by In 1957, the men’s basketball program at Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial State University in Nashville had all the hallmarks of a great team: a coach dedicated to the fundamentals of the game and a fast-paced offense that applied relentless full-court pressure.
“We felt like if we stayed focused, there was no one else that could beat us,” said Dick Barnett, the team’s guard.
That was true, three times more. The Tennessee A&I Tigers would become the first team from a historically black college or university to win any national championship, and the first college team to win three consecutive championships.
But the team, caught in the headwinds of the Jim Crow South, has struggled for recognition ever since.
Barnett, now 87 and who played for the New York Knicks’ two championship teams in the 1970s, has spent the last decade working to correct that. He has spent years campaigning for the Tigers to be inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame and is teaching a new generation of basketball players at Tennessee State University, as the school is now known, about the team that breaks barriers.
Their journey is now the subject of a new PBS documentary.”The dream whisperer.”
And if Barnett has his way, the trip will include one last stop: the White House. More than 50 members of Congress have signed a letter on behalf of the team asking for an invitation “for a long-awaited recognition and a fitting celebration.”
Time is the essence. Only seven players from the championship teams are still alive, and only three of them and one surviving assistant coach are healthy enough to travel, said Danielle Naassana, the film’s producer.
“I still feel like it’s a big deal, not just for me, but for my race, to be accepted and go to the White House after being passed over all these years,” said George Finley, 85, a former center on the team. , he said in an interview.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
If the team gets there, it will be thanks to Barnett.
Barnett grew up in segregated Gary, Indiana, playing ping-pong balls in a tin cup. But when he was about 9 or 10, he traded them for a basketball and would shoot around a local court late into the night.
One of those nights he was practicing his characteristic jump shot – a question mark shot with a lot of air – when Tigers coach John McLendon showed up asking if he would like to join him at Tennessee A&I.
Barnett came to Nashville in 1955, the year Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi and Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a city bus. The team was acutely aware of the social forces working against them, Barnett said. His biggest obstacle could be summed up in two words: “Skin color, skin color, skin color,” he said.
“The implication was that you weren’t good enough white people to do what we wanted to do, that this is America, this is a white American society,” he said. “We were part of American history, even though we were a different color, a different style.”
Barnett said McLendon made a “tremendous effort” to keep his players focused and understand that “we were as good as anyone at playing this game,” even if that meant staying in private homes when we played on the road because hotels wouldn’t accommodate them. .
“I always knew he was great,” Barnett said. “I was a great shooter. “I was a great player.”
McLendon, a disciple of basketball inventor James Naismith, was fighting his own battle. He had attempted to move Tennessee A&I to the NCAA, but was denied entry, so the team played in the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics.
The Tigers, conditioned for speed and accuracy, shook the league by winning championships in 1957, 1958 and 1959. Nine players from Tennessee A&I’s championship teams would go on to play professional basketball.
Championship victories are noted on pendants hanging from the rafters of the Gentry Center at Tennessee State, but the team’s legacy was virtually lost to history, until Barnett “decided to do something about it,” as he says in the documentary.
In the film, former NBA players Julius Erving, Walt Frazier, Bill Bradley and Phil Jackson argue for the team’s inclusion in the Basketball Hall of Fame. But it took Barnett nearly a decade to convince Hall of Fame voters that his team was worthy of recognition.
In 2019, he finally put on the orange jacket at the induction ceremony as a team representative.
“His leadership on the court as a basketball player was really show me, don’t tell me,” said Eric Drath, who directed the documentary. “That was the same thing when making the movie.”
Ron Thomas, author of “They Cleared the Lane: The NBA’s Black Pioneers,” said it was common in the Jim Crow era for white media to ignore black teams.
“America has lost itself by not being able to hear, read and watch the teams of some of these great coaches and players from that era,” said Thomas, director of the journalism program in sports, culture and social justice at Morehouse University. “They had no exposure whatsoever.”
But for teams like the Tennessee A&I Tigers, there was an extra layer of responsibility, Thomas said: “They represent more than just themselves.”
