Rodney Page

When Dave Bing was five years old, he was playing with a homemade hobby horse made out of two sticks. He tripped and drove a rusty nail into his left eye. There was no emergency surgery available to his family. The vision in that eye never fully came back. He went on to lead the National Basketball Association in scoring. His father Hasker was a bricklayer and a Baptist deacon. His mother Juanita cleaned houses. They lived in Washington, D.C., and his dad called him Duke because he wanted his son to be top dog. People told him he was too small for basketball. He was also, functionally, playing with one good eye. He went to Syracuse anyway, roomed with a kid named Jim Boeheim, and wore number 22 because that was Elgin Baylor's number and he had watched Baylor play as a boy. He averaged 28.4 points as a senior, fifth in the entire country, and became Syracuse's first consensus All-American in 39 years. Detroit took him second overall in 1966. He was Rookie of the Year. The next season he led the NBA in scoring at 27.1 points a game. Seven All-Star games. All-Star Game MVP in 1976. Two-time All-NBA First Team. The Pistons retired his number 21. The Hall of Fame took him in 1990 and the league put him on both the 50th and 75th anniversary teams. In 1971 he detached a retina and missed two and a half months. The eyes again. He played 12 seasons and averaged 20.3 points. Now here is the part that makes him different from every other Hall of Famer. When he retired, he did not open a car dealership or take a broadcasting job. He took a job in a steel processing warehouse for $35,000 a year. A Hall of Fame basketball player, on the floor of a warehouse, learning the steel business from the bottom because he intended to own one. He stayed two years. Then in 1980 he opened Bing Steel with four employees, $80,000 of his own money, and $250,000 in loans, in a rented warehouse in Detroit. In six months he lost all of it. Every dollar of the startup capital, gone. He did not quit. He pivoted the whole company from manufacturing into steel processing and distribution, got General Motors as his first major client, and in year two did $4.2 million in revenue. By 1984 President Reagan was handing him National Minority Small Business Person of the Year. By 1985 he had two plants, 63 employees and $40 million in revenue. It became the Bing Group, one of the largest Black-owned businesses in America. And then in 2009, at 65 years old, Dave Bing ran for Mayor of Detroit. He won. And he walked into one of the worst municipal financial situations in American history. A $332 million accumulated deficit. A city hemorrhaging people and money. He took no salary his first year. Here is the honest part, and it matters. It did not work. He cut a thousand positions, tore down 6,700 abandoned houses and fought the city council constantly, and in 2013 the state installed an emergency manager over him and Detroit filed the largest municipal bankruptcy in United States history. His approval rating fell to 14 percent. He did not run again. Some jobs cannot be won. But look at the whole life. A kid who lost the use of an eye to a rusty nail, who was told he was too small, led the NBA in scoring. Then went and swept a warehouse floor to learn an industry, lost everything in six months, and built a $40 million company anyway. Then he took the hardest job in America because it was his city. He started the Bing Youth Initiative in 2014 to mentor kids in Detroit. He is still at it. For more stories like this, follow us on any platform @thesportsontap