November 17, 2025

Spencer Haywood Fought the NBA and Won—Now He Wants Recognition

Anthony Price 

NBA legend Spencer Haywood played for the Supersonics from 1970-1975.

​When former NFL star Ahmad Rashad introduced Spencer Haywood, the audience applauded politely.
 
It was a Friday evening, September 11, 2015. Savoring his moment, Haywood, who was dressed in a blue suit with a white pocket square, strolled through the crowd and up the six steps to the stage of the Springfield Symphony Hall in Springfield, Massachusetts. Soaking in the smiles like sunlight and exchanging fist bumps, those were the slowest steps his long legs ever walked. 

​Haywood, who is 6-foot-8 with broad shoulders, looked the part of a basketball ambassador ready to be enshrined in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame. With a bald head and clean-shaven face, he cut a dashing figure on the stage with his brown skin juxtaposed against the red curtains behind him. 
 
To his right on the stage were his three presenters: Hall of Famers Charles Barkley (’06), the late Lenny Wilkens (’89, ’98, ’00) and the late Bill Walton (’93). They are enshrined legends, but on this night, they seemed to be sentinels welcoming him to the pearly gates of basketball immortality.  
 
Dick Bavetta, John Calipari, Dikembe Mutombo (deceased), Jo Jo White (deceased), Lisa Leslie, Louis Dampier, John Isaacs, coach Lindsay Gaze, coach Tom Heinsohn (deceased) and coach George Raveling (deceased) were also being enshrined on this night.  
 
But this was Haywood’s moment, and he wasn’t going to let it slip away without telling his story. His neck craned to reach down to the microphone, like a giraffe nibbling on leaves.

He looked out into the sea of people and began to tell his story. 

​A Long Wait 
 
His wife of twenty-five years, Linda, his daughters, Zulekha and Shaakira, and his brother, Leroy, watched with pride. It had been a long time. Haywood last played in the NBA for the Washington Bullets during the 1982-83 season, averaging 8.2 points and 4.8 rebounds over 38 games. 
 
On his mind tonight was the small town of Silver City, Mississippi, where he was born—back then, it had fewer than 400 people. He looked out into the sea of people and began to tell his story. 
 
He and his nine siblings and mother picked cotton for 12 hours a day in the cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta as sharecroppers, he said. It was inhumane work that tortured the human spirit and paid a meager wage of a few dollars a day, starving the body of nourishment. 

The Cotton Field. Photo: Shawn Escoffery

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​Haywood was 13 years old in the early sixties. His father died months before his birth. He and his family were on their own, struggling to make ends meet. 
 
“We didn’t have money and food, but we sure did have a love for God,” he recalled from the stage. “We had a special relationship with God, and many times we would be so hungry, and we would be so desperate, but every time God came through for our family.” 
 
He tapped the podium to mimic the sound of someone knocking on his door. “Somebody would walk up to us and say, ‘Eunice, I got some beans. I got some rice.’ We were able to eat,” he said, holding back the stream of emotion in his heart. 

We had a special relationship with God, and many times we would be so hungry, and we would be so desperate, but every time God came through for our family.

​Go North 
 
Haywood left Mississippi after his sophomore year and moved north to Ohio to live with his brother Leroy. After living with him briefly, he moved to Detroit to live with James and Ida Bell, who were the parents of one of his teammates. 
 
Will Robinson, who would be like a father figure to Haywood, coached him at Pershing High School. By his junior year in 1966, he was 6-foot-7 and averaged 29 points and 17 rebounds per game. In his senior year, he grew to 6-foot-8 and weighed 220 pounds. He averaged a quadruple-double: 25.4 points, 13 rebounds, 14 assists and 12 blocked shots. His team won the state championship in 1967. 
 
After high school, during the 1967-68 season, Haywood played at Trinidad State Junior College in Trinidad, Colorado. He averaged 28.2 points and 22.1 rebounds, earning him the Junior College Player of the Year award.
 
The 1960s were turbulent times for the Civil Rights movement. Blacks faced discrimination and racism in all facets of American life. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown, and Lew Alcindor (later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) fought to empower Black people and change America. 
 
The Olympics is a world stage with millions of eyes watching. Elvin Haynes, Wes Unseld and Alcindor didn’t try out for the American basketball team that year as part of a broader boycott of the games for the treatment of Blacks in America. 

Spencer Haywood goes up high at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City.

Haywood participated in the 1968 Olympics, winning a gold medal at 19—the youngest player ever to make the team. He shot 71.9% from the field and scored a record 145 points in the games—a record held for 44 years until superstar Kevin Durant broke it with 155 points in the London games.  
 
This was the Olympics where track and field athletes Tommy Smith and John Carlos came in first and third in the 200 meters. And on the medal stand, they wore black gloves and saluted Black Power with their fists in the air, and their shoes off—an iconic moment for the Civil Rights movement.  

This was the Olympics where track and field athletes Tommy Smith and John Carlos came in first and third in the 200 meters. 

Tommy Smith (1), Peter Norman (2) and John Carlos (3) at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City.

The Four-Year Rule 
 
Haywood transferred to the University of Detroit Mercy Titans after one year in junior college. The plan was to go there, and within a year, coach Robinson would take over. That’s the deal he thought he arranged with the university. When coach Bob Calihan retired, they passed on Robinson and hired coach Jim Harding. 
 
Haywood was upset, but it didn’t impact his play on the court. He averaged 32.1 points and 22.1 rebounds per game for the University of Detroit Titans. After his sophomore year, he decided it was time to go pro. 
 
The National Basketball Association and the American Basketball Association both had rules that prohibited players from entering the leagues until four years after high school. The difference was that the ABA had a hardship exemption that allowed players to bypass the rule. Haywood’s hardship was poverty. 
 
Haywood entered the ABA at the age of 21. He played for the Denver Rockers, averaging 30 points and 19.5 rebounds in 1969. In his first year in the league, he won Rookie of the Year, league MVP, and MVP of the 1970 All-Star Game. 

The following year, he signed with the Seattle SuperSonics, which violated the NBA’s four-year rule. The NBA obtained an injunction preventing Haywood from playing for 10 games. 
 
Fans were not happy that Haywood was playing in the NBA. They thought he was destroying college basketball. He was booed and harassed. 
 
The NBA, the University of Detroit, and the NCAA all considered suing Haywood. Instead, Haywood fought back and sued the NBA. Lawyers on Haywood’s behalf argued that the NBA rule violated the Sherman Antitrust Act.
 
His case would go all the way to the United States Supreme Court, where he won. It was official: Players didn’t have to wait four years after high school to play professional basketball. 

High school players Darryl Dawkins (No. 5 in 1975) and Bill Willoughby (No. 19) opened the door for young players to enter the NBA. 
 
From 1995 to 2005, some of the game’s greatest players skipped college to play in the NBA: Kevin Garnett, Kobe Bryant, Tracy McGrady, Dwight Howard and LeBron James—all Hall of Famers, except James, who is still active in the NBA. 
 
Players with college eligibility left to turn pro, not just high school players. In 2005, the NBA and its players agreed to a rule requiring players to be 19 years old and one year removed from high school. 

LeBron James circa 2003-2004.

​He Changed the Game 
 
In 2023, Theresa Runstedtler, a professor of African American history at American University, published the book Black Ball: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Spencer Haywood, and the Generation that Saved the Soul of the NBA. The publisher describes the book: “Against the backdrop of ongoing massive resistance to racial desegregation and increasingly strident calls for Black Power, the NBA in the 1970s embodied the nation's imagined descent into disorder.

​The press and the public blamed young Black players for the chaos in the NBA, citing drugs, violence, greed, and criminality. The supposed decline of pro basketball became a metaphor for the first decades of integration in America: the rules of the game had changed, allowing more Black people onto a formerly white playing field, and now they were ruining everything. But Black Ball argues that this much-maligned period was pivotal to the rise of the NBA as the star-laden powerhouse we know today, thanks largely to the efforts of Black players in challenging the white basketball establishment.” 

Black Ball book cover featuring Spencer Haywood in a Seattle Super Sonics uniform.

​In the foreword to the paperback version of the book, Haywood describes asking Wilt Chamberlain why he didn’t challenge the four-year rule. “I wasn’t as stupid as you,” Chamberlain replied. 
 
“I went to the ABA to get my mother out of the cotton field because she was still picking cotton for two dollars per day,” Haywood said in the foreword. “She was dragging a sack for all of her life, since she was five years old, and her back had gone pretty bad. I just wanted, before something serious happened, to get my mother out of that brutal work.”
 
Haywood’s successful court challenge forever changed the game. Billions of dollars of contracts have gone to players because of the Supreme Court decision. “So, I see the impact,” he said from the stage, mentioning LeBron James, Kevin Durant and Stephen Curry. “I see what I’ve done, and by the grace of God it has happened for me.“

I went to the ABA to get my mother out of the cotton field because she was still picking cotton for two dollars per day,

He left the audience with one more message: “And remember, guys, I had game. It was not like I did this Supreme Court thing [because I couldn’t play]. I had some serious game!“ The crowd roared as if he were back on the court. 
 
Today, Haywood wants one thing: recognition. He planted a tree whose shade he never sat under. But now he wants that tree to be named after him: the Spencer Haywood Rule. This is his last fight. 
 
“I don't think the players today understand the sacrifices I made,” he said in Black Ball. 
“I have been begging the Players Association to help me get proper recognition.” 

His dream is to see the rule named in his lifetime—thanking him and his family for his work.
 
And if today’s players know and appreciate him, he will have accomplished more off the court than on.

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​Anthony Price is an entrepreneur, author and publisher of CT Hoops Magazine. Jump Ball Journal is basketball beyond the score.