Bob Love, a cornerstone player for the ascendant Chicago Bulls during the first half of the 1970s who overcame an enervating stutter after his playing days to work for the team as a motivational speaker, died on Monday in Chicago. He was 81.
The Bulls announced his death, saying the cause was cancer.
Love’s stuttering, which traced to a childhood in rural, segregated Louisiana, was so inhibiting that he seldom did interviews with reporters during his 11 seasons in the N.B.A., despite leading the Bulls in points per game or total points scored for seven straight seasons.
“The reporters had deadlines — they couldn’t hang around all night for me to spit something out,” Love told The New York Times in 2002.
Nicknamed Butterbean in high school because of his fondness for butter beans, Love even struggled to get words out in huddles during timeouts. A teammate, Norm Van Lier, often spoke up for him.
A 6-foot-8 forward, Love averaged a career-high 25.8 points per game during the 1971-72 season, utilizing a smooth jump shot arched high over his head. He appeared in three All-Star games and twice was voted second-team all-league. But he was a complete player, three times named second-team all-league defense. And he was the Bulls’ third all-time leading scorer, behind Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen.
Jerry Reinsdorf, the Bulls’ owner, said in an interview for this obituary that Love was “a tenacious defender who set high standards for competitiveness and toughness.”
Led by Love, fellow forward Chet Walker and the guards Van Lier and Jerry Sloan, the Bulls stabilized a foundering franchise that had contemplated a location change. Competing in the Western Conference, they were beaten in the playoffs three straight years by the powerhouse Los Angeles Lakers of Wilt Chamberlain and Jerry West.
The Bulls came within a victory of the N.B.A. finals in the 1974-75 playoffs. Love averaged 22.6 points and 6.6 rebounds in the conference finals against the Golden State Warriors but made only 6 of 26 shots in the decisive seventh game. He believed that the Bulls would have won the game and the championship had he played better.
A back injury ended Love’s career in 1977 while with the Seattle SuperSonics. His marriage dissolved, leaving Love, whose highest season’s salary had been $105,000, short on money and employment, largely due to his stuttering.
He washed dishes and cleared tables in the cafeteria at Nordstrom, the retail department store. John Nordstrom, an executive, promised him a promotion with higher earnings if he went for speech therapy, which the company paid for.
“All my life I dreamed and prayed to be able to communicate normally with people,” Love said in the 2002 Times article. “I would have given up everything else in my life to do it.”
In 1986, he worked with Susan Hamilton Burleigh, a Seattle-based speech pathologist, four times a week on breathing to open up vocal cords and on word patterns.
“His stuttering was severe — a lot of blank time, lack of eye contact,” Hamilton Burleigh said in a telephone interview. “He would tell me stories about being a Black player who stuttered, and the work at Nordstrom, which were high on the list of shameful experiences.”
Love recorded himself in everyday interactions and analyzed his speech in sessions with Hamilton Burleigh. “He was super-motivated,” she said. “In one of our first sessions, he said, ‘I want to be a great public speaker.’ I said, ‘Well, OK.’ But after a while, he was going around Seattle, giving speeches.”
Love became Nordstrom’s manager for health and sanitation and attracted media attention that reached Reinsdorf. In 1991, he brought Love back to the Bulls at the dawn of the Michael Jordan-led run to six championships in eight years.
Reinsdorf had sympathized with Love’s challenges during his playing days and admired how he had “had faced a great deal of adversity in his life and overcame all of it.”
Representing the Bulls, Love made speeches at schools, churches and community centers. He grew so confident that he knocked on doors all over Chicago’s 15th Ward in an unsuccessful run for the City Council in 2003.
In 2023, as a guest on a Nordstrom company podcast with Peter Nordstrom, the president and chief brand officer, Love described his post-playing years as “a story of overcoming, of never playing the victim.”
Robert Earl Love was born on Dec. 8, 1942, in Bastrop, La., a small town in the northeastern part of the state. His mother, Lula Belle (Hunter) Cleveland was 15 when he was born. His didn’t know his father, Benjamin Love, until adulthood.
To escape an abusive stepfather, he lived with his grandmother, Ella Hunter, who nurtured him through a difficult childhood made worse by his stuttering.
“I’d come home crying and my grandmother would wipe my tears with a big rag,” Love told the Times. “She’d tell me, ‘Robert Earl, there are no perfect people in this world. People are not always nice about things that they don’t understand.’ ”
Fashioning a makeshift basketball court in his grandmother’s crowded two-bedroom shanty, using a bent coat hanger as a hoop and his grandfather’s rolled-up socks as a ball, Love pretended he was Bob Pettit, a star forward for the St. Louis Hawks.
A starting quarterback at Morehouse High School, he went to Southern University to play football until the basketball coach, A.W. Mumford, noticed him playing pickup. Love averaged 30.6 points and 18.2 rebounds as a senior, finishing as Southern’s all-time leader in both categories.
With N.B.A. teams wary of players from historically Black colleges, Love was selected in the fourth round of the 1965 draft. He drifted from the Cincinnati Royals to a minor league, back to the Royals and to the expansion Milwaukee Bucks before sticking with coach Dick Motta’s Bulls.
Information about survivors was not immediately available.
Love was active with the Stuttering Foundation of America and maintained occasional contact with Hamilton Burleigh, who once attended a dinner at which Love was receiving an award. His speech that night was less than his fluid best.
“Here’s the deal on stuttering — there’s no cure, it’s just about managing it,” she said. “So I went back to talk to him after the speech and said, ‘We can always do a refresher.’ ”
Recalling his shame from their initial sessions, she was delighted by what he told her.
“Susan, no,” he said. “If people have problems with my stuttering, it’s their deal. It’s not keeping me anymore from doing anything I need to do.”
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