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His legacy with the Chicago Bulls is almost as old as the team itself. Growing up in a rural, segregated Louisiana, Butterbean seldom spoke in huddles or gave interviews during his 11 seasons in the NBA. Fleeing away from home, sharing a two-bedroom shanty with 16 children and grandchildren, it required his maternal grandmother Ella Hunter to provide shelter for a weeping eight-year-old Bob. Throwing an ax handle on the door when his step-father dropped in to bring the young buck back home, grandma retorted, “Get away from here. The boy lives here now.”
Using a bent coat hanger as a hoop and a rolled-up sock, filled with grass and paper, as a ball, Robert Earl Love would pretend to be Bob Pettit in his make-shift basketball court. Love made it to the NBA but remained an enigma for the most part. “The reporters had deadlines — they couldn’t hang around all night for me to spit something out,” he shared 25 years after his retirement. His stuttering was severe — “a lot of blank time, lack of eye contact,” therapist Susan Hamilton Burleigh would say.
Shortly after his retirement, Bob returned home one night to discover his wife, nearly all his furniture, joint bank account, and rings gone… He returned to an empty house with a note left on the floor: “I don’t want to be married to a stutterer and a cripple.” Bob Love was officially broke. Retired with a career-high NBA salary of $105,000 a year, Love resorted to $4.5 per hour wages working as a dishwasher and a busboy in a restaurant in a Nordstrom’s department store in Seattle. John Nordstrom, the cafeteria executive, floated the idea of a promotion with the condition that he commit himself to speech therapy, which the company was ready to pay for. The result?
The Bulls hired him as a director of community affairs which entailed preparing for 300 to 400 speeches a year, in schools, churches, hospitals, and community centers. In 2002, he was running for political office to represent an area on the southwest side of Chicago. Unfortunately, Bob passed away on Monday. “We mourn the passing of Bob Love, who passed away today in Chicago at the age of 81 after a long battle with cancer,” the Bulls’ official Instagram account posted.
Dwyane Wade, who grew up in Chicago, mourned the loss of a Windy City icon. The Flash wrote, “Rest peacefully, legend,” on his IG stories, sharing a post honoring Love’s legacy—something that goes beyond basketball.
Bob was the only one out of the 13 siblings to attend college. He had landed a football scholarship with Southern University in Baton Rouge but later switched to basketball, which paved his way into the NBA.
