Back when pro basketball was making its first inroads into popular culture, Rick Barry was the poster boy for everything good, bad and confusing about the modern game. As a second-year pro, he lifted a forlorn franchise to the NBA stratosphere and pried the scoring title from the iron grip of history’s most dominant player. Next he was cast in the role of villain, as he shattered the team sports status quo and joined the upstart ABA. Since then Rick has been on a long, strange journey that continues today.

Richard Francis Dennis Barry III was born on March 28, 1944, in Elizabeth, New Jersey. His father, Richard Barry Jr., played on local semipro clubs and also coached at the St. Peter and Paul parochial school. Rick and his older brother (by four years), Dennis, learned the game from their dad, who hammered the fundamentals into them from an early age. The teaching continued at the dinner table, much to Mrs. Barry’s chagrin. She had only a passing interest in the sport.

In fifth grade, Rick made the school team. Most of the other boys were of junior high school age, but he was as tall and quick and talented as any of them. Having tagged along with Dennis all those years gave him valuable experience against older players. Rick’s father was a strict coach, especially with his own son. He sometimes pulled Rick for making a single mistake.

When Rick was ready for high school, the Barrys moved a few towns west on Rte. 28 to Roselle Park, where he made the Roselle Park High School varsity. Though he had the ball-handling skills and court vision of a guard, he played forward for the team. Rick participated in a number of other sports, from baseball to tetherball, and was always the best at whatever he tried. The only thing that seemed to hold him back was his temper. Trained to see ahead in ways his opponents, teammates and even coaches could not, Rick was easily frustrated when he felt others were impeding his progress. It would take him several years to bring this part of his personality under control.

Who was your favorite athlete growing up, and what was your favorite sport?

My sports hero as a kid was Willie Mays, which is why I wore number 24. Baseball was my first love until I got into a situation on the junior varsity in high school where I wasn’t allowed to play when I wasn’t pitching. I said, “This is crazy. I’m batting .500, I’m a better hitter than anybody on the team, and I want to play. This is not the major leagues.” The next game I’m pitching, I go one-for-two and the game after that I wasn’t in the lineup. So I quit baseball and decided to focus my energies on basketball. I suppose I should be sending that coach a present, for as it turned out he got me to focus my efforts on a sport that proved to quite good to me.

So you quit baseball?

No, the next year the varsity baseball coach came to me and told me what happened at JV was irrelevant and he would like me to come out for the team. I did, and I made All-State in both my junior and senior years. I continued to pitch and improved as a hitter. I very rarely struck out and batted .450 or .460 as a junior. The next year I got a little bigger and stronger and hit the ball better, but my average actually went down almost one hundred points. We played on a field with no outfield fences. I hit some shots that guys caught that should have been home runs.

After the JV experience I had lost my passion and love for the game. So by this time basketball was my number-one sport.

Rick, meanwhile, was developing into an unstoppable force on the hardwood. His first basketball coach was his dad, who schooled him in the fundamentals of the game. At Roselle Park High School, Rick was voted All-State twice. By then he stood more than six feet tall, and though he looked skinny in his uniform, he dominated opponents with a physical style of play. Rick could hit his jump shot from anywhere on the floor, but he was at his best taking the ball hard to the hole. His take-no-prisoners attitude resulted in bumps, bruises and regular trips to the foul line.

When and why did you start shooting your free throws underhand?

I really don’t remember exactly, but I believe it was before my junior year at Roselle Park. I was a 70 percent free throw shooter doing it the traditional way. My dad kept on me that I could be better if I shot underhanded. I tried it basically to make him stop bugging me. But when I went out and worked with him, little by little I realized that, “Hey, this isn’t too bad.”

I actually changed the technique later in my career. I took what my dad taught me and perfected it by taking the wrist out of the shot. I wish I had been smart enough to make that adjustment earlier because when I became a pro, I got to shoot a lot of free throws my first couple of years. I would have loved to have put a streak of 100 or more in a row together. That’s one of my big disappointments, that I never made 100 or more consecutively during the course of competition. I think I could have done that had I developed that technique earlier. I was shooting 10 or 12 a game when I first came up and it wouldn’t have taken that long to reach 100.

In the fall of 1961, Rick headed south for the University of Miami. From a basketball standpoint, it was an interesting decision. The Hurricanes were hardly a powerhouse, but coach Bruce Hale—whose nickname was “Slick”—was a good recruiter who helped convince Rick that Miami was the place for him. A one-time NBA star and former referee, Hale took over the program in 1954, then transformed the ’Canes from a perennial doormat into a giant killer. He brought in the school's first All-American (Dick Hickox) and seven-footer (Mike McCoy). Hale also earned Miami national recognition. In 1960, the year before Rick showed up, the Hurricanes rose to #10 in the country. With a mobile forward like Rick on the team, Hale saw the chance to compete at college basketball's highest level.

Why Miami?

If you live in New Jersey it’s an easy question to answer. You don’t want to go through winters with galoshes and overcoats and earmuffs. I wanted to get away and go some place where it was going to be nice and warm. Plus I wanted to go some place where I thought I’d have a chance to play as a sophomore. Miami was a school where they didn’t bring in a ton of recruits. It wasn’t a basketball machine. They had an independent schedule, so I knew I’d be traveling around the country playing in a lot of different places I’d never seen before—from that standpoint, I thought it would be a good education. There was no other school I even considered and I never even visited the campus. I saw some pictures and heard good things about the school and that was it.

How important was the coach, Bruce Hale, in your decision-making?

The number one selling point was that I would have a coach I really enjoyed playing for. The coach I had in high school I couldn’t stand. There were times that I considered quitting and if it weren’t for my father and brother talking me into staying, I was going to leave the team in my senior year. Bruce Hale, the Miami coach, was different.

After a season on the freshman squad, Rick moved right into the starting lineup and soon blossomed into Miami's best player, averaging almost 20 points and 15 rebounds a game. Miami was all that he expected—good basketball and great weather—except for the facilities. The school didn't have a field house or gym. The Hurricanes played their home games at the Miami Beach Convention Hall (or the Auditorium next door). Practices were held at the campus armory, which the team shared with the U.S. Army. But no one, including Rick, ever complained.

Hale was something of a legend back then. He was one of a handful of top-level stars (including George Mikan, Bob Davies and Arnie Risen) who came over from the National Basketball League in the post-war years and enabled the Basketball Association of America to survive its embryonic years, and eventually evolve into the NBA. As a coach, Hale was ahead of his time. He treated his players like human beings, inviting them for cookouts at his home, letting them swim in his pool, and running with them in scrimmages. Rick also loved Hale because he gave him so much freedom to explore his game.

Conditions at Miami were a bit primitive, weren’t they?

Yeah, we practiced in an armory on campus, had to travel to play our home games and there wasn’t great fan support from the student body. Looking back I might have liked to go to a school like North Carolina or Kentucky, where basketball was the big sport, but for me Miami was perfect. Bruce Hale taught me so many things about basketball. It was like being in the minor leagues of the NBA. We learned a fast-break, up-tempo style from a man who had been one of the top five players in pro basketball at one time. He prepared me for the NBA in so many ways and was, without question, the reason I became an All-NBA player as a rookie. Back then people who were 21 just didn’t go into the NBA and have that kind of impact.

When I was a sophomore we had a seven-foot center by the name of Mike McCoy. Lou Mose, the general manager of the Lakers, came down to scout him. There was an article in the local newspaper and he was asked what he thought about Mike. Mose said, “I’m not to sure what Mike McCoy’s going to do in the NBA, but you have a sophomore right here named Rick Barry who’s going to be a great pro basketball player.” That really pumped me up.

Rick was eager to prove his critics wrong. In 1965, he joined a Warrior club trying to find its identity after the trade of Wilt Chamberlain to the Philadelphia 76ers. The team’s record in 1964-65 had been 17-63, by far the league’s worst mark. Working with point guard Guy Rodgers, Rick injected new life into the club. In his first season, he surpassed Elgin Baylor’s rookie record for points with 2,059, and finished second in the league in free-throw percentage (.862) and 10th in rebounding (10.6 rpg). Rick was named Rookie of the Year and All-NBA First Team.

Indeed, Rick was even better his second season with San Francisco. Playing for new coach Bill Sharman, he topped the NBA at just over 35 points a game, breaking Chamberlain's seven-year stranglehold on the scoring title. After taking home honors as the All-Star Game MVP, Rick was voted All-NBA First Team for the second year in a row. His fine play boosted the Warriors to 44 wins and the division title. After sweeping the Lakers and beating the Hawks in six games, San Francisco met Chamberlain and the 76ers in the NBA Finals. In a high-scoring series, the Warriors lost in six games. Rick set a new championship mark with a 40.8 scoring average (which stood until Michael Jordan erased his name from the record books in 1993), including one game when he hit for 55.
 

Nate Thurmond got a chance to play center and be the guy things revolved around. He had been playing power forward, but center was more his natural position. Also, we had some other good people we had picked up. I won the scoring title and we came within a couple of plays of beating the 76ers for the championship. This is the same Philly team that a lot of experts pick as the best team ever in the NBA.