Sid Hartman, longtime sports columnist and one-time owner of the Lakers, dies at 100

Sid Hartman, the longtime -- looooongtime -- sports columnist at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, passed away yesterday at the age of 100.

He also had a notes column in yesterday’s paper, on the day he died, which was byline No. 21,149.

His contribution to the NBA world was beyond the realm of current-day belief.

We’ll get to that in a second, but first, a little more about Hartman: 

• His first byline appeared in the long-gone Minneapolis Times in 1945. That’s 75 years of writing columns, and predates the Twins, the Wild, the Vikings and the Timberwolves.
• His first job was selling the paper in downtown Minneapolis, when he was eight .... in 1928. His life spanned both the Great Depression and the coronavirus pandemic. 

OK, as he pertains to basketball: Hartman is the reason the Lakers exist. Without this man, there’s no Showtime, no Shaq and Kobe and no LeBron and AD.

How it happened: In 1947, as a 27-year-old, he paid $15,000 for the “Detroit Gems,” a franchise in the National Basketball League, and quickly rebranded them as the Minneapolis Lakers. He, as the general manager, drafted George Mikan, the game’s first superstar, and presided over five BAA/NBA titles in the late ‘40s and ‘50s.  And, in what must be the first on-record flirtation with tanking, he agreed to a deal with Red Auerbach in 1956 to purposely make his team worse, thereby increasing his chances of drafting Bill Russell, but got cold feet at the last second.

The funniest part about his operation with the Lakers is he never dropped his sports column, which he wrote for the Star-Tribune at that point. It was a conflict of interest of the highest regard, akin to Patriots owner Bob Kraft filing columns for the Boston Globe. (He cut ties with the Lakers in ‘57 and, three years later, the franchise headed west.)

But Hartman, a famously clunky writer who made up for it by his doggedness as a reporter, carried on, comically large recorder in hand, unbothered by basic ethical newspaper norms or the world around him. He was the through-line in Minnesota sports, from Mikan to Kevin Garnett and Randy Moss.

The best story about him, though, comes via this 2016 ESPN feature by Kevin Seifert. 

Hartman, covering the 2007 Super Bowl in Miami, decided he wanted to meet a fellow Twin Cities celebrity named Prince, who was performing at the game’s halftime.

With help from some PR guys, Hartman, then 87, nudged his way to a backstage area where Prince was waiting to do a Super Bowl press conference. He saw the famous musician and raced through waves of security guards to track him down, bluntly yelling ‘Hey Prince!’ during his pursuit.

When he finally reached Prince, the eccentric genius of his genre turned around and started the conversation:
 

[READ: That day when Prince met Sid Hartman]
[READ: Star Tribune sports columnist Sid Hartman dies at age 100]
[READ: Sid Hartman was a true original, and he was ours]

-- SE