Former Hawks And Nuggets GM Pete Babcock Visits Roadrunners

“If you can find something that you have a great passion for, whatever it may be, you need to pursue it every way you can.” That’s what Pete Babcock, former National Basketball Association executive and current scout for the Cleveland Cavaliers, told the Dalton State basketball team prior to Tuesday’s practice at Bandy Gymnasium.

Babcock said that he has never played in a single NBA game but that he has “lived the NBA dream”. He explained the math on a basketball player having a successful career in the NBA.

“There are eight thousand good high school players in the US every year,” said Babcock. “It doesn’t count international players who are now a big factor through our draft. These are seniors in high school who are all conference, all city, all state, all American. They have some recognition. Two thousand get division one scholarships. You don’t have to be a division one player to play in the NBA. We draft players from all divisions every single year. I’m just showing you what the numbers are like as things transfer down. We draft 60 into the NBA every year. Part of those are international players. Of those 60 who are drafted, 35 make it for one year or more. Of those, eight have name careers. Those are the guys who you know off the top of your head. That’s eight players out of eight thousand per year.”

“I don’t tell players that to discourage them from their dream. I tell them that because you want to know the reality,” he said. “If your dream is to be the next Lebron (James), the next Kobe (Bryant), the next whomever it may be there’s nothing wrong with that dream. You follow that dream as far as it will take you.”

“Once it plateaus and you can’t get past that point you need to broaden the dream out. Maybe you’re not going to be the star of the team. Maybe the result of all of your hard work and preparation is that you become a member of the team. You’re a part of it, but you’re a reserve player on the team, you’re a backup guy. Or maybe you can’t make the team.  You become a coach, you become a scout, you become a general manager, you become a team owner, you become an attorney for the team, a team doctor, the team strength coach.”

“That’s what happened to me,” the former General Manager of the Atlanta Hawks and Denver Nuggets told the Roadrunners. “When I was in high school and college I was an over achieving player. I wasn’t that talented. I over achieved. I played high school. I played two years in junior college. That was it. I played in a semi-pro league for a while just to stay busy, but I thought the game was over for me.”

After finishing his college degree he went to law school for a little while, but he said he didn’t enjoy that. He quit law school and became a high school coach as a volunteer the first year to see if he liked it. 

“I loved it and knew that was I wanted to do so I got a job as a full time coach and teacher. I spent nine years coaching high school basketball. While I was coaching high school basketball I would go down to Phoenix Suns games. I watched the games and I would think to myself ‘this is where I’d love to be if I could, but I don’t know how to get there’. I videotaped every game I could possibly videotape and at night I would go home and I would break down the tapes. I would study them carefully and I built files on the New York Knicks and the Boston Celtics, the Chicago Bulls… everybody in the NBA.”

He said he charted there offensive sets, what out of bounds plays they ran and notes about their offensive plays

And the weaknesses of the players. “Trying to teach myself about the NBA. I was just a fan like everybody else.”

“At the end of the year, I wrote a letter to every team with the report that I had written on their team. I figured that if I write the Celtics and attach their report to it they will know if it’s any good or not because it’s about their team.”

He volunteered to scout for each team. “It won’t cost you a penny,” he told the teams. “Most teams didn’t write back. Four or five teams were nice enough to write me letters and say, ‘thanks, but no thanks”. One team wrote back and said we don’t have a whole lot of money to spend on scouting, so if you want to scout for free go ahead. That was a team called the New Orleans Jazz, now the Utah Jazz. I started scouting for them free for two years while I was teaching and coaching at the high school. I enjoyed what I was doing, but at night, when the Suns had a home game, I’m down there writing reports on those games.”

“What helped me was that I was getting those reports critiqued,” Babcock said. He then was given a part-time scouting job with the Lakers, then a regional scouting job with the Bucks, and an assistant coaching job with the old San Diego Clippers, before they moved to Los Angeles. He then became San Diego’s General Manager.

From the Clippers he went to the Denver Nuggets where he spent six years and became President, General Manager, and Minority owner. The team was sold in 1990 and he moved to Atlanta as General Manager of the Hawks for 13 and a half years. After two years helping his brother with the Toronto Raptors he took a year off. He went to the Cavaliers to help with draft preparation and has now been with them for nine years.

“The reason I’m telling you all that about my background is that I’ve never played one game in the NBA, but I’ve lived the NBA dream since 1974. That‘s over 40 years ago. I would encourage you to pursue your dreams as far as you can take it. If that means you end up playing in the NBA, its perfect… if that means you play in Europe, terrific… if that means you don’t play past this level, there’s nothing wrong with that. If you really have a passion for it and you want to work in the league, there’s a way to do it. That applies to everything in life. If your passion is art, if your passion is music, if your passion is medicine, whatever your passion is you need to pursue your passion. I’ve had these jobs for over 40 years and it is like I have never worked a day in my life. I’ve never actually gone to work. I have never had what I call a job, because it is not a job. It’s my passion. I don’t punch a clock. There’s a way to live your passion, whatever it is. You just have to figure out what it is.”

Whether in the classroom or in basketball, the speaker told the players to go above and beyond. “Don’t program your mind to do the minimum required to get by,” he said. “You’re being mediocre. That’s what everybody does. If you want to be special, program your mind to write that paper just like you prepare to play a game.”  

“Program your mind for success,” Babcock said. “If you have to write a paper, make it the best paper you have written in your whole life. It may not be something Ernest Hemingway would write, but make it the best paper you have written in your whole life.”

He challenged the players to try that approach for every task they for the next two weeks. “What happens is, success becomes a habit. You get used to being successful. Now you don’t have to think about it as often. What happens is it’s just automatic. If Coach Ingle says ‘everybody shoots 25 free throws before you go in’, you shoot more than 25 free throws. Twenty-five is the minimum to shoot. Plan for success. Success becomes a habit.”

When asked about the process of deciding who to draft, Babcock said it is a long process that includes many things. “The draft process is like a giant research project,” the athletes were told. Babcock said the Cavaliers start by closely following around three hundred players, then narrow it down to about one hundred.

“As we get closer to draft day we fly all of the players we are serious about into Cleveland. We do personal interviews with the players. They do all of the physical testing. They work out for the coaches on the floor. We are allowed to go three-on-three in our work outs. They take a take a psychological profile. They take a general intelligence test.”

Babcock said the Cavaliers are also interested in aspects of a possible draft choice’s life. “We want to bring in the best person who represents our franchise in the most positive way in our community as well as a really good community. We are not bringing in great people who can’t play. We’re bringing great people who can play. We will not draft a player if we think he is really talented, but he has issues off the floor. We just won’t do it.”

“We do background checks where we have a checklist of all of the people we have to talk to. Coaches where the player played, coaches in the conference, then we go back to the high school level and talk to high school coaches and teachers, principals, AAU people. We talk to everybody we can find who has a relationship with the player. We have more information than you can imagine. Thick, thick files on every player. We know pretty much what the player’s grades are in every class. We know if he parking tickets on campus. Whatever problem he has, we have a pretty good line on it.”      

“You need to study and understand the history of the game to appreciate how it has evolved and where it is today,” Babcock said as he gave the players a bit of that history. “It’s important for you to understand how it has all come together and why you have an opportunity to play where you are playing in collegiate basketball. It’s important for you to have appreciation of how this has all come about.”

“In 1950 the NBA owners in their collective wisdom decided it was a good time to start integrating,” he explained. “At that time it was all white. There were no blacks playing in the NBA.” The owners decided to allow one black player per team using a quota system in the draft.

“They didn’t publicize this, but this is what happened,” he said. “The first African American drafted by the NBA was a player named Earl Boyd. However, the first African American player to play in a game in the NBA was a guy named Chuck Cooper with the Boston Celtics. Red Auerbach had drafted him. The reason he played in the first game was because of the way the schedule worked out. Their first game was the day before the Washington Capitals played and that’s the team that drafted Earl Boyd.”

The Roadrunner were told that Cooper nor Boyd was the first to sign an NBA contract. “The first African American to sign an NBA contract was a 5-9 point guard out of the North Carolina College for Negroes named Harold Hunter.”

Hunter was signed by the Capitals, but was cut during the team’s training camp and never played for an NBA team. “They only cut him because there was a quota system,” said Babcock. Hunter went on to coach basketball for the United States men’s national basketball team, the U. S. Olympic basketball team, and for Tennessee State University.

John McLendon learned about basketball from Dr. James Naismith while he was attending the University of Kansas, but he was not allowed to play on the school’s segregated basketball team. While he was coaching at the North Carolina College for Negroes in Durham, McLendon and the coach at Duke University arranged a secret game.   

“Players from Duke would secretly go to the YMCA and play with players from North Carolina College for Negroes because the competition was good,” the speaker said. “They had to do it quietly because it was against the law.

The players wanted to know who had the better team, so the “secret game” was arranged. “It was played on Sunday morning at 11 o’clock because they figured everybody would be at church. They allowed no spectators in the game. They had referees and they had official score keepers. That was it and they closed and locked the doors of the gym. North Carolina College for Negroes won the game 88 to 44 against Duke. It was kept quiet for years. Nobody talked about it. It was almost life threatening if you let word out that you guys had this game.”

While Coach McLendon was at Tennessee State he campaigned to allow the NAIA tournament to be integrated. “Like the NBA they wanted to do it in small steps,” Babcock told the players. Black college teams had a tournament with the winning team being allowed to play in Kansas City. “John McLendon’s team, Tennessee State, went to Kansas City and won the NAIA Tournament three years in a row. He was the first coach to win three consecutive national championships. Before John Wooden ever did it.”

McLendon, known as “the father of the fast break”, went on to coach the Cleveland Pipers of the American Basketball League making him the first African American head coach in professional basketball.

Future New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner was the team’s owner. The meddlesome Steinbrenner sold a player to the opposing Hawaii Chiefs during a game. The player, Grady McCollum, was told to play for the other team in the second half.

“It disrupted John McLendon’s team so badly that it emotionally tore them apart and John McLendon didn’t know this was going on.” The team stopped winning and Steinbrenner stopped paying their salaries. The coach quit over the issue.   

Dalton State Coach Tony Ingle introduced the speaker. “He had a dream,” Coach Ingle said. “He accomplished his dream, but the most important thing is that he did it through hard work with honesty and integrity. Never sacrificing any principals. He always knew who he was.”

Ingle quoted legendary NBA coach Pat Riley as telling a friend that Babcock has more integrity than anybody he knows in the NBA. “He’s very humble, Ingle said. “It’s amazing some of the things he’s done, he knows basketball, he loves family, and he’s here as a personal favor to me.”

Babcock returned the compliment. “We’ve been friends for a long time and I have a great appreciation for what Coach Ingle represents,” he said. “Every program that he’s been involved with not only wins, but he cares about people. He cares about you guys, he cares about everybody he’s involved with, and he wants what is best for you.”

Dalton State basketball is currently ranked No. 12 in the NAIA D-I Coaches Top-25.