![]() ![]() (Well, nothing other than Ginuwine, the '90s R&B crooner, a D.C. In 2009, the floor at Key Arena was dedicated as Elgin Baylor Court.īut there’s almost nothing named for Baylor in the nation's capital. Since 2004 the Elgin Baylor Classic college basketball tournament has been held each fall in Seattle. devotee, I couldn’t help but notice there’s far more reverence for him in THAT Washington than in the Washington where he was raised. I recently did a talk radio show about Baylor with a station in Seattle, where he played college basketball. ![]() The Lakers erected a statue of Baylor outside the Staples Center in Los Angeles, alongside statues of fellow basketball Hall of Famers Shaq, Kobe, Kareem, Magic and Jerry West. In 1959, as an NBA rookie and the league's newest superstar with the Los Angeles Lakers, he became the first pro athlete to go on strike to protest racism faced by black players.īottom line: Baylor, now 86, is only officially celebrated in cities other than the one he came from. Baylor's work as a civil rights pioneer is also undervalued. The local white-owned media didn't give him the coverage he deserved while playing for all-black Spingarn High School in the mid-1950s. Henderson, a basketball Hall of Fame member regarded as " the father of black basketball" who introduced the game to his students after picking it up while studying at Harvard.īut Baylor's renown outside D.C.'s black neighborhoods, where he was a legend as a teenager, was never what it should have been. The game was big in the black community here before any other city: The sports programs at black schools in the District were run from 1910 to 1954 by Edwin B. He went on to become the greatest homegrown purveyor of D.C.’s greatest cultural export, basketball. Baylor spent his entire childhood being denied access to the city’s best parks, pools and schools simply because of the color of his skin. As a kid he was victimized by the segregationist systems Woodrow Wilson championed both as an academic and as president. ![]() native and a product of the public schools. The nutshell case for Baylor first: He’s a D.C. But also because of what he had to overcome along the way to greatness, a path that relates to the same reasons behind Wilson’s removal from the school’s marquee. Not only because of Baylor’s biography: Plainly, he changed the way the great American game of basketball was played. But you don’t have to be a Baylor obsessive to rate the case for Baylor High as a slam dunk. I’ve written lots of stories about Baylor over the past 25 years, and every one of them argues that he’s among the greatest, most influential and most underappreciated athletes in American history. Look no further than: Elgin Baylor High School. As a result, the search for a replacement has commenced in earnest. Like lots of places and things named long ago for lousy people, Woodrow Wilson Senior High School, the biggest of Washington D.C.’s public schools, is losing its title. ![]()
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