On the night of April 12, 1958, Bob Pettit scored 50 points and pulled down 19 rebounds to carry the St. Louis Hawks past the Boston Celtics, 110-109, in the Game 6 that clinched the only NBA championship the Hawks franchise would ever win. Pettit, the first two-time Most Valuable Player in NBA history and a two-time consensus All-American at LSU, died September 23, 2026, at his home in Metairie, Louisiana, at age 93.

That Game 6 performance, at Kiel Auditorium in St. Louis, was the signature night of an eleven-year career in which Pettit remade the forward position: a 6-foot-9 scorer who could face the basket, work the offensive glass, and simply outlast whoever the other team put in front of him, as ESPN recounted in its obituary of him.

He grew into that body the hard way. As a freshman, and again as a sophomore, Pettit was cut from the basketball team at Baton Rouge High School, five feet eleven inches tall at the time and not yet good enough for the roster. "We were five over the roster limit, and I really wasn't good enough to make the team," he recalled decades later of the cut, made by coach Kenner Day. "He knew it, and I knew it," according to The Advocate. For the next two years he shot a tennis ball through a bent coat hanger nailed to the garage door, and his father rigged reading lamps toward the driveway hoop so he could keep shooting after dark. He made the all-city team as a junior, grew to 6-foot-7, and led Baton Rouge High to a state championship as a senior.

Few colleges recruited him. LSU coach Harry Rabenhorst did, and Pettit stayed home. He became a two-time consensus All-American for the Tigers, led the Southeastern Conference in scoring in each of his three varsity seasons, and set a conference career scoring record that stood for roughly fifteen years, until Pete Maravich broke it. He also led LSU to the program's first Final Four, in 1953, the first Southeastern Conference team other than Kentucky to reach one. In 1954, LSU retired his No. 50, the first jersey retirement of any kind in the university's athletic history.

The Milwaukee Hawks made him the second overall pick of the 1954 NBA draft and signed him for $11,000. He reported to training camp a month early, nearly broke, to help the struggling franchise sell tickets. The team relocated to St. Louis the next season, and Pettit was named Rookie of the Year after averaging 20.4 points and 13.8 rebounds a game. Coach Red Holzman built the offense to go through him, and teammate Ned Clark, who had known him since Baton Rouge High, once put the difference this way: "His work ethic was incredible. That is what eventually showed up on the court."

Pettit won the NBA's Most Valuable Player award in 1956 and again in 1959, the league's first two-time winner. He made the All-Star team all eleven seasons he played, was voted the All-Star Game's own Most Valuable Player a record four times, and earned first-team All-NBA honors in ten consecutive seasons. In 1964 he became the first player in NBA history to reach 20,000 career points. When he retired the following year, he left the game as its all-time leading scorer, with 20,880 points and 12,849 rebounds, averaging better than 26 points and 16 rebounds a night across his career. In 1996, as the NBA celebrated its 50th season, he was named one of the league's 50 Greatest Players.

He was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1970. In a statement marking his death, the Hall of Fame called him a "sleek, skilled big man who revolutionized the forward position" and, simply, "this true giant of the game."

Pettit moved home to Louisiana once his playing days ended, working in banking in Baton Rouge before relocating to New Orleans in the 1980s to become a financial consultant; he retired from Equitas Capital in 2006. His wife, Carole, died in 2010. LSU unveiled a bronze statue of him at the Pete Maravich Assembly Center in February 2016, and in 2023 he made what would be his final public appearance there alongside Clark, his friend and teammate since Baton Rouge High School. Clark died this past March at 92.

Pettit's family said in a statement that he "passed away very peacefully at his home in Metairie, on Wednesday, September 23," adding, "He was the most amazing father. The most kind, humble and gentle soul." He is survived by three children and ten grandchildren. LSU Athletics, in its own statement, put it simply: "Bob Pettit was LSU basketball. And such a gentleman. He always stayed very involved in the Baton Rouge community and was just a model athlete."

The number 50 still hangs at the Pete Maravich Assembly Center, the first jersey LSU ever retired in any sport, and Pettit's bronze likeness now stands outside the building. In St. Louis, the only championship banner the Hawks franchise ever raised traces back to one player who scored 19 of his team's final 21 points to close it out. Every face-up big man who has since made a living scoring over smaller defenders and out-working larger ones is, in some part, playing a position Pettit built from a coat hanger nailed to a garage door and two lamps aimed at a driveway hoop.