SWC75
Bored Historian
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This week's SI, (with Darrelle Revis on the cover), has an article on Spencer Haywood on Page 2. For those who don't know who Haywood is, he got a shot at representing the US in the 1968 Olympics when Lew Alcindor, (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) joined Harry Edwards boycott of the event. Haywood had been an unknown junior college player but led the US team to the gold medal. He then played for the University of Detroit for a year. Then he jumped to the ABA's Denver Rockets and was named league MVP.
But he wanted to play in the NBA, which didn't take players before their college class graduated, (Heywood played one year in junior college so he would have been a senior if he'd stayed at Detroit). He filed a lawsuit and was allowed to play pending it's resolution. Sam Schuman, owner of the Seattle Supersonics, decided to sign him.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spencer_Haywood
I knew all that but I didn't know how he was treated:"I was thrown out of several arenas. When I would walk on the floor, they would make an announcement: "Ladies and Gentlemen, we have an illegal player on the floor, number 24 and he must be escorted off the grounds...It was horrible. I was 20 years old. One night we played the Bulls and their whole team walked off the floor because their owners didn't want me to set sight on their players."
Spencer is finally being inducted into the Naismith Hall of Fame and granted this interview to SI:
http://www.si.com/nba/video/2015/07/13/basketball-hall-of-fame-spencer-haywood-call-right-time
and
http://www.si.com/nba/video/2015/07/13/spencer-haywood-lebron-james-richer-because-him
But he wanted to play in the NBA, which didn't take players before their college class graduated, (Heywood played one year in junior college so he would have been a senior if he'd stayed at Detroit). He filed a lawsuit and was allowed to play pending it's resolution. Sam Schuman, owner of the Seattle Supersonics, decided to sign him.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spencer_Haywood
I knew all that but I didn't know how he was treated:"I was thrown out of several arenas. When I would walk on the floor, they would make an announcement: "Ladies and Gentlemen, we have an illegal player on the floor, number 24 and he must be escorted off the grounds...It was horrible. I was 20 years old. One night we played the Bulls and their whole team walked off the floor because their owners didn't want me to set sight on their players."
Spencer is finally being inducted into the Naismith Hall of Fame and granted this interview to SI:
http://www.si.com/nba/video/2015/07/13/basketball-hall-of-fame-spencer-haywood-call-right-time
and
http://www.si.com/nba/video/2015/07/13/spencer-haywood-lebron-james-richer-because-him
