for their two COVID-related losses, Baylor might have been undefeated too. With that additional pressure- to do what Indiana did in 1976, would they still have beaten Gonzaga so badly?
Baylor brought the state of Texas its first NCAA title since 1966, and this game in many ways resembled that year’s historic Texas Western-Kentucky final. That year, there was a largely unremembered semi-final in which Kentucky beat Duke 83-79 in a classic game a bit reminiscent of the UCLA-Gonzaga semi-final. Did the UCLA game exhaust Gonzaga? Might Kentucky, in 1966, have been spent after the Duke game, and perhaps subject to a let-down against Texas Western? That question doesn’t get asked, as it would inevitably carry overtones of racism.
Baylor’s sweetheart Coach Scott Drew smiled broadly, with joy and satisfaction. Drew is an iconic NCAA name, the Drews a hallowed family [9]. Over Coach Drew’s eighteen years, Baylor underwent a complete rebuild and transformation: from a scandal-ridden program under Coach Dave Bliss, in which one of its players was murdered (not to mention Kenneth Starr’s subsequent corrupt tenure as university president) to joyful domination.
May Elgin’s reputation thrive similarly. Amen.
Notes
1 Bob Mitchell, “The Heart Has Its Reasons: Reflections on Sports and Life,” 1995, p. 55.
2 Nelson George, Elevating The Game: Black Men and Basketball, HarperCollins, 1992.
3 See Bob Mitchell’s “When Caucasians Ruled the Hardwood,” at p. 40 of The Heart Has Its Reasons: Reflections on Sports and Life, 1995.
4 I got the news machine gun style, with three emails and a phone call within an hour that I was trying to spend with a psychotherapy patient.
5 Dave McKenna, “Wilt vs. Elgin: When Their World was the Playground,” Grantland.com, May 11, 2012.
6 Yet a third blight upon Elgin’s resume was his having been marginalized in Los Angeles by having worked so many years as General Manager for the Clippers’ venal racist owner Donald Sterling, who was eventually made to relinquish his stake in the franchise. But when the time came, Elgin fully redeemed himself by bringing a lawsuit against Sterling. Enter Steve Ballmer, and eventually Doc Rivers, Kawhi Leonard, Paul George, and Clipper championship aspirations.
7 The Selection Committee Show gets all the publicity, but the week of conference tournaments (just four years ago, the Ivies finally capitulated and became the last conference to adopt the conference tourney format, and now they’re opting out of play altogether; those rich preppies!) can bring attention to lesser-known conferences and showcase local rivalries that still mean something. And everyone has a favorite conference. Mine is The Big East.
I love the Big East. How? Let me count the ways: how vividly I recall the hatred, the boiling point to which my blood routinely ascended at John Thompson, whom I had loved at Providence College, and deeply respected, along with Temple’s also recently departed John Cheney, but whose tactics of intimidation and thuggery I despised. I never knew exactly what to make of his having no white players. None. Two years ago, I noticed one playing under Coach Patrick Ewing. He turned out to be a blue chipper (Mac McClung), but he transferred. Why?
Loving the Big East of Louie Carneseca and Chris Mullin still allows me to feel happy for Ewing whose charges upset top-seeded Villanova and then Seton Hall. Big East champs, but rewarded with a twelve seed! What disrespect! Damn, though, after that crazy expansion, it was football that did us in, a rivalry that developed between the schools that played football (the additions; the variants, if you prefer).
8 Liss, R. “I Lost It at the NCAA’s: What We’ve Lost, What We’ve Gained. WELCOMAT, April 13-21, 1976.
9 Scott Drew’s father Homer Drew was the longtime coach of Valparaiso. Playing for his dad, Bryce Drew, Scott’s older brother, hit an historic buzzer-beating three pointer for Valparaiso in the 1998 tourney.