Elgin is easily one of the most under-rated sports icons ever.
http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/791 ... hington-dc
He was iconic as a player:
"Here I am guarding Elgin Baylor, one-on-one," Wexler said. "And he showed me basketball at a totally different level — another world, head and shoulders above anything I'd ever seen. He could do everything. He was a scorer. He could jump out of the gym. He reverse-dunked on me! You have to remember: Nobody did that before Elgin Baylor. That's not how basketball was played before him."
Shue was months away from being the third overall pick in the 1954 NBA draft. Baylor was months away from getting out of high school.
"I think about that game all the time, and still shake my head," says James "Sleepy" Harrison, who played alongside Baylor with Stonewall A.C. and against him on the playgrounds. "Here you have Shue, an [All–Atlantic Coast Conference player and] college senior, and Elgin's still in high school, but he put him in his hip pocket."
"Elgin invented hang time. Everybody knows that he was Michael Jordan before Michael Jordan," says Castellani, who at 86 is still practicing law in Milwaukee. "But he did so many things nobody else did, things with the ball, like putting the ball behind his back on a fast break while cutting from his left to his right, and from a guy his size! He was way ahead of his time, and he brought all these things from the playground, things nobody had ever seen. I remember the coach at Portland put a sign up in their locker room: 'If you're going to stand around and watch Elgin play, then pay admission!' That was perfect. I guess I stood around and watched him play, too. And it was a joy."
"Elgin was the highlight of all those games," says Francis Saunders, one of the rare D.C. ballplayers who will admit to occasionally playing on Chamberlain's teams during the playground summit with Baylor. "He set the place on fire, and there was just no comparison. Wilt could score whenever he wanted. But Elgin was so creative, and, by far, Elgin was the better ballplayer. That sounds a little like I'm beating the drum for Elgin, I know. But that's how I remember it. You had to see it."
Bob Feerick, coach of Santa Clara, told the New York Daily News that Baylor was "absolutely the greatest, the best I've ever seen."
"I've seen Chamberlain and [Columbia All-American Chet] Forte and [West Virginia All-American Rod] Hundley and most of the other hot shots," Feerick said in the NIT preview piece. "Wrap 'em all up in one, and I'll still take Baylor."
And as a pioneer:
"We didn't ever think of Washington, D.C., basketball up here," says Sonny Hill, a childhood friend of Chamberlain's, and a guy known as "Mr. Basketball" in Philadelphia for being godfather of the city's streetball scene beginning in the 1950s. "Nobody did. It was just us and New York. Then Elgin Baylor came out and we all heard about it. He put D.C. on the map."
"Now, schools will look under rocks for black ballplayers," says George "Dee" Williams, a teammate of Baylor's at Spingarn and with Stonewall A.C. "But nobody came to D.C. back then. And we didn't have anywhere around here to go."
Though penalized for not playing by the rules, Castellani clearly recognized where basketball was headed. Chamberlain and Baylor's playground tête-à-têtes, and the Seattle coach's pursuit of Baylor's Kelly Miller mates, came at the cusp of black dominance of college basketball. In March 1957, Tennessee State won the NAIA title for small colleges, becoming the first all-black basketball squad to win a national collegiate championship. The big schools were following suit: Chamberlain was the only non-white player on the 1957 consensus All-American team; just one year later, five of the six consensus All-Americans, including Chamberlain and Baylor, were black.
D.C. provided a lot of the color.
"After Elgin, through my high school and college years, there wasn't another area in the country that produced as many guys who could play — and I'm talking about All-Americans and NBA players — as D.C.," says Bing, who was a consensus All-American at Syracuse before his Hall of Fame NBA career.
The playgrounds prepped him for bigger venues.
Chambers also credits Baylor for kick-starting a boom in Kelly Miller exports to the rest of the basketball world.
"Elgin's the one who got us all to go to college," says Chambers. "He showed us it could be done. Nobody from D.C. had ever gone away [to play college or pro ball], so we all thought you had to be as good as Elgin to get out of town. We wanted to be like him. You cannot say enough about how much Elgin meant to guys in D.C." (After Chambers was named MVP at the NCAA Final Four, played in College Park, Maryland, his coach at Utah, Jack Gardner, was asked by a reporter from the Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star if he was sticking around D.C.: "If there's another Chambers here, let me know," he said. "I'll stay a month.")
