Billy Ray Bates is a playoff hero for the Trail Blazers from 1980. X, @awfulannouncing Bates is still alive and well at the age of 68, but Ernie Johnson and Kenny Smith chided Barkley about it ...

In 1978, Billy Ray Bates was drafted by the NBA's Houston Rockets. Sports Illustrated's Jon Wertheim writes: "As a basketball player he was gifted almost beyond reason. A sort of proto-LeBron ...

If Billy Ray Bates’s name was something straight from pulp fiction, so was his backstory. The eighth of nine siblings, he was born in 1956, but it might as well have been 1856.

According to Wikipedia, Bates is still alive. There are also still services and websites offering to book Billy Ray Bates as a guest speaker, which similarly would imply he’s still alive.

Billy Ray Bates admits he has lived life in the fast lane — even swerving into the shoulder at breakneck speeds on many occasions — but [he checks his heart] he’s still breathing, even if ...

TNT was forced to issue an apology after Inside the NBA host Shaquille O’Neal claimed former Portland Trail Blazers player Billy Ray Bates had died. Spoiler alert – he’s alive.

Former NBA player Billy Ray Bates burst into the league in 1980. But, he was out of the NBA by 1983. After struggling with drugs and alcohol for most of his ...

TNT issued an apology after incorrectly saying former NBA player Billy Ray Bates is no longer alive. On Sunday, Ty Jerome scored 28 points off the bench in the Cleveland Cavaliers' Game 1 victory ...

“We would like to issue a correction and an apology for something that happened last night on ‘Inside the NBA.’ We were talking about Billy Ray Bates, who back in 1980, had one of the NBA ...

Without a pension and with a bad track record for managing money — “I’ve seen Billy Ray pass out $100 bills to the homeless,” said one witness — Bates is in dire straits.