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SPORTS
BASKETBALL'S
BIG SHOT
"LITTLE" ELGIN BAYLOR
"Only" six-foot-five, he keeps
those pro cage giants up in the air
with his all-around finesse
BY ED FITZGERALD
"Shorty" Elgin Baylor towers over bigger men in rebounding.
How would you like to be six feet
five inches tall and hear the men
you work with call you "little man"?
That's how it is with Elgin Baylor,
one of pro basketball's greatest players
and the "one-man franchise" of the Min
neapolis Lakers.
When he walks down the street, Elgin
looks like a giant; his wife Ruby had to
have an oversize bed custom-made for
their apartment in St. Paul to accommo
date his height; but when he goes out
on the court to play a National Basket
ball Association game, he's a shrimp.
Well, maybe not exactly a shrimp. Bob
Cousy, who is probably the most famous
"little man" in the NBA, is only six feet,
two inches tall, but almost all the big
scorers in the league are three or four
inches taller than Baylor, ranging all
the way up to Bill Russell's six feet, ten
inches and the seven feet, one inch of
the astonishing Wilt Chamberlain.
"I guess in just about every game I
play, the man I'm matched up with is
bigger," Elgin says. "I'm used to it."
It certainly doesn't seem to bother
him any. He's been tops ever since he
left Seattle University at the end of his
junior year and signed a $20,000 contract
with the Lakers, who were frantically
searching for a new drawing card to re
place the immortal George Mikan. In
his professional debut in 1958, he re
quired exactly eight seconds to find the
range for his first basket and wound
up the evening with 25 points as he led
the Lakers to an easy victory over the
Cincinnati Royals.
That was only the beginning. In the
middle of the season, playing with the
West team in the NBA's annual All-Star
game, Elgin tied old pro Bob Pettit in
the voting for the most-valuable-player
award. He was the first rookie to achieve
the honor, and Pettit made the occasion
even more memorable by insisting that
Elgin take the trophy. "I've already got
one," Bob said. "Anyway, you earned it"
As good as he was in his rookie season,
Elgin is even better this year. Scoring
more than ever, he piled up 52 points in
the first game of the season, and on Nov.
8 he buried the champion Boston Celtics
under an incredible 64 points. "I never
scored that many in college," he said,
"and I didn't even in high school."
Elgin got his start as a basketball
prodigy at Spingarn High School in
Washington, D. C, where he scored some
2,000 points and won himself a spot on
the Helms High-School All-America
team. A lot of colleges were interested in
him, but it usually turned out that only
the basketball coach stayed interested
the registrar generally blanched when he
got a peek at Baylor's grades.
"I don't remember what they were,"
Elgin says grimly, "but they weren't
very good, I can tell you that." He finally
7 I
To Elgin's wife Ruby, the pro star is a
big man around the house in every sense.
made it to the College of Idaho, where
he played for a year, gave fits to Idaho's
opponents, and made the small-college
All-America before transferring to
Seattle University.
There wasn't much that Elgin could
have done at Seattle that he didn't do.
Emmett Watson, one of the finest sports
writers in the country, wrote this neck-stuck-out
line about him in a national
magazine: "Elgin Baylor, a junior at
Seattle University, is probably the best
basketball player today, pro or amateur."
The strangest part about Watson's
challenging claim was that knowledge
able basketball men didn't get too upset
by it. Some, to be sure, grumbled that
Bob Cousy was still around, and others
said that it might be smarter to wait
until Baylor got out of college and faced
the pros. But nobody said it was ridicu
lous to talk that way about a college kid
not if he was Elgin Baylor.
Baylor is much more than just a
scorer. He's a complete basketball
player. He can handle the ball, set up
plays, hit his teammates on the dead run
with perfectly timed passes, defend
tenaciously, and go after the ball on re
bounds with the spring of a leopard and
the strength of a bull. In the NBA, they
call him a "big six-five" because he has
the skill to compete on even terms with
the tallest players in the game.
There's no telling how high Elgin will
go before he comes to the end of the line.
He will probably be drawing top pay in
the pro league for another ten years.
And soon he will have even more in
centive to play to the peak of his
powers: his pretty wife Ruby, a senior
at the University of Minnesota, is ex
pecting their first baby in March. Ruby,
at five feet, six inches, is almost a foot
shorter than her famous husband. If the
baby takes after Elgin instead of her,
she may have to go shopping for a
custom-made cradle to go with that
custom-made bed.
12
Family Weekly, January 10, I960