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Walt Bellamy, 1958.

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Walt Bellamy

1960

Hoops Hall-of-Famer (Twice)

BEFORE BASKETBALL’S DREAM TEAM WAS ASSEMBLED FOR THE 1992 OLYMPIC Games, there was an original version.

“This was the authentic Dream Team,” Walt Bellamy once said of his 1960 Olympians. “I’d like to think that we were the best team that has ever played basketball.”

Before pros were allowed in the Olympics, the six-foot-eleven Indiana center was a starter on a team of college and amateur players that crushed all opposition in Rome. The Americans won the gold medal, outscoring eight teams by an average of 102–59.5. Indeed, the United States won by a cumulative 339 points, nearly as big as the 1992 margin (350).

The 1960 team, coached by Pete Newell, featured four members of the Naismith Hall of Fame—Oscar Robertson, Jerry West, Jerry Lucas, Bellamy—plus future NBA stars such as Terry Dischinger, Darrall Imhoff, and Bob Boozer. Robertson and West each averaged 17 points a game, and Bellamy averaged 8.1.

The Americans beat Italy 88–54, Japan 125–66, Hungary 107–63, Yugoslavia 104–42, Uruguay 108–50, Soviet Union 81–57, Italy 112–81, and Brazil 90–63.

In the gold-medal game, Bellamy was ejected by a Mexican referee for landing an elbow to the mouth of a Brazilian player, although it did not appear deliberate. As Bellamy pleaded his case with the referee, he had tears in his eyes. The Brazilians played timidly thereafter, however.

“That was the end of the game for them,” Robertson said. “They were out of it at that point. They were not going to win anyway, but they didn’t put up a big battle at all then.”

Bellamy protested that it was ordinary rebounding.

“That was just coming off the board with the ball,” he said.

Few rebounded better than “Bells.” He played in the NBA during the era of Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell, so it is unsurprising that he never made an all-NBA first team. When Bellamy retired in 1974, he was third in league history in rebounds (14,241)—behind those two other centers—and sixth in points (20,941). As of 2019, Bellamy was still eleventh all-time in rebounds.

Walter Jones Bellamy was born July 24, 1939, in New Bern, North Carolina. He was six foot one by age fourteen, and his best sport was football. As a senior end, he led Barber High School to a state championship and was an all-state selection. In basketball, he acquired the nickname “goaltending kid” for blocking shots. He scored forty-seven points in a 1956 game against Durham.

A trip to Bloomington in summer 1956 was influential in his decision to enroll at IU. His high school coach, Simon Coates, was doing undergraduate study there, and he invited Bellamy to visit. During that time, the teenager played pickup ball with Hoosiers such as Wally Choice, Hallie Bryant, and Gene Flowers.

“Indiana at the time was the closest school to the South that would accept African Americans,” Bellamy said. “It was an easy transition for me to make. Not that I was naive to what was going on in Bloomington in terms of the times, but it didn’t translate to the athletic department or the classroom. Every relationship was good.”

A case could be made for Bellamy as the top player in IU history. In three college seasons from 1958 to 1961—freshmen were ineligible—Bellamy set school records for rebounds in a season (649), rebounds in one game (33) and double-doubles in a career (59). He averaged 20.6 points and 15.5 rebounds for his career.

He rounded out the best decade of center play by any school in Big Ten history: from Bill Garrett to Don Schlundt to Archie Dees to Bellamy. All four Hoosiers made a major All-America team.

Bellamy averaged 17.4 points and 15.2 rebounds as a sophomore, then 22.4 and 13.5 on coach Branch McCracken’s 20–4 team. As a senior, coming back from the Olympics, Bellamy averaged 21.8 and 17.8 (still the IU record) for a team that once ranked number four but ultimately fell to 15–9. In his final college game, he set a Big Ten record of 33 rebounds that still stands, and he scored 28 points in an 82–67 victory over Michigan.

Talents like Bellamy don’t remain in college for four years anymore. Yet his Indiana years are among his most treasured.

“I would go so far as to say that they should at least experience the college atmosphere,” he said. “There is no better atmosphere.”

Bellamy became the first Hoosier chosen number one overall in the NBA draft by the Chicago Packers. He lived up to it, becoming 1962 Rookie of the Year by averaging 31.6 points and 19.0 rebounds a game. In NBA history, only Chamberlain—with 37.6 and 27.0 in 1960—averaged more as a rookie. For instance, Michael Jordan averaged 28.2 points a game in winning Rookie of the Year in 1985.

Bellamy’s rookie season is nearly lost to history because Chamberlain averaged 50.4 points and 25.7 rebounds that year. Yet Bellamy was instant offense. He scored 35 in the home opener in Chicago, and 35, 37, and 45 over the next three games. In a loss to the Philadelphia Warriors, he scored 45 to Chamberlain’s 55. In the NBA All-Star game—when those games were more competitively played—Bellamy had 23 points and 17 rebounds.

“To play against guys you watched on television . . . little did I know my talent would mesh with theirs,” he said.

Bellamy merits a couple of footnotes. Only a decade after the color barrier in the NBA was broken, and with racial quotas commonplace, he played on the first all-black lineup during a Packers game. (The franchise later moved to Baltimore and then Washington, DC.)

He also owns an NBA record that might never be broken: eighty-eight games in one season. In December 1968, he was traded from the New York Knicks to the Detroit Pistons. The Knicks had played thirty-five games, but the Pistons only twenty-nine, so he played an additional fifty-three games for the Pistons.

Bellamy was omitted from the NBA’s fiftieth anniversary team in 1996, despite statistics exceeding many of the big men who made it. One of them, Wes Unseld, asked, “Do you know what Bellamy did?”

What did he do?

He was an All-Star four times, and he averaged 20.1 points and 13.7 rebounds over fourteen seasons and 1,043 games. He was twice inducted into the Hall of Fame—belatedly as a player in 1993 and as part of the 1960 Olympic team in 2010.

The only other enshrined Olympic team is that of 1992. He was inducted into IU’s Hall of Fame in 1982.

“I just like to think I made a contribution to basketball,” Bellamy said in a 2007 interview.

He wore seven NBA uniforms: Chicago Packers and Zephyrs, Baltimore Bullets, New York Knicks, Detroit Pistons, Atlanta Hawks, and New Orleans Jazz. He was traded three times: from the Bullets to Knicks in November 1965, from Knicks to Pistons, and from Pistons to Hawks in February 1970.

Russell once told Sports Illustrated that Bellamy, at his finest, was one of his toughest rivals. Bellamy, sometimes critiqued for not always being at his best, was often stuck on rebuilding or expansion teams.

Before he coached the ABA’s Indiana Pacers, Hoosier great Bobby “Slick” Leonard coached the Bullets. The Bullets were 31–49 in 1963–64, and Leonard largely blamed Bellamy. The coach frequently chided the center for not hustling, and twice Bellamy was fined . . . despite a season in which he averaged 27.0 points and 17.0 rebounds.

Under a new coach, Buddy Jeannette, Bellamy was made captain the next year. Beyond his production—24.8 and 14.6—he led the 37–43 Bullets to the 1965 Western Division finals, where they lost to the Los Angeles Lakers in six games.

After Baltimore traded him, Bellamy helped the Knicks climb out of the cellar and into the playoffs in 1967 and 1968. His presence displaced Willis Reed, a natural center, so the Knicks in turn traded Bellamy and Howard Komives to Detroit for forward Dave DeBusschere.

After the third trade, Bellamy teamed with Walt Hazzard and Lou Hudson to push the Hawks to the 1970 Western Division finals. They were swept by the Lakers 4–0. Bellamy, with “Pistol” Pete Maravich in the backcourt, also made the playoffs in 1971, 1972, and 1973. Bellamy played one game for the Jazz in 1974 and retired at age thirty-five.

His home remained in Atlanta, where his wife, Helen, was a middle school science teacher. He was especially active in the NAACP.

He was a public affairs consultant, four-time delegate to the Democratic National Convention, commissioner of Atlanta’s Police Athletic League, a special events director for a scholarship fund for minority students, a mentor at a local YMCA, a board member for a nursery school, and a member of two African Episcopal Methodist Church boards.

In 1977, he was a sergeant-at-arms at the door of the Georgia Senate. Bellamy escorted Prince Charles and introduced him to the legislature.

He died November 2, 2013. He was seventy-four.