Bill Simmons wrote a piece about Elgin Baylor.¨Ü Right now it’s the featured story on ESPN’s front page, so I don’t know how useful linking it is.¨Ü A few paragraphs in, he writes about Baylor’s 38-19-5 part-time season:
A U.S. Army Reservist at the time, Elgin lived in a barracks in the state of Washington, leaving only whenever they gave him a weekend pass … and even with that pass, he could only fly coach on flights with multiple connections to meet the Lakers wherever they happened to be playing. Once he arrived, he would throw on a uniform and battle the best NBA players alive on back-to-back nights — fortunately for the Lakers, most games were scheduled on the weekends back then — and make the same complicated trip back to Washington on Sunday night or Monday morning. That was his life for five months.