A pioneer in green

You would have needed a well-sharpened knife to cut through this tension. The smoky air in the basketball arena in Lexington, Ky., was thick with anticipation. All eyes focused on the collision of cultures, the will-he-or-won't-he moment of truth.

Everyone looked at a single bottle of water.

The United States men's basketball team was playing an intrasquad exhibition, getting ready for the Olympics in London. No, this was not LeBron and Kobe and KD. This was the 1948 team, a crew of little-known amateurs that retrospectively could be dubbed the "I Have a Dream Team." After all, the roster featured the first African-American basketball player to represent the U.S.: Don Barksdale.

Consider the context. The Olympics had not taken place for a dozen years. The last games in 1936 had been the debut of basketball in the Olympics, with James Naismith himself showing up and the U.S. claiming gold. The enduring cultural image from Munich took place on the track, with Jesse Owens blazing to victory in front of Adolf Hitler.

The Games in 1940 and again in '44 were canceled amid the ravages of World War II. Now, finally, the world's sporting community was about to gather in London in a few weeks, Hitler's vision of a master race having been defeated.

Barksdale, a lanky 6-foot-6 Californian who had played at UCLA, was the lone African-American on a team that included five players from just-crowned NCAA champion Kentucky. One of the coaches of the Olympic squad was Kentucky's own Adolph Rupp, still more than 20 years away from recruiting a black player for the Wildcats.

While in Lexington, Barksdale was not permitted to live with his Olympic teammates. He had to tell the owners of the home where he was staying that he had received a death threat. And now, even the sanctity of the basketball court itself had become a stage of racial tension. There was a timeout on the court -- without any of the modern distractions of T-shirt flinging mascots and pumped-in music. There were some coaching instructions. There was sweat streaming down. And there was a bottle of water.

It passed from white player to white player to white player to Don Barksdale. He took a drink, then passed it to the next player, a hulking 6-7 forward who had grown up in rural Arkansas: Gordon "Shorty" Carpenter.

"When he handed it off," Don Barksdale's son, Derek, said this week, some 64 years later, "everyone gasped."

Carpenter never hesitated. He took a few gulps of water and then ran back onto the court with his teammates.

"If that guy next to him turned his back, it would have been a rough situation," Derek Barksdale said. "But when [my father] saw his teammate just grab it and take a drink right after him, it really made him feel good inside … He used to tell that story quite often."

Derek Barksdale might choose to tell it himself this weekend when he gives the acceptance speech for his father at the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame enshrinement dinner. Don Barksdale, who passed away in 1993, is being inducted posthumously, thanks to the advocacy of the Early African-American Pioneers committee. He will go into the Hall as part of a class that is headlined by Reggie Miller, who, along with some of the marquee presenters for this class (e.g. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Julius Erving, Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson), had the door to their fame and fortune opened in part by people like Barksdale.

Barksdale's presenter would not be in that category, the palest of point guards, the 84-year-old "Houdini of the Hardwood" -- Bob Cousy. The two men played together for two seasons on the Celtics (1953-54 and 1954-55) and forged a friendship that lasted four decades.

"I never saw someone who enjoyed life as much as he did," Cousy remembered this week. "He was always upbeat, always smiling."

***

Don Barksdale was the first African-American player to:
-- Earn All-American status (1947 at UCLA)
-- Play for the U.S. Olympic team (that '48 squad)
-- Make the NBA All-Star team (1953)

His pioneering role has, until recently, been mostly overlooked for a number of reasons. For one, he played at a time when professional basketball was a peripheral part of the sporting landscape. Pro ball had started in 1946, and the NBA formally emerged from a merger of two leagues in 1949. It did not garner much in the way of public attention.

"We were so far down the totem pole," Cousy said. "Nobody paid any attention to basketball at the time. Now it's the second-most-played sport in the world, and even in my lifetime I think we'll see it eclipse soccer."

Basketball also lacked the compelling race narrative of baseball. Jackie Robinson was an unambiguously great player in New York at a time when his game was at the unquestioned center of the sporting world. His breaking of the "color line" remains an iconic cultural moment.

In basketball, the color line is more of a question mark. Who was the first black player? Historians typically credit three separate players from the same season: Chuck Cooper of the Celtics (first black player drafted in 1950 -- the same year as Cousy), Sweetwater Clifton of the Knicks (first black player to sign a contract) and Earl Lloyd of the Washington Capitals (first black player to actually play in a game). Barksdale came along a year later in 1951 with the Baltimore Bullets.

Barksdale's accomplishments were also tamped down by his own constitutional modesty. According to his son, Derek, Barksdale used to keep his Olympic gold medal in a drawer. "I was out of high school, I think, when I found out that he was the first black All-Star," he said. "Amazing. I never knew."

Also, his achievements were obscured by his chance departure from two teams just before they went on unprecedented runs of success. His 1946-47 team at UCLA was 18-7, one of only two winning seasons in the nine-year coaching run of Wilbur Johns. Two years later, John Wooden took over and went on a wild spree of winning throughout the next 27 years, putting together an almost certainly never-to-be-repeated string of 10 NCAA championships in the 12 seasons from 1963-64 to 1974-75. The pattern was the same with Celtics. After Barksdale's last season (a 36-36 record in 1954-55), the Celts ran off 14 straight winning years with 11 NBA titles.

According to Derek Barksdale, his father spoke very favorably of his years in Boston and did not convey a sense of experiencing much in the way of racial strife in the city. "He absolutely loved it," said Derek, who works as a chief of police for a Naval base in San Diego.

He also left town just before some seminal moments in the great American crisis of civil rights, including the slaying of Emmett Till in Mississippi in August 1955 and Rosa Parks' iconic refusal to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Ala., that December.

As the Celtics soared to prominence in the years ahead, the great Bill Russell lived a different reality. His career played out against an anguished backdrop of national racial strife, with images of children being slammed against walls by fire hoses and barking dogs in Birmingham, Ala. Boston would become its own cauldron of racial struggle, and Russell faced some vicious treatment.

"At some point they broke into his house in Reading," Cousy remembered. "They defecated in his bed. They put it on the walls. They did all sorts of terrible things. I can see why he would have been impacted far stronger just five or six years later than Don was."

Within the team itself, Cousy insists, racial tension never entered the equation. He credits coach Red Auerbach for setting the tone.

"I give Arnold the credit for that," Cousy said. "He treated everyone the same -- really badly."

***

Barksdale's place in the game was brought to light largely because of Ron Thomas' book "They Cleared the Lane" (an account of black pioneers in basketball) and because of the release of Doug Harris' 2007 documentary, "Bounce: the Don Barksdale Story."

The documentary makes the case that Barksdale's greatest contributions may have come in other areas. He was a successful entrepreneur in the music industry. He opened a record store when he was still a student at UCLA. He became a renowned DJ (football coaching legend Bill Walsh calls him "the eminent disc jockey in northern California for years" and describes "that smooth voice, that velvet voice of his, he could just talk to you"). He also owned a successful nightclub, The Showcase, and became close with many famous musicians and entertainers: Duke Ellington, Sarah Vaughn, Lou Rawls, Flip Wilson, etc.

In his later years, the film points out, Barksdale used his considerable connections in sports and the entertainment industry to oversee an organization called "Save High School Sports" in Oakland, raising well more than $1 million as budget cuts threatened opportunities for inner-city kids. It was a cause close to his heart. After all, Barksdale had been cut every year from the Berkeley High School team, judged by the color of his skin and not by the content of his character (or his basketball skills).

"He just crossed so many lines," said his sister Pam Barksdale-Gore, who is traveling east from California this week with a large contingent of family members for the enshrinement.

Barksdale-Gore, whose given name is "Pamelia" ("Don named me," she said of her brother, who was 20 years her senior), says that Don was a beloved figure in the family, thought by their grandmother to have "fallen out of the Christmas tree." Their father, Argee, was a Pullman porter. Their mother, Desoree, was the one who got Don into sports. "My mother was the one who used to slink him out of the house to play basketball," she said. "My dad wasn't sure what bouncing a ball was going to accomplish."

As a teenager, Don Barksdale went with some friends to see a football game at the nearby University of California campus against UCLA, where one athlete caught his attention.

"My first hero was really Jackie Robinson," he said in a taped interview aired in "Bounce."

Years later, after playing at Marin Junior College and serving in World War II, Don Barksdale would become, briefly, a multisport athlete at UCLA, just like his hero. He ran track and played basketball, his breakthrough 1946-47 season ending just weeks before Robinson's debut with the Dodgers.

As professional basketball began to take shape in fits and starts in the late '40s, Barksdale maintained his amateur status -- like many great players of the day -- by playing what was called AAU ball. The teams were subsidized by businesses, retaining a kind of wink-wink amateurism. Those seasons of playing on teams like the Oakland Bittners (named after Lou Bittner, owner of a tax-preparation business) might well have represented Barksdale's prime. In an era before dunk-contest histrionics, he routinely soared above the rim to drop in points and harvest rebounds in the thin air.