Gary's Dick Barnett never stopped fighting for what's right; now a Hall of Famer at 88

Dick Barnett has always had to wait.

He had to wait to get inducted into the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame. He had to wait to get his jersey retired by the New York Knicks. He had to wait to get his historic Tennessee State team recognized. And he’s had to wait to be inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame. At the age of 88, Barnett is getting the highest individual honor a basketball player can receive. Barnett will be inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame on Oct. 12 and 13.

When Barnett was growing up in Gary, Indiana, he always found his way to a basketball court. He played one-on-one with older guys, he’d be in the gym during prom and he begged janitors at Gary Roosevelt to keep the lights in the gym on as long as possible. An introvert at heart, Barnett frequently shot alone.

“I got better, quicker,” Barnett told IndyStar. “I was doing this when other guys were not out on the playground in the wintertime. … I was on the playground dealing in snow and everything else.”

Barnett was born in Gary on Oct. 2, 1936, to Etta (née Barnett) Carter and Ezra Carter. As a Black family amid the Great Depression, Barnett’s family lived paycheck to paycheck in a home with no central air or hot water.

He found an affinity for basketball before he had a real ball and hoop in front of him. When Barnett’s family washed clothes in their kitchen during winter, a young Barnett would take a dishrag or a pair of socks and shoot them over the clothesline. He also enjoyed shooting ping pong balls into tin cups, often from funky angles and trying to bounce a ball from off the wall into a cup.

“Anything where a ball was going into a hole or something, he just liked that kind of stuff,” said Jean Tibbs, Barnett’s 92-year-old older sister.

Eventually, Barnett got out to real courts. It quickly became difficult to keep him away from them. He started playing at the Campbell Friendship House, and it soon became clear he was special.

Dick Barnett's jump shot

Barnett’s unique jump shot set him apart from everyone else on the floor. A lefty, Barnett kicked his legs back and placed the ball behind his head when he shot. The unorthodox form helped Barnett gain elevation over defenders and kept him balanced. He always shot the ball like that, and he claims he was more comfortable shooting that way. Barnett made a lot of shots that would’ve been 3s in today’s world.

“You’d get up on him and he’d shoot behind his head,” said Jim Satterwhite, one of Barnett’s Tennessee State teammates. “So it was almost impossible to block his shot.”

Barnett became known for saying, “Fall back baby,” during the shot, because when he went up for it, a defender’s contest hardly bothered him.

“No one else had that fall-away shot that Barnett had,” said George Finley, another former TSU teammate. “And I describe his shot as one of the most deadly touches in basketball during that time. Nobody else had a fall-away jump shot the way Dick had.”

That shot helped Barnett become one of the best high school players in Indiana in the mid-1950s. When Hall of Fame coach John McClendon — who coached Tennessee State (then Tennessee A&I) — made the trip to Gary to recruit Barnett, Barnett wasn’t at his home. McClendon found Barnett, where else, but playing at a court.

A James Naismith protege, McClendon invented the four corners late-game offense and was a pioneer of the fast break offense. McClendon was an HBCU legend who was widely responsible for integrating basketball at the college and professional levels. He had an impressive 496-179 (.735) record in 22 years of coaching college basketball, and he frequently got skilled players from Indiana to play for him.

McClendon persuaded Barnett, who was an All-State player, to play for him at Tennessee State. After Barnett’s Roosevelt team lost to Oscar Robertson’s historic Crispus Attucks team in the 1955 state championship, Barnett graduated and made his way down to Nashville to play for McClendon.

Barnett immediately made an impact for Tennessee State. As a freshman, he was an AP and NAIA All-American. He helped lead the Tigers to the 1956 NAIA tournament, which was the first with more than one Black college in it (Texas Southern the other).

Off the court, Barnett gained an interest in education that he didn’t have in Gary. Barnett — who said he “never even thought about going to college” — started going to classes and realized he was as smart as his peers. He gained an interest in writing while in school.

“He always had a novel or something,” Satterwhite said. “He would always read. See, most people don’t know that. So the knowledge that he had, it was already there.”

While at Tennessee State, Barnett and his team constantly dealt with racial barriers. As the team traveled through the South amid the civil rights movement, they faced an array of issues at gas stations and hotels regarding whether they were welcomed.

“It was what it was at the time, segregation here and there,” Satterwhite said. “You adjusted to your surroundings.”

Dick Barnett and the first HBCU national title

Still, through some of the first years of Black colleges playing in the NAIA, Tennessee State proved it belonged. TSU lost in the quarterfinal of the NAIA tournament in Barnett’s freshman year to McNeese State, the eventual champions. Barnett scored a team-high 26 points in TSU’s eight-point loss. It would be the last NAIA tournament loss of Barnett’s career.

As a sophomore in 1957, Barnett returned to his All-American status. Tennessee State was 26-4 heading into the NAIA tournament in Kansas City, Mo. TSU cruised to the quarterfinal thanks to two dominant wins over Adrian and Portland. The Tigers then snuck past Western Illinois in a 90-88 win in the quarterfinal.

In TSU’s semifinal bout against Pacific Lutheran, the Tigers saw themselves in a back-and-forth affair. TSU trailed by a point late when Barnett made a 10-foot jumper with nine seconds left to give TSU a 71-70 lead and the win in a 32-point effort. The Tigers went on to trounce Southeastern Oklahoma State 92-73 in the championship to become the first HBCU to win a national title.

Despite TSU’s success, the team came back to Nashville with very little acknowledgment. Their national championship wasn’t celebrated to the extent that it may have been if it wasn’t an HBCU. Before the Tigers even returned home, they were the target of a bomb threat (that never came to fruition) on the plane back to Nashville.

Barnett said the team was “not concerned” with not getting recognized. TSU just kept winning. The Tigers repeated with a national championship in 1958, and Barnett was NAIA tournament MVP as TSU won all five games of the tournament by at least 12 points. In 1959, Barnett led the country with 29.9 points per game as TSU went 32-1 and won its third straight national championship.

Led by Barnett — who won NAIA tournament MVP again in 1959 — Tennessee State became the first college basketball program to three-peat at any level. The trio of Barnett, Satterwhite and Evansville native John Barnhill led TSU to its best seasons in school history, as the Tigers went 94-8 in their three championship seasons.

Dick Barnett in the NBA

Barnett was drafted fifth overall in the 1959 NBA draft by the Syracuse Nationals (who later became the Philadelphia 76ers). He joined Hall of Famer and 10-time All-Star Hal Greer as the second Black player on the Nationals, as the league had an unofficial quota that allowed teams just two Black players on their roster.

In Syracuse, Barnett was miserable off the court. The unfamiliarity of being away from Gary and Tennessee State bothered him. He started writing poems as a coping mechanism, and he found a passion for writing.

“It brought everything together so I could articulate what I wanted to talk about,” Barnett said.

After two seasons in Syracuse and one playing for McClendon in the ABL, the Lakers bought the rights to Barnett’s contract. He was third on the team in scoring behind Elgin Baylor and Jerry West in 1962-63. The Lakers made the Finals with Barnett in 1963 and 1965, losing to the Celtics both times.

In 1965, Barnett was traded to the Knicks in the offseason. When he ruptured his Achilles in February 1967 during his second year in New York, his perspective shifted. He didn’t know if he’d play in the NBA again, so he refocused on education to prepare for life after basketball.

“I had to be aware of where I was, who I was and what I was going to do for the future, even if I didn’t get well,” Barnett said.

Barnett fortunately did come back from his injury. In 1967-68, his 18 points per game were second on the Knicks. Barnett made his first All-Star team and guided New York to its first winning record in nine years. In 1970, Barnett started every game in the regular season and playoffs for the Knicks as they won the NBA Finals for the first time. He was also on the Knicks’ 1973 championship team in what would be his last full season in the NBA.

'(Worked) just as hard in the classroom like he did on the courts'

The drive and passion that turned Barnett into a legendary (yet underappreciated) player translated to what he did away from the court too. That same year that Barnett won his second championship with the Knicks, he also received his master’s degree in public administration from New York University. He went on to get his doctorate from Fordham University in 1991.

“He wanted to be a scholar, and all of his degrees proved that he could work just as hard in the classroom like he did on the courts,” said Steve Baumley, the co-founder and executive director of the Dr. Richard Barnett Foundation.

Barnett became a professor and dean at Baruch College, Fordham and New York City’s St. John’s University while also publishing over 20 books and writing poems. In 2020, Barnett and Baumley founded the Dr. Richard Barnett Foundation, which provides internship opportunities and higher-education scholarships to New York youth in low-to-moderate-income families.

Barnett had his No. 12 jersey retired by the Knicks in 1990, although it was well after five other greats from the late 1960s and early 1970s Knicks teams had their jerseys immortalized. He was inducted into the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame in 1993, 12 years after he was initially eligible for the honor.

For whatever reason, recognition for Barnett’s accomplishments came later than they should have if they came at all. And while the three championships the Tennessee State team won got acknowledged on the NAIA level, those teams still weren’t given a whole lot of respect on the largest scale of basketball royalty.

As the 2010s approached, Barnett wanted to spread the word about what those TSU squads accomplished. He went back to the campus in Nashville, where he quickly realized that the student body, faculty and administration knew very little about what those teams did.

Barnett thought the TSU teams deserved an induction into the Naismith Hall of Fame. He witnessed the 1966 Texas Western team, which was the first to win an NCAA championship with an all-Black starting five, get inducted in 2007, and he felt his Tigers deserved that same honor. So Barnett went to work to educate the basketball community on what TSU did.

Two-time Sports Emmy Award filmmaker Eric Drath got word of Barnett’s mission and decided to document it. In 2011, Drath and his Live Star Entertainment production crew went down to Nashville to follow Barnett’s journey for what became “The Dream Whisperer” documentary.

“It really was emblematic of a time where there was greatness being done, and this country was not in a place to recognize all people for being equal,” said Drath, the director and executive producer of the film. “Had it been a white team, or a major college — not an HBCU — they would have been legendary.”

Barnett got the teams on the Hall of Fame ballot in 2011, but they didn’t make the finalist stage of the process. Barnett went to TSU’s campus to educate the people and start campaigning for the team.

McClendon individually dealt with similar issues with the Hall of Fame. The architect of those historic Tigers teams was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1979 as a contributor. Winning three national championships, winning 70% of his college games, inventing the four corners offense and being the first Black head coach in any professional sport only got McClendon recognized as a contributor.

So it was no surprise that Barnett went through the same challenges to get TSU inducted. Year after year, Barnett witnessed being turned down for induction by the Honors Committee. Still, he kept trying.

“I admired his drive,” Tibbs said of her younger brother. “I admired his persistence. (He) just wouldn’t give up. He fought like a champ, and I admired him. … The things that he really wanted to fight for, he fought for. Some things I disagreed … but the things that he believed in, that he believed was right, he fought for. And he kind of wouldn’t let go.”

“He’s always been the black sheep,” Barnett’s former Knicks teammate Walt Frazier said in “The Dream Whisperer.” “So he’s got the type of tenacity, now he wants to make them pay. He says what he says and how he wants to say it, and he’s a maverick.”

In 2016, McClendon was inducted into the Hall as a coach nearly 17 years after he died and almost two years after his widow, Joann, died. In “The Dream Whisperer,” Barnett stated that it was “a damn shame” that Joann wasn’t alive to see her husband inducted as a coach.

In the time that Barnett fought for the honor, people around the team like Joann and Barnhill died. Drath was concerned about the trajectory of the journey.

“There was a lot of time when we were saying we really hope that this is not a posthumous award,” Drath said.

But in 2019, TSU finally got inducted into the Hall of Fame as a team. It took eight years of Barnett’s perseverance to get it done, but he managed to have their three-peat immortalized in the Hall of Fame.

“That’s as high as you could go is getting inducted into the Hall of Fame,” Finley said. “So that's something that the ballplayers, they will never forget this. We never thought we would be able to reach that level from where we were and then who we were.”

“At first, it was no sure bet,” Drath said. “In fact, I kind of thought, ‘I don't know if this is going to happen.’ And there were certainly times where I felt pretty defeated, I think the whole team did. But Dick's leadership and persistence and tenacity really pulled us through.”

On April 5, six members of the team visited the White House and met with Vice President Kamala Harris along with family and friends. The Tennessee State teams went from barely being known by students on their old campus to getting invited to the White House, largely due to Barnett’s efforts.

“Ain't nothing in the world can be this great,” Finley said. “That was one of my greatest joys of my life, was being in the White House with the Vice President of the United States, and nothing could be any bigger than that.”

The next day, it was announced that Barnett would be individually inducted into the Naismith Hall of Fame through the men’s veteran committee. At 88 years old, Barnett will be enshrined in Springfield, Mass., in the town where Naismith invented the game and tutored McClendon, who led the way for Barnett to become an all-time great.

“He reached the mountain top while he was still here,” Satterwhite said. “So that’s the good thing about it.”

Satterwhite’s words came with a grain of salt because he feels Barnett’s induction is well overdue. It’s been 50 years since Barnett retired, and his resume from high school to the pros is astounding. Satterwhite said Barnett should’ve gotten into the Hall of Fame “many years ago.”

“And now they finally recognize him,” Satterwhite said. “But (with) his statistics, he should have been in 20, 30 years ago. … So, a long time coming, but he finally got there, and I was happy for him.”

Many of the people who witnessed Barnett’s career are gone or aren’t in the proper condition to travel to the enshrinement.

“It would’ve been wonderful if he would’ve had somebody to share it with him, you know?” said Tibbs, who will need approval from doctors to travel from Gary to Springfield to watch her brother’s enshrinement ceremony in person. “But, I don’t know. It is what it is. … I wish it had come along when we could’ve celebrated better than we’re celebrating. But I’m glad it’s happening in his lifetime.”

One watch of “The Dream Whisperer” shows why Barnett getting these honors now is so important. The documentary — which was filmed from 2011 to 2022 — featured firsthand footage and interviews of Joann, Barnhill, John Thompson, David Stern, Anthony Mason and Jerry West. All of those figures have died since Barnett’s journey started, and West — who died on May 28 — is the only one who was alive when the documentary aired.

The number of athletes living to tell their stories from Barnett’s generation is decreasing rapidly. But in the past five years, he’s gotten to smell his flowers while he’s still here. Barnett is obtaining deserved recognition this far into his life, despite always having to wait.

“What I learned from him is just never give up on your dream,” Drath said. “No matter what, it could seem as removed from reality as possible, but you never stop. And he never stopped, and he didn't get bitter, and he didn't become resentful. He just kept methodically moving forward for his dream.”

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Gary's Dick Barnett never stopped fighting for what's right; now a Hall of Famer at 88