;Marvin “Bad News” Barnes was the most free-spirited of the many free-spirited basketball players who passed through Louisville in the days of the Kentucky Colonels in the old American Basketball Association. Marvin ate McDonald’s hamburgers on the bench, paraded around the dressing room in a full-length mink coat, with his uniform underneath, and accused his teammates of selfishness because they wouldn’t pass him the ball when he had 48 points and needed one basket to score 50. In one season alone he missed more than 100 team practices. But his most famous miss was a plane flight. As Bob Costas, then the team announcer for Barnes” team, the St. Louis Spirits, tells it in the book Loose Balls: “Because of the change of time zones our return flight would leave Louisville at 8 a.m. and arrive in St. Louis at 7:57 a.m. Marvin looked at that and announced,
