An all-time NBA great briefly played at College of Idaho. The school just honored him
One of the greatest basketball players of all time once spent a year developing his game in the backwoods of Idaho.
Now, The College of Idaho in Caldwell has honored him by renaming its basketball arena.
In a halftime dedication ceremony during a men’s basketball game Friday night, The College of Idaho named its basketball venue the Elgin Baylor Arena. New signage with the arena’s name was placed above the scoreboards, which eventually read a 97-46 win for the Yotes over Evergreen State College.
Elgin Baylor, who died of natural causes in 2021 at age 86, played for College of Idaho for one season before transferring to Seattle University and going on to become the 1959 NBA Rookie of the Year with the then-Minneapolis Lakers, an 11-time NBA All-Star and a Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame inductee.
“In 1954, we had the best basketball player in the world at The College of Idaho,” Doug Brigham, president of the school, said during the ceremony.
When Baylor moved from Washington, D.C., to Southwest Idaho in 1954, the college had only about 500 students, while Caldwell’s population was only around 12,000. However, not many colleges at the time would scout at all-Black high schools, meaning that despite Baylor’s revolutionary playing style, he went unnoticed.
A friend who attended College of Idaho arranged a scholarship for him to play football. However, he never set foot on the football field; instead, he joined the basketball team and immediately became the best player around.
“It’s as if I have wandered into a private and exclusive members-only club, except that rather than feel intimidated and excluded the way I do in D.C., I feel invited,” Baylor wrote in his autobiography, “Hang Time.”
Baylor averaged over 31 points and 20 rebounds in his freshman season. However, a head coaching change and scholarship limitations resulted in his transferring to Seattle University a year later. Seattle named its playing floor Elgin Baylor Court in 2010.
Baylor became the first Black player to be selected with the No. 1 overall pick in the NBA Draft when the Lakers picked him in 1958. The team moved to Los Angeles in 1960, and Baylor spent his entire playing career there until his retirement in 1971.
Following retirement, he became the head coach of the New Orleans Jazz for several seasons and was the Los Angeles Clippers’ vice president of basketball operations for 22 years.
“We are so glad to have been just a little part of Elgin’s amazing life,” Brigham said. “But I am so proud that in 1954, when a lot of this country wasn’t very welcoming to people, The College of Idaho welcomed Elgin Baylor. The city of Caldwell welcomed Elgin Baylor.
“And I’m even prouder to say that today, The College of Idaho continues to be a welcoming place, and the city of Caldwell continues to be a welcoming place, and we’re not going to change.”
During the ceremony, a four-minute video was shown. It featured clips from the unveiling of Baylor’s statue at the Lakers’ arena in 2018, including comments about Baylor from some of the biggest names in basketball, such as Magic Johnson, Jerry West and Kobe Bryant.
Johnson recalled Baylor’s 61 points in Game 5 of the 1962 NBA Finals in the old Boston Garden against the Celtics. That total still stands as the record for the most points scored in a game in the Finals.
“Brother, you did some things that Dr. J (Julius Irving) and Michael Jordan, Kobe, myself, we couldn’t do,” said Johnson, who won five NBA championships with the Lakers.
West, an NBA legend in his own right, well-known for his silhouette on the NBA logo, effusively praised Baylor’s personality off the court.
“A scared rookie who didn’t know if he belonged in the league or not, to walk into a locker room and have someone like this man to welcome you with an open arm, you would have never known he was a star,” West said of Baylor in 2018. “But you would have known he was different as a human being. This is one of the greatest men I’ve ever met in my life.”
This story was originally published February 22, 2025 at 3:21 PM.
