By Steve Martin, hornets.com
Paul Silas has had many achievements during his active basketball life. He was an outstanding player at Creighton, which led to a very successful career in the NBA. He won three NBA Championships and was a voracious rebounder in St. Louis, Atlanta, Phoenix, Boston, Denver, Seattle and San Diego. But two amazing days during his senior season at Creighton seem to stand out more than others. In just 24 hours time, Silas met two of the most influential personalities of the 20th century.
It was February 24, 1964 and the Creighton Blue Jays were putting the wraps on a 22-7 season. They were in Miami, where they whipped the Miami Hurricanes by 20 points. After the game, as the team returned to its hotel, the players found that they shared it with a young heavyweight boxer by the name of Cassius Clay, who 24 hours later would take down heavyweight champion Sonny Liston with a TKO in the seventh round of their battle at the Miami Convention Center. Clay met with the team and spent time getting to know them before sending them on their way with a bevy of autographed placards and trinkets. Shortly after the fight, Clay would change his name to Muhammad Ali.
The very next day the Blue Jays were at O'Hare Airport in Chicago, changing airplanes on their trip home to Omaha, Nebraska. At the very next gate, there stood the legendary Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. awaiting his flight to Atlanta. He met with the team in an impromptu fashion and extolled them on the value of hard work in achieving goals, as Silas recalls. Eight months later, Dr. King's non-violent movement to help secure blacks the right to vote in the south would garner him the Nobel Peace Prize.
Dr. King also autographed the souvenirs the team received the day before from Cassius Clay. Imagine, 12 young men possessing placards containing the autographs of both Cassius Clay and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and what a collectors item that would be. Silas says he can only imagine what that would have been like as he laughingly explains that he misplaced the placard, never to be found again.
Silas is an amazing man, who despite his many achievements, has an endless supply of humility. I have had the pleasure of working with him several times as an NBA coach.
One of Silas’ many talents is his ability to carry a tune. In his first tour with the Hornets, initially as an assistant coach under Dave Cowens, Silas regularly sang over the radio on the bus rides from the arena to the airport to take the team to its next destination. That talent would serve him well on Easter Sunday, April 4, 1999. The Hornets were getting ready to play the Atlanta Hawks, who that season were splitting their home games between the Georgia Dome and Georgia Tech's on-campus facility. On this particular day, the holiday warranted the use of Georgia Tech facility, where some 7,000 fans were getting ready for a Hawks-Hornets showdown. The 12-year-old girl singing the National Anthem got about halfway through the opening verse of the song when she stopped dead in her tracks because she had forgotten the words. Coach Silas was standing about six feet away from the girl and picked up the song where she had left off. She happily accepted the prodding of her self-appointed monitor and strongly belted out the remaining words of the song, finishing with a flourish and the brightest smile for the man who wouldn't let her fail on that Easter Sunday.