BOB PETTIT (BASKETBALL LEGENDS)

Bob Pettit fought his way past two Cicinnati Royals during this 1957 game 

on his way to another basket. When he retired in 1966 after eleven seasons, 

Pettit was the NBA's leading scorer, with 20,880 points.

Where does Bob Pettit fit in among the greatest basketball players of all time? At the very top, according to the experts who named him to the NBA's twenty-fifth and thirty-fifth anniversary All-Time Teams. After all, when he retired in 1965, Robert Lee Pettit, Jr., was the highest scorer in the history of professional basketball with 20,880 points, and third in rebounding with 12,849 boards. Don't underplay those rebounds-they say a lot about the 6-foot-9 athlete. "I recognize that I am totally prejudiced in behalf of Bob Pettit," Ben Kerner, owner of the St. Louis Hawks, once said. "He was a scoring champion, but more important, he was a tireless rebounder at both ends of the court."

Offensive rebounds, the kind that often require grit and an elbow or two, were just as much a part of Pettit's game as those wonderfully muscular drives to the basket. Born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 1932, Pettit was an All- American at the local high school before attending Louisiana State University in 1950. He was the Southeastern Conference Most Valuable Player his last three years, averaging 27.4 points and 14.6 rebounds over 69 games. Pettit was drafted by Milwaukee in the first round of the 1954 draft and won Rookie of the Year before the franchise shifted to St. Louis.

Pettit was selected to play in the All-Star Game as a rookie and made the First Team for ten consecutive years, a testament to his consistency. In 1956, Pettit won the Most Valuable Player award at the All-Star Game and repeated as the league's Most Valuable Player over the regular season, when he averaged 25.7 points and 16 rebounds a game. Pettit led the NBA in scoring that year and again in 1959, (he had added the rebounding crown in 1956), but his greatest moment came in 1958 when he scored 50 points to beat the Boston Celtics in the sixth game of the NBA finals.

The Celtics had ripped through the Eastern Division, winning 49 games and losing 23, compared to the Hawks' modest 41-31 record. The series opened with a Hawks victory over the Celtics in Boston and the two teams eventually split the first four games. After St. Louis won the fifth game in Boston, 102-100, the series returned to St. Louis. The Hawks, who had lost to the Celtics in the seventh game of the championship series in an excruciating double-overtime contest the previous year, had something to prove.

Pettit simply wouldn't let the Hawks lose, scoring 50 points-including 19 of St. Louis' final 21 points-when Boston mounted a spirited charge in the fourth quarter. The Hawks won, 110 to 109 and Pettit had set a new standard for field goals in a playoff quarter, with 8.

"It was the highlight of my career," says Pettit, now a successful banker based in New Orleans. "Of all the games I played, that championship meant the most to me. It still does.'