An HBCU legend was owed and received an apology from TNT after false claims of his death were aired during the network’s NBA playoff coverage.
Billy Ray Bates, who starred for Kentucky State in the 1970s and was a phenomenon for the Portland Trail Blazers, was thought to be deceased by Inside the NBA analyst Shaquille O’Neal and O’Neal stated as such during Sunday’s post-game coverage of the Cleveland Cavaliers/Miami Heat series opener.
The next night on the pre-game show, Ernie Johnson apologized to Bates, who is still very much alive, and his family.
“We would like to issue a correction and an apology for something that happened last night on Inside the NBA. We were talking about Billy Ray Bates, who back in 1980, had one of the NBA’s best playoff debuts coming off the bench with 29 points,” Johnson said. “In the course of our discussion, we passed on some bad information that Billy Ray Bates had passed away. While it was inadvertent, it was also inaccurate, and insensitive, and inexcusable. In short, we screwed up. And we apologize to Billy Ray Bates and his family.”
A native of Kosciusko, Mississippi, Bates played at Kentucky State from 1974 to 1978, scoring 1,723 points while shooting 56 percent from the field and 77 percent from the free throw line.
Drafted in the third round of the 1978 NBA draft by the Houston Rockets, Bates joined the Blazers late in the 1980 season from the Maine Lumberjacks of the CBA. Bates averaged 25.3 points per game in the Blazers’ first-round series loss to the Seattle Supersonics. Bates followed that up the next postseason by averaging 28.3 points per game in the Blazers’ first-round loss to the Kansas City (now Sacramento) Kings.
All told, Bates played parts of four seasons in the NBA for Portland, the Washington Bullets, and the Los Angeles Lakers, averaging 11 points per game. He went on to be known as “Black Superman” in the Philippines Basketball Association, a local legend remembered fondly to this day.
