Bob Pettit Never Played Here. His Number Hangs Here Anyway.

There is a number in the rafters at State Farm Arena that has never had anything to do with the floor underneath it.

No. 9. Bob Pettit. He died Wednesday at 93 — LSU announced it Thursday and did not give a cause — and the jersey carrying his number hangs in a city where he never played a professional game. He retired in 1965. The franchise was sold to the Atlanta developer Tom Cousins and former Georgia governor Carl Sanders in May 1968 and began playing here that fall. By the time the Hawks were Atlanta's, Pettit was 35, three years out of the league, and home in Baton Rouge.

He is the only man who ever won this franchise a championship. He won it for St. Louis.

The one night, held at full size

Saturday, April 12, 1958. Game 6 of the Finals, St. Louis and Boston. Pettit scored 50 points. He had 19 rebounds. The final was 110-109.

Sit with that a second, because it has earned it. 50 points in a closeout game, and the only one of four Finals series this franchise ever won against a Bill Russell Celtics team. Then set it down where it actually sits. 68 years ago. Another city. Ten years before Atlanta had a team at all.

The rest of the record reads like something invented to prove a point. Rookie of the Year in 1954-55, the last season the franchise spent in Milwaukee. The NBA's first MVP the following year, 1955-56, when he led the league in scoring at 25.7 and in total rebounds too. A second MVP in 1958-59, the year he led the league in scoring again at 29.2. He retired after 1964-65 with career averages of 26.4 points and 16.2 rebounds — 20,880 points and 12,849 rebounds across 11 seasons, all of them for this franchise, in Milwaukee and then St. Louis. Per the AP, those totals left him the NBA's career scoring leader on the day he walked away, and second in rebounds. He was MVP of the All-Star Game four times, which only Kobe Bryant has since matched. 6-foot-9, 205 pounds, a power forward before the league had a word for it.

Bill Russell, who beat him in three of those four Finals, said Pettit made "second effort" part of the sports vocabulary — that he kept coming at you more than any man in the game. Pettit's own account was plainer. "I played as hard as I could play every minute I was in the game. I never took time off."

What Atlanta actually has

That testimony belongs to Russell, to Oscar Robertson, to Lenny Wilkens, the men who had to guard him, collected this week by NBA.com. Atlanta has none of its own to add. ESPN's obituary allows that Pettit played before the NBA was widely televised, and that a smaller market denied him a larger audience. He was under-watched in his own lifetime, in his own city. Atlanta's version of that is total: this city's relationship to its only championship is entirely second-hand. A banner. A number. A box score.

In April I gave him one clause in a piece about a playoff trip to Boston — Bob Pettit played in St. Louis and retired there, and the franchise's greatest player never wore a Hawks jersey in Atlanta. It was an aside. Today it is the whole subject, and the clause was too small for it.

The Hawks said the decent thing Thursday, which is what a club does and what it should do: his retired No. 9 "continues to hang proudly at State Farm Arena as a lasting reminder of the impact he made on our organization." It is a reminder. The honest question is of what.

Nobody did anything wrong here. The strangeness is structural. State Farm Arena was rebuilt to argue that this team belongs to Atlanta's culture and not to a borrowed history, and the oldest object in the room is a number earned by a man from Baton Rouge who played his entire career in two other cities and is not on the record as ever having walked in.

An inheritance is not a memory. A city can hold a banner and have nothing whatsoever to remember about it, and the distance between those two things is the exact shape of the 58 years Atlanta has gone without a title of its own.

So what this city owes Bob Pettit is not a share of his championship. It is the smaller, harder thing. Knowing who he was, precisely. Knowing he was the best player this franchise ever had. Knowing Atlanta never got to watch a minute of it.