If the identify Dick Barnett tickles your reminiscence a bit, you might be in all probability a Lakers fan, and never a younger one. Or, extra probably, you're a Knicks fan.
If the achievements of the 1957, ’58 and ’59 basketball groups from Tennessee A&I set off any recognition, contemplate your self one in 1,000,000, a sports activities geek.
However there's as story there, and it doesn't matter what your age or sports activities pursuits, it's price understanding. It’s about rather more than basketball success, and it's being advised in a documentary movie entitled “The Dream Whisperer.” The primary have a look at that shall be introduced Saturday at 7 p.m. on the Pan African Movie & Arts Competition, in a theatre complicated on the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza.
Barnett is the “Dream Whisperer.” He's additionally the previous Lakers guard who performed with Jerry West and Elgin Baylor from 1962 to 1965. To stir your reminiscence, consider a thin, left-handed jump-shooter, who kicked his legs backward as he unleashed. Consider a protracted, emaciated face a person who carried the nickname “Cranium” as a result of, effectively, he seemed like one. You may also consider the participant, an ace sixth man more often than not, who bought traded from the Lakers to the New York Knicks, infuriating West and ending up serving to the Knicks win their solely two NBA titles (1970 and 1973). The Knicks beat the Lakers each occasions.
Barnett’s No. 12 jersey now hangs within the rafters of Madison Sq. Backyard.
The guts of this story shouldn't be the Lakers, or the Knicks, or West, nor even the numerous superstar voices the movie presents, comparable to Phil Jackson, Walt Frazier, David Stern, Julius Erving, Invoice Bradley, Al Sharpton and the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It's Barnett’s story of, as the previous Knicks star and U.S. senator Bradley calls it, “unimaginable tenaciousness.”
Earlier than he was a professional, earlier than he was drafted fourth general by the Syracuse Nationals in 1959, Barnett performed for the Tennessee A&I Tigers, a faculty in Nashville that's now Tennessee State. His crew gained the championship of the NAIA (Nationwide Assn. of Intercollegiate Athletics) thrice in a row, and that was simply 5 years after all-Black faculties had been even allowed to compete in any nationwide basketball match that meant their presence would combine the competitors. The Texas Western Miners, with 5 Black starters, surprised the school basketball world in 1966 by beating Pat Riley’s Kentucky within the NCAA last. The A&I Tigers had gained a nationwide title a decade earlier than and accomplished it thrice.
However it turned out that that three-peat had little traction within the sports activities world. The NAIA division featured a bunch of smaller faculties and the sports activities world associated extra to Disneyland than Branson, Mo.
By the mid-Seventies, Barnett was accomplished along with his NBA profession. He had torn an Achilles tendon and medical doctors advised him he may by no means play once more. “I began to consider what I used to be going to do with the remainder of my life,” he says.
It was a burning query as a result of training takes you locations in life, and Barnett had nearly none. Rising up within the opulence of Gary, Ind., he was a foul scholar at Roosevelt Excessive, however a adequate basketball participant to guide his crew to the Indiana State finals, the place it misplaced to Crispus Attucks Excessive and someone named Oscar Robertson. Barnett was from the ghetto and anticipated to remain there.
“The one white folks I ever noticed in Gary had been police,” he says.
At some point, a person named John McClendon, who would turn out to be a Corridor of Fame coach, provided him a scholarship to play for him at Tennessee A&I.
“I by no means heard of the place,” Barnett says.
With no higher choices, he went, grew to become captain of the crew and was the star participant of A&I’s three-year NAIA sweep.
When basketball ended, he knew faculty was the following step, the one step. Whereas with the Lakers, he made the journey from the west facet of Los Angeles to take lessons at Cal Poly Pomona and finally went again to complete his school diploma there in bodily training. He adopted that with a grasp’s diploma from NYU in public administration and a doctorate from Fordham in training. So, it was Dr. Richard Barnett, professor and creator of greater than 20 books, who paused at some point with a realization that there was one thing else he wanted to handle — getting his NAIA three-peat crew into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Corridor of Fame.
It shouldn’t be troublesome, he reasoned. His crew had achieved this unbelievable milestone within the midst of the Jim Crow period of southern state legal guidelines that legalized racial segregation. He and his teammates needed to keep in non-public properties after they traveled to video games. After they gained their first NAIA title, Barnett rushed again to downtown Nashville to take part in a restaurant counter sit-in, the place no Blacks had been allowed. The Naismith Corridor of Fame folks would take heed to all this and, in a brand new world of racial understanding, rapidly resolve to honor this crew.
His first strive was 2011. He was turned down then and yearly for the following seven. It grew to become greater than a marketing campaign for Barnett; nearer to an obsession. “It was a narrative that have to be advised,” Barnett says. “Individuals had been dying. This was a crew that will be misplaced to historical past.”
In 2011, George Willis of the New York Submit wrote a column about Barnett’s efforts.
“I had by no means heard about this,” Willis says. “I assumed Tennessee State was a soccer faculty.”
In 2016, Willis wrote once more. “My theme was, ‘What's taking so lengthy?’”
A former proprietor of the Atlanta Hawks, George Peskowitz, learn the primary Willis column. He referred to as a filmmaker pal, Eric Drath. For eight years, cameras adopted Barnett, now 85 and strolling with a cane.
“When he lastly bought the crew within the corridor in 2019,” says Willis, one of many documentary producers, “there was loads of movie.”
On the 2019 ceremony in Springfield, Mass., his pal West stood subsequent to Barnett on the rostrum, shook his hand and introduced him for his acceptance speech. Barnett had reached the highest of his mountain climb, and the NBA emblem was there to have a good time with him.
West stated this week that he shall be on the Saturday displaying of “The Dream Whisperer,” including that it will likely be good to observe one thing correct and optimistic. That will be a reference to his present battle with HBO over its portrayal of him within the present sequence “Profitable Time.” West, via his legal professionals, has demanded a retraction and apology from HBO.
“The sequence made us all [the Lakers] seem like cartoon characters,” West says. “They belittled one thing good. If I've to, I'll take this all the way in which to the Supreme Court docket.”
Even that in all probability wouldn’t take so long as his pal Barnett’s journey to Corridor of Fame recognition for a crew of basketball legends that few knew. At the least till now.
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