A man sat courtside for pregame warm ups on Wednesday as the Wolves prepped to take on the winless Philadelphia 76ers at Target Center. He was unassuming in stature, unobtrusive with his demeanor, clearly happy to be so close to the NBA action.
Harold Gifford, however, is much more than an average 90-year-old fan. Gifford is responsible for saving the current Los Angeles Lakers franchise as we know it thanks to a miraculous emergency landing more than 50 years ago.
It’s no secret the Lakers are one of the winningest franchises in sports, though it goes unnoticed that they might not be a franchise at all had it not been for Gifford. Gifford can easily recall that night in 1960 when he was tasked with flying the Lakers, based in Minneapolis at the time, home after a road loss to the St. Louis Hawks.
“We left at about 8 o’clock at night and it was really bad weather,” Gifford said while outlining the night’s happenings down to the most miniscule detail. “I knew from checking the weather we’d be on top the clouds so we should be fine.”
Gifford said above the clouds it was a beautiful night, though below the clouds, and higher up in the atmosphere, was a completely different story. It featured blizzard conditions that made flying extremely tough.
It was decided amongst those in the cockpit about five hours into the flight that the plane needed to make an emergency landing with the weather condition worsening with every passing minute. As the plane made its descent, Gifford said he realized the plane was getting dangerously low to the ground and out of the window in the cockpit he saw a cornfield.
“I told the captain that we had to get this thing on the ground and we should land in that cornfield,” Gifford recalled. “I said, ‘There’s nothing wrong with landing in that cornfield.’ I was a kid riding on the cultivator in my father and I know there’s nothing in cornfields.”
In that moment, the captain had other ideas. He wanted to stay the course — or what was left of the course — and try to find an airport. As the conditions continued to worsen, however, and the plane drifted closer and closer to the ground, he changed his mind.
“That was it,” Gifford said. “We got back to the cornfield … and when that plane came to a stop and we shut the engine off it was the loudest noise imaginable. They hollered and they screamed and they cheered and they clapped. Then everybody got out of the plane and started throwing snowballs. … These guys were seriously thinking that this might be it.”
It wasn’t thanks to Gifford and the rest of his crew.
“If the Lakers team perished in that crash, the franchise would not exist as we know it,” Lakers president Jeanie Buss tweeted Wednesday.
That might not be hyperbole. There were NBA greats on that plane, namely Elgin Baylor, and had the plane gone down in a blaze, it could have taken the team years to recover.
That team, of course, moved the Los Angeles the next season and the rest is history as the Los Angeles Lakers were born and Minnesota was without an NBA franchise until the Timberwolves were spawned in 1989.
“There were other teams there weren’t necessarily doing too well at the time and if we don’t land that plan it might have changed the way the NBA looks right now,” Gifford said. “There might have been a team in Los Angeles, but it wouldn’t have been the Lakers.”
Gifford said the team ultimately traveled back home on a bus and in the end arrived safely back in Minneapolis.
“Sometimes I thought about what it would have been like if we had gone down,” Gifford said. “I’m sure glad we didn’t.”
So is the NBA.