SPORTS LEGEND: Bill Laimbeer played a Sleestak on the children’s television show Land of the Lost.

First, let’s have a quick introduction of our players…

Bill Laimbeer was the center for the Detroit Pistons when they won back-to-back National Basketball Championships in the late 1980s.

Laimbeer’s abilities as a basketball player (he was a four-time All-Star, he was one of the best outside shooting centers of his era and he is still the Pistons’ all-time leader in rebounds) are perhaps overlooked because of his reputation as a player who was not afraid to get physical with his opponents, while also at the same time willing to goad opponents into committing stupid fouls on him and perhaps frustrating opposing players enough that they would do things they wouldn’t normally do (Laimbeer is one of the few players who can say that he was punched in the face by two Hall of Famers, Robert Parrish and Michael Jordan).

Laimbeer was a big part of why the Pistons were called the “Bad Boys” back then, but their tough style of play was also a WINNING style of play, as they won two championships, and that team of Pistons has a winning record in the playoffs against Jordan’s Bulls, Larry Bird’s Celtics AND Magic Johnson’s Lakers.

Land of the Lost was a children’s television program that aired for three seasons on Saturday mornings from 1974-1976 (and has been replayed ever since, to the point where it has become a major cult classic)….

The show follows a man and his two children as they become trapped in an alternate universe filled with dinosaurs and all sorts of other far-out creatures.

As the family tries to find its way home, they (and the audience) explore their new home.

The show is soon to be re-made as a major motion picture in 2009, starring Will Ferrell.

So what could these shows possibly have in common?

Well, a major group of bad guys on the Land of the Lost are the scary, lizard-men known as the Sleestaks.

The Sleestaks are meant to be towering evil giants, so that caused a bit of a problem for the show - where would they find people tall enough to fit into the suits and cheap enough to, well, you know - work cheap.

Enter Bill Laimbeer!

Laimbeer played a Sleestak during the first season of the show, before he went to college (Laimbeer attended the University of Notre Dame).

On the Wikipedia page for The Land of the Lost, they suggest that the show decided to crash the local high school (the show was filmed in Los Angeles) to find tall players from the basketball team to play the Sleestaks. I don’t believe that’s accurate.

When on the Colin Cowherd show recently, Bill Laimbeer discussed how he got the gig (that’s an audio link, by the way), and Laimbeer’s story fits the fact of the matter a lot better than the Wikipedia version of the story.

According to Laimbeer, who DID attend high school in Palos Verdes, which is pretty close by, the job was given to him while he was being recruited by the two big Southern California schools (University of Southern California and University of California, Los Angeles) and that it was arranged by someone connected to the studio who also was connected to one of the two schools. That makes sense, because the other two men that played Sleestaks on the show were both future NBA players, David Greenwood and Jack Lambert (and all three men were at least six foot ten), and Greenwood did not attend the same high school as Laimbeer and Lambert was actually close to graduation from USC at the time he appeared on the show. Greenwood ended up attending UCLA while Laimbeer went to Notre Dame, as mentioned above.

So almost certainly, this was arranged as a sort of a perk in an attempt to lure the graduating seniors Greenwood and Laimbeer to play in Southern California (while Lambert was most likely just being rewarded for being a great player for USC). And that’s how Laimbeer remembers it, so I think that’s the true story. That doesn’t mean that LATER seasons didn’t have Sleestaks played by players from the local basketball team, though, so Wikipedia could be correct in that sense!

Still, overall, it’s an amazing story - Bill Laimbeer as a Sleestak! Hilarious!

Thanks so much to commenter Basara549 for suggesting this great legend!

STATUS: True

Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is bcronin@legendsrevealed.com