Jerry West called him "one of the most gifted and special players this game will ever see." His coach, Fred Schaus, noted that "without reservation that [he] is the greatest corner man to have ever played professional basketball." John Thompson was introduced to basketball when his friends invited him to watch a player he only knew as "Rabbit". By all accounts, Elgin Baylor was the greatest high school player in Washington basketball history.

"He was a pioneering Laker in a town with short memories," wrote Bill Plaschke of the Los Angeles Times. "He was a champion [who] never won a championship. He was the flashiest of athletes in an era from which there is scant video evidence of his greatness. He was a social justice fighter who never got his day in court."

Born in Washington, the youngest of three sons, Elgin Baylor didn't even pick up basketball until the age of 15 when, owing to city ordinances, the playground courts were locked by police to keep black residents out.

"The police even put chain locks on the gates around the basketball court so we couldn't get in when the park was closed," Baylor told the Washington City Paper in 1999. "The older kids would sneak in at night over the fence and play with whatever light they could get, but most of the time, we just played stickball in the streets."

By his sophomore season at Phelps Vocational HS, the "Rabbit" was already a legend. He transferred to the newly built Spingarn HS in 1952, earning two-time All-Met honors despite almost no coverage in the local papers. His 63 points against Phelps in 1954 is a DC city record that still stands, but owing to segregation, Spingarn could only play the other local all-black schools: Armstrong, Cardozo, Dunbar, and Phelps.

In 1954, a integrated game was arranged at Taylor Junior High School with Baylor and a group of the top white students that had graduated from the Interhigh League (the current Interhigh students were prohibited from participating). Western High's Jim Wexler, the 1953 Player of The Year, scored 35. Baylor soared for 44.

"He showed me basketball at a totally different level, another world, heads and shoulders above anything I'd ever seen," Wexler recalled to the City Paper. "He could do everything. He was a scorer. He could jump out of the gym. He reverse dunked on me! You have to remember: nobody did that before Elgin Baylor. That's not how basketball was played before him."

Following graduation from Spingarn in 1954, Baylor never played a collegiate or pro game in the District again. But at least one local school caught his interest: Georgetown University.

The surviving reference to Baylor's interest in Georgetown comes from a 1968 article in The HOYA, written by the future governor of Illinois, Pat Quinn (C'71). In the article, Quinn interviewed Raymond (Pebbles) Medley, who served as an athletic trainer at Georgetown from 1927 until his death in 1982. Pebbles was quite the character in this era, but wasn't in the habit of making up stories. When discussing some of the players who Georgetown had missed over the years, he brought up Baylor specifically.

"'Let me tell you who we've lost,' Medley said. 'Bob Whitmore, Sid Catlett, Austin Carr, and John Austin are all from around the Washington area. They're all playing basketball for other colleges and well too. They leave here and later come back to dominate us.' When asked why this sad state of affairs exists, Pebbles answered with the all-too-familiar reply, 'They aren't smart enough to get in here.' Elgin Baylor walked through the Georgetown gates and the school officials told him that he couldn't make it academically."

Others took note as well. Ralph Shaughnessy, a scout for the Boston Celtics, told the Washington Post that if Baylor picked a college, he suggested "Georgetown, Holy Cross, or Boston U, because they have the coaches we like."

Academics was the stated reason why schools steered clear of Baylor. While he was adamant in later interviews that he never earned any grade lower than a "C", that kind of average at schools like Phelps and Spingarn weren't opening any doors, especially when no white coaches had ever seen him play. As for Georgetown, it was standard policy that the College made no exceptions in admissions, especially for athletes, and generally took a dim view of any applicant that had not gone through a thorough Jesuit (or at least Catholic) high school curriculum. The top ranked local white basketball recruit, Jim Wexler, lived in Georgetown and went to school two blocks from the GU campus and even he wasn't recruited.

In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court decision in the case of Bolling vs. Sharpe desegregated the D.C. school system; the litigant, Spottswood Bolling, was a classmate of Elgin Baylor at Spingarn. This decision had little effect at Georgetown University, as much as past was prologue. The Jesuits of the pre-Vatican II 1950's were committed to the precepts of the Ratio Studiorum, not to topics of social justice and institutional diversity.

"[Georgetown] didn't think it was in their tradition to admit African-American students," said historian Emmett Curran in 2012. "This was traditionally a very Southern school, and I think that tradition lingered the longest in the College." It would be another 12 years before Georgetown signed its first African-American basketball player, Bernard White, the president of his high school class in Fairfax, VA.

Baylor received passing interest from Seton Hall and Duquesne, two Catholic schools which had successfully integrated in the late 1940's, but no offers were forthcoming. A classmate of Baylor at Spingarn, Warren W. Williams, had been alerted to a small college in Idaho that was offering football and basketball scholarships regardless of race, and Williams called Baylor if he would like to come along.

"W.W. says, come out to Idaho!" Baylor recalled their phone conversation to columnist Dave McKenna. "So I say, Where's Idaho?"

Baylor found the Northwest liberating from the segregation of Washington DC. He averaged 32.8 points per game as a freshman at the College of Idaho, playing in the NAIA, yet was out of school a year later when the school cut scholarships in basketball after Sports Illustrated suggested the school had relaxed standards to let black students play. Baylor stayed out west, and found a mentor in Seattle University coach John Castellani. Sitting out the 1955-56 season as a transfer, Baylor played two seasons at the Jesuit school, averaging 29.7 points per game and 20.3 rebounds as a sophomore. As a senior, he scored 32.5 points per game (second nationally) and 23.6 rebounds (first nationally), with a 60 point game versus Portland that remains the school record.

In 1958, he led the unlikely Chieftains to the NCAA Tournament final in Louisville where, according to McKenna, Baylor played with a pair of broken ribs but still had 25 points and 19 rebounds in a 84-72 loss to Kentucky and its all-white team, known as the "Fiddlin' Five". Baylor was voted the Final Four MVP in what may have been the first integrated basketball game many fans in Kentucky had ever seen.

A consensus All-American, Baylor was a secret no longer. The first pick in the 1958 NBA Draft, he signed with the Minneapolis Lakers, a team struggling financially. Lakers owner Bob Short, who would later be known to Washington fans as the despised owner of the Washington Senators, remarked that if Baylor had not signed with the Lakers that year, the team would have likely folded.

An 11 time NBA All-Star in 13 seasons, he averaged 27.4 points and 13.5 rebounds per game despite being only 6-5. In 1960-61 he averaged 19.8 rebounds, a record no NBA player under 6-8 has matched since. His career 38.3 points per game in the 1961-62 season is all the more amazing in that he was a part-time player with obligations in the U.S. Army Reserves. He scored a career high 71 versus the New York Knickerbockers. To this day, only three players in NBA history (Wilt Chamberlain, David Thompson, and Kobe Bryant) have ever scored more in a single game.

Owing to injuries, Baylor retired nine games into the 1971-72 season, which later became the first title won by the club in Los Angeles--Baylor is often referred to as the greatest player never to have won an NBA championship as a result. A member of the National Basketball Hall of Fame, his #22 jersey was retired by the Lakers in 1983.

There was basketball in Washington before Elgin Baylor, but it would never be the same after. All the players that followed owed a debt of gratitude to the "Rabbit" even if they never knew of him. And yet, that one visit to the Hilltop in 1954 is rife with possibilities.

What would a decision to accept a black student in the College have meant for the University, and its relationship with the city? What message would it have sent to the next generation of D.C. high school players, long discouraged by the University, that they could play college basketball locally? What heights could the Hoyas have reached in the 1950's with the greatest forward of his generation in blue and gray?

But nothing was ventured by Georgetown, and thus nothing was gained.