Barnett was stylish off the court as well as on it.
Holzman told of the time when he was scouting for the Knicks and saw Barnett, who was with the Nationals, enter the old Madison Square Garden for the first time. “He walked in with a Chesterfield coat, homburg, striped pants, spats and an umbrella hooked on his arm,” he recalled in his memoir, “The Knicks” (1971, with Leonard Lewin).
Richard Barnett was born on Oct. 2, 1936, in Gary, Ind., where his father, Ezra, was a steelworker, and his mother, Etta, worked at a candy store and ran the household. Dick starred on his high school basketball team before attending Tennessee A&I.
From 1957 to 1959, his team won back-to-back-back championships in the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics, a separate conference smaller than the National Collegiate Athletic Association. It was the first Black college basketball team to win any national championship.
The 2024 documentary focused on Barnett’s efforts to win greater recognition for that team, which culminated in their collective induction into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in 2019. When the surviving members of the team were invited to the White House last year, Barnett remarked, “Finally.”
Barnett did not graduate from Tennessee A&I, but while he was a Laker he received a bachelor’s degree in physical education from Cal Poly. He obtained a master’s degree in public administration from New York University while a Knick and a doctorate in education from Fordham University in 1991. He taught sports management at St. John’s University and established a publishing imprint, Fall Back Baby Productions, for which he wrote poetry and commented on athletes and race.