Basketball legend Bob Pettit, the LSU great who became one of the NBA’s earliest superstars and helped define the modern power forward position, has died at 93.
Pettit passed away Wednesday, according to LSU, closing the book on a towering career that stretched from Baton Rouge to the NBA Hall of Fame.
The Louisiana native first made his mark at LSU, where he helped lead the Tigers to their first NCAA Final Four in 1953 and became one of the most dominant players in school history.
Pettit was a consensus All-American, a three-time first-team All-Southeastern Conference selection and the league’s scoring leader in each of his three varsity seasons.
He averaged 25.5 points per game in 1952, 24.9 in 1953 and 31.4 in 1954, becoming only the second major-college player at the time to average more than 30 points in a season.
He was just as relentless on the glass, averaging 13.1, 13.9 and 17.3 rebounds per game over those same seasons.
In the second game of his senior year, Pettit poured in 60 points against Louisiana College, setting what was then an SEC record.
His rise was hardly automatic.
“The greatest thing that ever happened to me is that when I first picked up a basketball, I was terrible,” said Pettit many years ago in a previous interview. “If things come naturally, you might not bother to work at improving them, and you can fall short of your potential.”
Pettit was cut from the varsity team as a sophomore at Baton Rouge High before growing five inches and turning himself into one of the state’s top players.
He eventually led Baton Rouge High to its first state championship in more than 20 years before choosing hometown LSU over a long list of college offers.
After college, Pettit became the No. 2 overall pick in the 1954 NBA Draft by the Milwaukee Hawks.
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He later admitted professional basketball was barely on his radar while he was still at LSU.
“When I was at LSU … I knew very little about professional basketball,” he said. “I probably heard of the Minneapolis Lakers, the Boston Celtics and maybe the New York Knicks. That was about it … After my senior year, I played in a couple of All-Star games; there was one in New York and one in Kansas City … I played pretty well in both of those. Then I started considering maybe the NBA.”
Pettit quickly proved he belonged.
He won NBA Rookie of the Year in 1955 after averaging 20.4 points and 13.8 rebounds per game.
He then became the first player in league history to win the NBA regular-season MVP award when the honor debuted in 1956. He won it again in 1959.
Pettit was selected to 11 straight All-Star Games from 1955 through 1965 and won All-Star Game MVP honors four times.
His signature moment came in the 1958 NBA Finals, when he scored 50 points in Game 6 to lead the St. Louis Hawks past the Boston Celtics 110-109 and clinch the championship.
The performance stood as one of the greatest scoring efforts in NBA Finals history for decades.
Pettit retired in 1965 while still playing at an elite level.
He became the first player in NBA history to surpass 20,000 career points, finishing with 20,880 and a career average of 26.4 points per game.
His 12,849 rebounds ranked second in league history when he retired, while his career average of 16.2 rebounds per game remains among the best ever.
Pettit said rebounding was “the thing I did the best. It became a real focus for me. I was very proud of my rebounding ability. Not Wilt, not Bill Russell, but good.”
His legacy was cemented with induction into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1971.
He was also inducted into the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame and the College Basketball Hall of Fame and was one of only four players named to the NBA’s 25th, 35th, 50th and 75th anniversary teams.
LSU retired Pettit’s No. 50 in 1954, making it the first jersey number retired in any sport by the university.
The Hawks later retired his No. 9, and LSU honored him with a statue outside the Pete Maravich Assembly Center in 2016.
Pettit remained one of the most important figures in LSU basketball history, remembered for helping lift the Tigers into the national spotlight and for becoming one of the NBA’s foundational stars.
Funeral arrangements are pending.
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