I absolutely love hearing weird stories about the NBA in its nascent stages. Given the high money and high-level current state of the game, we sometimes forget that it was once a league of only 8 teams and little mainstream appeal. It wasn't always this thriving, international brand that has shown no signs of slowing down in recent years.
I wasn't around in the 1960's but from what I've read mainstream audiences just didn't know or care about the NBA like they do now. Jerry West and Gail Goodrich used to drive around Los Angeles in a car that had a megahorn on the hood, and they'd plead for LA locals to come to their games at night.
Because interest was so sparse, players weren't bestowed with the enormous salaries of today, and they often had to have jobs in the offseason to keep their water running and lights on. In terms of national recognition/following, it seems like it could have been equivalent in popularity, or even less popular than Major League Soccer (MLS) is in the United States today. This story below comes from that same time.
A typical refrain for the older generations is "Back in my day, we had to (insert struggle here)....in the snow!" Well if an older NBA player like Elgin Baylor was giving that droning lecture to a young buck it would go a little bit like, "Back in my day, we had to fly COACH to our games. And one time, our plane CRASHED into a cornfield...in the snow! And after that, we STILL had to play the game!"
Well in this instance, they weren't actually flying coach, but it was a shoddily put-together private plane. The owner made them fly this vessel occasionally because it was cheaper than commercial. The year was 1960, and the team was the Minneapolis Lakers, not Los Angeles Lakers. The team's owner, Bob Short, was orchestrating the move to LA but it was still a couple years away. Elgin Baylor (who was basically the LeBron of the 1960's) was the head of the Lakers squad that boasted other legends of times past such as "Hot Rod" Hundley, Frank Selvy, and Slick Leonard. It was a transitional time for the Minneapolis Lakers, who were looking for their own identity post-George Mikan. Mikan's Laker squad conquered the league and initiated the first NBA dynasty, winning five titles from 1948-54.
On January 18th, 1960, The Lakers were just convincingly defeated by the St. Louis Hawks (now Atlanta Hawks), 135-119 . They all loaded up into a DC-3 airplane for their long trek home. The DC-3 was formerly a World War II cargo plane that the owner converted to a team plane. After some waiting around in the terminal, they soon learned their flight was delayed on the count of icy conditions and light snow. Funnily enough, a teammate of theirs named Jim Kreb who always carried an Ouija board with him predicted that their plane would crash. His teammates brushed him off with a collective scoff. He made doomsday predictions quite often. I guess if you make them all the time you're bound to hit the jackpot once!
The Lakers plane left St. Louis around 8:30 PM. The players proceeded to do what they usually do on a team flight - they plopped down at a table and whipped out the cards. They were wheelin' and dealin' for a short while when Elgin Baylor recalls that the electricity in the plane suddenly went out. Lights, heating, everything. There was a snowstorm going on around them and the lack of power caused it to get cold and dark. Their generators were still working, but eventually, they failed too.
If the power going out didn't scare them enough, one of the teammates even saw the pilots strap on a pair of goggles and stick their head out of the side panel to see! Their windshield was frozen solid! Seeing the guy flying your plane stick his head out of the side panel must've been a comforting sight! At around the four hour mark, their disheveled pilot emerged into the passenger zone with a face and hands nearly cracked from frigidity to inform them that their plane had 30 minutes of fuel left in it. They had no clue where the hell they were, as their communication with their original control tower had ceased. They had to resort to using a compass and following the north star!
Their next course of action was to lower the plane into a safe zone to land. Somehow, they got in touch with the local police department of Carroll, Iowa, who then informed citizens to turn their lights on to give the pilots some frame of reference to land. Once they got lower the risks increased tenfold. They had to find somewhere to land, and their margin for error was shrinking the lower they got. Luckily, their vision stumbled upon a cornfield, whose dark stalks in the night stood out against the barren whiteness of the snow. The pilots managed to touch down softly into this snow-packed cornfield and they slid about a hundred yards before their landing wheel caught onto a barbed wire fence and halted movement. If their wheel never caught on, the plane would've kept sliding into an enormous ditch that was a mere 75 yards ahead of them.
If that engine wheel never caught the fence, it would've certainly caused a mass catastrophe! The entire LA Lakers team and coaching staff may have perished! And given the poor state of the league, the franchise might've become extinct in the year of 1960! No Lakers-Celtics rivalry, no Elgin Baylor, Jerry West/Wilt Chamberlain, Magic Johnson/Kareem, Kobe/Shaq. Heck, the Clippers might've become LA's premier franchise.
It's remarkable that everyone survived the encounter and just went on to play their next game after finding safety. Imagine if something like this happened in today's NBA. A plane carrying the Warriors crashes into a snowy corn field. This would be a story for weeks! A large investigation would ensue, memes would blow up the timeline, sports networks would be running stories like this 24/7. Back then, it was just an odd news story that probably barely scraped interest on a national scale.
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