Playground Games Between Wilt And Elgin

Dave McKenna writes about Wilt Chamberlain going to D.C. in the summer of 1957 to match up against Elgin Baylor on the playgrounds.  An interesting note about Baylor's struggle finding a college to attend:

But when it came time for college, Baylor's race trumped his talents and local renown. Whereas the teams from Philly and New York colleges welcomed blacks from their respective towns in the 1950s, all the major universities in D.C. were still years away from integrating when Baylor left high school. George Washington University didn't have its first black basketball player until 1963. Maryland, Shue's school, held off letting blacks play basketball until 1965 (Billy Jones).
Georgetown didn't recruit its first black ballplayer until 1966 (Bernard White).
"Now, schools will look under rocks for black ballplayers," says George "Dee" Williams, a teammate of Baylor's at Spingarn and with Stonewall A.C. "But nobody came to D.C. back then. And we didn't have anywhere around here to go."
So while Chamberlain had his 100 offers by his senior year at Overbrook High, Baylor, despite a 34-points-per-game scoring average at Spingarn and all that fame in the black half of his hometown, was essentially ignored. Though some reports during his senior year said that Indiana wanted him, Baylor told me Virginia Union, a historically black school, was the only serious suitor. But he'd had enough of segregated schools. A Washington Post story in 1954 quoted Ralph Shaugnessy, identified in the piece as "chief scout for Red Auerbach's Celtics," saying that "if [Baylor] isn't going to college, we want him with the Celtics now." (Auerbach told me in 2005 that while he was a huge fan of the young Baylor and that his buddy "Shag" Shaughnessy may have been quoted accurately by the Washington Post all those years ago, the Celtics never seriously pursued the young Baylor. "I didn't have time for high school kids," Auerbach said. NBA rules outlawed signing teenagers, anyway.)

He ended up starting school at the College of Idaho, before going to Seattle University.