Get out the crying towels. Boo hoo hoo. Billy Simmons cranks out another anti-white tear-jerker, this one on the horrible evils Elgin Baylor went through thanks to evil white people. Time once again for Whitey to wallow in guilt and remorse while ignoring the ongoing one-sided black against white race war taking place.
Elgin took the game to new heights
So come back with me to 1958, the year Elgin took Seattle University to the NCAA title game and then skipped his senior season to join the Minneapolis Lakers. If you don't think Minneapolis is teeming with black people now, you should have seen the city in 1958. America hadn't really started changing yet. Blacks were still referred to as "Negroes" and "coloreds." They drank from different water fountains, stood in their own lines for movies and were discriminated against in nearly every walk of life. When Elgin entered the NBA, the unwritten rule was every team could employ only two black players. Nobody challenged it. The St. Louis Hawks even captured the 1958 title with an entirely white team.
Elgin came into a league where guys shot running jump hooks and one-handed set shots. Teams routinely took 115 shots a game and made less than 40 percent of them. Nobody played above the rim except Russell; nobody dunked, and everyone played the same way: Rebound, run the floor, get a quick shot. Quantity over quality. That's what worked. Or so they thought. Because Elgin changed everything. He did things that nobody had ever seen before. He defied gravity. Elgin would drive from the left side, take off with the basketball, elevate, hang in the air, hang in the air, then release the ball after everyone else was already back on the ground. You could call him the godfather of hang time. You could call him the godfather of the "WOW!" play. You could point to his entrance into the league as the precise moment when basketball changed for the better. Along with Russell, Elgin turned a horizontal game into a vertical one.
It's impossible to fully capture Elgin's greatness five decades after the fact, but let's try. He averaged 25 points and 15 rebounds and carried the Lakers to the Finals as a rookie. He scored 71 points against Wilt's Warriors in his second season. He averaged 34.8 points and 19.8 rebounds in his third season -- as a 6-foot-5 forward, no less -- and topped himself the following year with the most amazing accomplishment in NBA history. During the 1961-62 season, Elgin played only 48 games -- all on weekends, all without practicing -- and somehow averaged 38 points, 19 rebounds and five assists a game.
Elgin lived through some things during his career that we like to forget happened now. Lord knows how many racial slurs bounced off him, how many N-bombs were lobbed from the stands, how much prejudice he endured on a day-to-day basis as the league's signature black star. Russell bottled everything up and used it as fuel for the next game: He wouldn't suffer; his opponents would suffer. Oscar morphed into the angriest dude in the league, someone who screamed at his own teammates as much as the referees, a great player who played with an even greater chip on his shoulder. Elgin didn't have the same mean streak. He loved to joke with teammates. He never stopped talking. He loved life and loved playing basketball. He couldn't hide it. And so his body soaked up every ugly slight like a sponge.
Only a few of those stories live on. In a book called "
Tall Tales" by Terry Pluto, we learn about the time the Lakers played an exhibition game in Rod Hundley's hometown of Charleston, W.Va. Upon arrival, the Lakers quickly learned their three black players (Baylor, Boo Ellis and Ed Fleming) couldn't check into their hotel or eat anywhere in town except for the Greyhound bus station. Here's how Hundley and Baylor remembered the incident in the book:
Hundley: "The people who put on the game wanted me to talk to Elgin about playing. After pregame warmups, I went into the dressing room and he was sitting there in his street clothes. I said, 'What they did to you isn't right. I understand that. But we're friends and this is my hometown. Play this one for me.' Elgin said, 'Rod, you're right, you are my friend. But, Rod, I'm a human being, too. All I want to do is be treated like a human being.' It was then that I could begin to feel his pain."
Baylor: "A few days later, I got a call from the mayor of Charleston and he apologized. Two years later, I was invited to an All-Star Game there, and out of courtesy I went. We stayed at the same hotel that refused us service. We were able to eat anywhere we wanted. They were beginning to integrate the schools. Some black leaders told me that they were able to use what had happened to me and the other black players to bring pressure on the city to make changes, and that made me feel very good. But the indignity of a hotel clerk acting as if you aren't there, or people who won't sell you a sandwich because you're black ... those are the things you never forget."
And he didn't. If you read about the great black athletes from the '40s, '50s and '60s, everything comes back to the same point: The respect they earned from peers and fans was totally disproportionate to the way they were treated in their everyday lives. When Russell bought a house in a white Massachusetts suburb, his neighbors broke in, trashed the house and defecated on his bed. When Elgin was serving our country in 1962 and potentially sacrificing his livelihood, there were dozens of towns and cities strewn across America that wouldn't serve him a meal. Black stars felt like two people at once, revered in one circle and discriminated against in another. Just because America changed over the last four decades doesn't mean those guys forgot the way it used to be. Throw in today's nine-figure contracts and the babying and deifying of today's basketball stars and you can see why they would be a little bitter.
Full Cultural Marxist article:
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=simmons/0810 08Edited by: Don Wassall 
