Basketball Hall of Famer Lenny Wilkens | "I Played Stickball with Willie Mays"

Black Diamonds

SiriusXM

History, Baseball, Black History, Sports, Negro Leagues, Documentary, Equality, Society & Culture, Civil Rights

4.8 • 617 Ratings

🗓️ 10 August 2023

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Lenny Wilkens scored 17,772 points as an NBA player, and won 1,332 regular season games as an NBA coach. He has two gold medals, and he's in the Basketball Hall of Fame three times. And still, he reminds you... his first love was baseball. Hear the story of young Lenny Wilkens watching Jackie Robinson's rookie season from the Ebbets Field bleachers in 1947, and the firsthand accounts of how he changed America. Hear Lenny's accounts of playing stickball with Willie Mays, and what roles the first wave of Black stars in the Major Leagues had in the community. The Civil Rights movement, the Dream Team, the incredible stories of a 45-year Hall of Fame career and the man who lived it - all with Negro Leagues Baseball Museum President Bob Kendrick.

Transcript

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0:00.0	And one day I'm delivering groceries to Jackie Robbins in South.
0:10.8	And I see him and I almost dropped the groceries.
0:15.5	But I got to talk to him.
0:17.5	And he was friendly.
0:19.1	You know, because he was going through a lot back then.
0:21.7	Absolutely.
0:22.3	And I said to him, you know, how do you do it?
0:25.1	And he kind of looked at me and he put his hand on my shoulder and he said to me,
0:28.7	they can never get in here talking about his mind.
0:32.1	His mind.
0:50.0	Well, this is really an incredible honor for me because, as you all know, I make my living in baseball, albeit baseball history.
0:56.9	But my first love was basketball. Yeah, and I thought I had some game.
0:58.7	I thought I had some game.
1:09.4	I'm there in Crawfordville, Georgia, and I used to have a bicycle rim nailed to the side of the tree.
1:13.3	And I started shooting hoops on that old bicycle rim,
1:18.3	and then I elevated it from a bicycle rim to the lard can.
1:20.4	My mother would have these old lard cans,
1:23.0	and I'd knock the bottom out the lard can,
1:24.9	and then nail that to the tree,
1:26.7	and then that became a hoop. And then eventually I got a real
1:28.9	basketball goal and net, and we made our own backboard. Yeah, we made our own backboard,
1:35.6	and would cut down a tree, nail that backboard till the tree, had a hole digger, and would dig
	...

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