BATON ROUGE – One of the legends of the hardwood, Bob Pettit, who helped lead the LSU Tigers to its first NCAA Final Four in 1953 and then became a generational star in the National Basketball Association, passed away on Wednesday at the age of 93.
Pettit, a consensus all-American for the Tigers, was a two-time MVP in the NBA (1956, 1959), an 11-time NBA All-Star (1955-1965) and a four-time NBA All-Star Game MVP (1956, 1958, 1959, 1962) for the St. Louis Hawks. He led the Hawks to the 1958 NBA Championship.
His 1956 regular-season MVP award was the first the Association gave an award for the best player in the regular season.
In 1954, his college No. 50 became the first jersey number in any sport to be retired by LSU, and his number 9 was retired by the Hawks after the team moved to Atlanta. Also in 1954 he was inducted into the LSU Athletics Hall of Fame.
Pettit was honored with a statue on the basketball plaza of the Maravich Center in February 2016 with his grandchildren helping unveil the monument before a large crowd gathered before an LSU basketball game.
Pettit was a three-time first-team All-Southeastern Conference member who led the Tigers to a second-place league finish in 1952, conference titles in 1953 and 1954, and the NCAA Final Four in 1953.
The Baton Rouge native, who lived in New Orleans in retirement, led the SEC in scoring all three years, with the highest averages seen to that date in the league – 25.5 points in 1952, 24.9 points in 1953 and 31.4 points per game in 1954. Only two other players – Pete Maravich and Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf (Chris Jackson) – at LSU would break the 30 points per game average mark.
At the time, Pettit was the second player in major-college basketball history to average more than 30 points a game. He also averaged 13.1 (1952), 13.9 (1953) and an LSU-best 17.3 (1954) rebounds per game.
In the second game of his senior season, he would set a then-SEC scoring record of 60 points against Louisiana College.
However, his basketball playing days didn’t start out with the glory of his days at LSU and the NBA.
“The greatest thing that ever happened to me is that when I first picked up a basketball, I was terrible,” said Pettit many years ago in a previous interview. “If things come naturally, you might not bother to work at improving them, and you can fall short of your potential.”
His definition of terrible was gangly and not very good. At that time, he was tall, but he couldn’t yet make the moves that made him a star. He was the last man on the junior varsity his freshman year at Baton Rouge High. As a sophomore, he was cut from the varsity.
He played church-league basketball and grew five inches in less than a year. Pettit went on to become a starter and the All-City prep team as a junior. As a senior, he led Baton Rouge High to its first state championship in more than 20 years and that led to offers from 14 universities including his hometown school, LSU.
LSU’s Final Four season of 1953 was near perfection for the Tigers in the regular season, going through the SEC undefeated, finishing the regular season with one loss. The Tigers would defeat Lebanon Valley and Holy Cross to get to the school’s first national semifinal, today known as the Final Four.
Seventy years later in 2023, Bob Pettit and his Baton Rouge teammate and lifelong friend, Ned Clark, made one of their final appearances in the Pete Maravich Assembly Center as they were introduced to the crowd saluting their team’s accomplishment. Clark passed away on March 16 of this year at 92.
After finishing at LSU, a pro league awaited, something Pettit once told The Athletic he knew little about.
“When I was at LSU … I knew very little about professional basketball,” he said. “I probably heard of the Minneapolis Lakers, the Boston Celtics and maybe the New York Knicks. That was about it … After my senior year, I played in a couple of All-Star games; there was one in New York and one in Kansas City … I played pretty well in both of those. Then I started considering maybe the NBA.”
Pettit was the second choice of the first round of the NBA draft in 1954 of the Milwaukee Hawks, signing for an all-time NBA rookie high of $11,000.
In 1955 he earned NBA Rookie of the Year honors after averaging 20.4 points and 13.8 rebounds per game. The Hawks would move to St. Louis after the season, where Pettit played the remainder of his NBA career.
The Hawks would reach the NBA Finals in 1957, losing to the Boston Celtics, before winning the title in 1958 over the Celtics. Pettit scored 50 points in the Hawks’ 110-109 series-clinching victory in game six. It stood alone as a single-game Finals point total all the way to 2021.
The Hawks and Celtics would also meet in the 1960 and 1962 NBA Finals.
Pettit ended his career in 1965 still near the peak of his game. He was the first NBA player to eclipse the 20,000 points marks (20,880 for a 26.4 average per game). More than 6,100 of his points (nearly 30 percent) came from free throws. His 12,849 rebounds were second-most in league history at the time he retired and his 16.2 rebounds per game career average remains third behind two other legends of the game, Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell.
Pettit said rebounding was “the thing I did the best. It became a real focus for me. I was very proud of my rebounding ability. Not Wilt, not Bill Russell, but good.”
In 1971, Pettit was inducted in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. He was one of four players named to all four NBA anniversary teams (25th, 35th, 50th, 75th) along with Bob Cousy, George Mikan and Bill Russell.
Pettit is also a member of the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame (inducted 1973) and the inaugural class of the College Basketball Hall of Fame in 2006.
Pettit defined what the modern power forward should be in the NBA and set standards that have been hard to duplicate in professional basketball. His career began at a time when television was still limited, and film preservation of athletic events was haphazard at best. His finesse and force combined made him extremely difficult to stop.
In many respects, Bob Pettit was part of a time at LSU when basketball stood brightly in the spotlight at the school and his banner hanging from the rafters of the Maravich Center and his statue outside should always give fans a remembrance of a special time when he and his Tiger teammates took LSU to basketball’s special place – the NCAA Final Four.
Funeral arrangements are pending at this time.