Wilt vs. Elgin: When Their World Was the Playground

Wilt vs. Elgin: When Their World Was the Playground

ELIGIN BAYLOR
SPINGARN SHS.
WASHINGTON D.C.
ALL-MET ELITE

Written by
Dave McKenna

In the summer of 1957, Wilt Chamberlain came to Washington, D.C., on the promise he'd get to play Elgin Baylor on the playground.

And they played. Over several weeks, Chamberlain, a Philadelphia kid and the first 7-footer who mattered, scrimmaged Baylor on his home blacktop, just as the local phenom was introducing playground flair to the hoops realm. Chamberlain would return to D.C. a year later for an encore of their pickup games, shortly after which both he and Baylor would turn pro and put up numbers that will be drooled over for as long as the game is played — 61,798 points, 41,024 rebounds, and 24 NBA All-Star Game appearances between them. Chamberlain and Baylor went at it in five-on-five encounters on various D.C. playgrounds around town. The city's top young black ballplayers played alongside the headliners, making for an ungodly assemblage of future NBA first-round picks, NCAA tournament MVPs, and Hall of Famers. Flash mobs created entirely via analog social media appeared wherever Chamberlain and Baylor played. No newspapers reported on these Eisenhower-era faceoffs. No movies or photos of the action are known to exist, and, obviously, no box scores of their pickup games were ever kept. "At that age, I didn't know what I was seeing," says Dave Bing, now the mayor of Detroit and a member of the Basketball Hall of Fame, who was just a 13-year-old dreamer when Chamberlain and Baylor held court near his boyhood home in D.C. "Hell, I'd never seen anything as tall as Wilt. But now, to have those guys come down to your playground at that time, and with us just clutching the fence surrounding it and watching them play, well, it's just amazing. "Wilt didn't know Baylor personally. Baylor now recalls only meeting Chamberlain once before their playground matchup, at a brief gathering of top college players in New York put together by Look magazine for the March 24, 1957, broadcast of The Ed Sullivan Show. He had a hunch where Baylor could be found: On the courts at Kelly Miller Junior High in Northeast D.C., which at the time was the hottest spot for basketball players in the city. day.

To that point in basketball history, there were only two cities with pickup basketball scenes with any reputation: Philadelphia, which stocked the historically robust Fab Five college programs, and New York, which produced talent for colleges across the country — all five starters on the North Carolina team that had just beat Kansas came off New York's courts.
Chamberlain's decision to forego Philly and Haddington Rec Center to spend so much of his break lacing up his Converse high-tops on D.C. playgrounds was a huge stamp of approval for the ball being played in the nation's capital. And for Baylor.
"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."
A few hours after Harris and Chamberlain hit D.C., the shiny Olds, with its top down, pulled over on 49th Street NE, beneath the fenced-in court on the hill at Kelly Miller playground. Baylor was already there. The crowd at Kelly Miller for the first of the games with Baylor was also memorably massive. "The mood was so festive," he says, "like a big event was taking place."
Chamberlain and Baylor also brought their games to courts at Brown Junior High adjacent to the Spingarn campus in Northeast D.C., Randall Playground in Southeast, and Lincoln Recreation Center in Southwest, the latter two within blocks of where the new Washington Nationals stadium, Nationals Park, now stands. Wherever the sandlot series resumed, the townspeople appeared.
"I'd say 2,000 or 3,000 people were there for some of the games," says Dee Williams.
Three thousand spectators? At a playground?
Among the hordes at Kelly Miller who witnessed Chamberlain and Baylor: Dave Bing, who would later go to Spingarn, become a college All-American, NBA rookie of the year, basketball Hall of Famer, and member of the NBA's 50th Anniversary All-Time Team, named in 1996. (Spingarn was the only high school in the country, public or private, to have two members of the All-Time squad.) Also in attendance was Jerry Chambers, who like Bing grew up blocks away from Kelly Miller and who in 1966 would be named Most Outstanding Player of the NCAA Final Four as a member of the fourth-place Utah squad. Later that same year, Chambers was picked in the first round by the Los Angeles Lakers.
"Whenever Elgin played, there were crowds," says Chambers, now retired and living in Los Angeles. "There wasn't cell phones or Facebook or Twitter. I don't know how that happened. But I guess somebody at the court ran and put dimes in the pay phone, and all the ballplayers would come running."
Baylor ran into Wilt throughout their long careers in the NBA. They played with or against each other in nine All-Star games, and were teammates for the four years before Baylor's 1971 retirement. Baylor says that he and Chamberlain only discussed their playground games one time, near the end of his career. Wilt brought up the old days in the locker room.
"It was years after, and Wilt was still mad," says Baylor. "I said my teams always won, and he said that I only won because I also picked the teams. He said I got all the good players, because I was from D.C., and he had to take what was left."
Was Wilt telling it like it was?
"Of course," Baylor says. "Home-court advantage."