How Lindsay Whalen got Charles Barkley as her Hall of Fame presenter
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.
Title: Bring Me The Sports co-owner, editor Email: joe@bringmethenews.com Twitter: @JoeBMTN Education: Southwest Minnesota State University Location: Minneapolis, Minnesota Expertise: All things Minnesota sports Nelson has covered Minnesota sports for two decades, starting his media career in sports radio. He worked at small market Minnesota stations in Marshall and St. Cloud before joining one of the nation's highest-rated sports stations, KFAN-FM 100.3 in the Twin Cities. There, he was the producer of the top-rated mid-morning sports show with Minnesota Vikings announcer Paul Allen. His radio experience helped blossom a career as a sports writer, joining Minneapolis-based Bring Me The News in 2011. Nelson and Adam Uren became co-owners of Bring Me The News in 2018 and have since more than tripled the site's traffic and launched Bring Me The Sports in cooperation with the Sports Illustrated/FanNation umbrella. Nelson has covered the Super Bowl and numerous training camps, NFL combines, the MLB All-Star Game and Minnesota playoff games, in addition to the day-to-day happenings on and off the field of play. Nelson also has extensive knowledge of non-sports subjects, including news and weather. He works closely with Bring Me The News meteorologist Sven Sundgaard to produce a bevy of weather and climate information for Minnesota readers. Nelson helped launch and manage the Bring Me The News Radio Network, which provided more than 50 radio stations around Minnesota with daily news, sports and weather reports from 2011-17.