When Lindsay Whalen is formally inducted into the Pro Basketball Hall of Fame this month she’ll have hall of famers Dawn Staley and Charles Barkley presenting her.
“I’ve had a good rapport and I’ve known Dawn for a long time, so Dawn was a fairly easy phone call,” Whalen said Thursday as a guest on KFAN at the Minnesota State Fair.
But how’d she get Barkley?
It turns out that each Hall of Fame inductee had to pick a minimum of two current hall of famers to present them during the Sept. 10 ceremony Symphony Hall in Springfield, Massachusetts.
“So I’m looking at this list and I’m like OK I know a few people but then I’m like, alright, I’m going for my favorite player. I’m going big. I grew up watching him, I loved those Phoenix Suns teams,” Whalen explained.
Now how does one get in contact with Barkley? Melissa Maines, the newly-named general manager of Gophers women’s basketball, went to Auburn, just as Barkley did, and she was able to get his cell number.
“I didn’t want to call because he’s going to get I don’t know how many phone calls a day, so I just shoot him a really nice text and just said I would be honored if you would stand up and there and, you know, just say, present you,” Whalen continued.
“He took about a day and a half to respond, so I was like there’s no way he’s getting back to me. I actually deleted the text because I was like, ‘let me just get this off my phone, let me just get this off my mind.’ I’m like I’m giving him one more day and I’m going to have to move on to somebody else. I was probably going to move on to Michael Jordan or something,” she joked.
“So then he texted me and he just said he’d be honored and this that and the other, so here we go.”
Barkley and Staley won’t speak at the event. But they’ll stand behind Whalen during her speech. Whalen gets 5-7 minutes to speak, which she says she’s already written and practiced numerous times.
“I’m working it as an opportunity to work on a little bit of my stand-up routine. You just never know. Gotta have a fallback,” she joked. “I’m going to work on my thing, say a few thank-yous … I have a couple of good lines in there that I’m really just hoping to land.”
What if they don’t laugh? “Well they will,” she said.
