If you recall, the Mountaineers were 6-0 and riding high to start the 1971-72 season when a terrible automobile accident left Larry Harris dead and rendered Sam Oglesby paralyzed.

Point guard Levi Phillips was an academic casualty, backup 6-foot-9 forward Robert Hornstein suffered a collapsed lung, 6-foot-8 center Gary Reichenbecher sustained an injured ankle and 6-foot-7 forward Dave Werthman broke his collarbone. These events left the program in terrible shape.

By the time Baker made his way to West Virginia University as a freshman in the spring of 1972, there was practically no one left.

Baker came to WVU from Greenbrier East High School, where he led the Spartans to the Triple-A state championship as a senior. The 6-foot-7, 200-pound forward/center averaged 29 points, 19.5 rebounds and shot 59 percent from the floor to be listed as one of the “Ten schoolboy stars of the South” by The Basketball News.

That list also included guard John Drew of Beatrice, Louisiana, Robert Parrish of Shreveport, Louisiana, Alvin Adams of Putnam City, Okla., and Walter Davis of South Mecklenberg, N.C. NBA fans should be familiar with all of those names.

Most were calling Baker the state’s best basketball prospect since Ron Williams, Rod Thorn and Jerry West.

“It wasn’t automatic that Baker was coming to West Virginia,” said former coach Gary McPherson, who helped land the White Sulpher Springs native. “He had a pretty good list of schools recruiting him.”

Baker considered Duke, Clemson, Michigan State, Marshall, Virginia Tech, Ohio University as well as West Virginia. Three of those schools wore his favorite color – green.

“Initially, I thought about going to a school that had colors of green,” Baker said. “There was just something about me being in a green uniform and I really think some of those trips I took just dealt with the color green.”

Of Baker’s campus visits, his trip to Duke proved the most memorable. Joining Baker during his stay at the Durham, N.C., campus was All-American guard John Lucas, who wound up signing with Maryland.

Former West Virginia coach Bucky Waters was coaching Duke at the time, and the Blue Devils were going through a so-so 14-12 season that year. Baker, Lucas and the rest of the Duke recruits were positioned just behind the Blue Devils bench to watch the game. It wasn’t too long into the contest before Baker, Lucas and the others were being pelted with flying debris coming from the Duke student section.

“They were trying to hit Bucky,” Baker laughed.

His relationship with West Virginia freshman guard Jerome Anderson ultimately swayed him to Morgantown. Baker and Anderson grew close playing against each other in the high school state tournament and Baker roomed with Anderson at Towers during his campus visit.

Baker’s arrival in the fall of 1972 coincided with the NCAA lifting its ban on freshman playing varsity basketball. Up until that time, freshmen were only permitted to play JV games in an effort to help them get acclimated to college life.

West Virginia’s coach Sonny Moran’s first inclination was to bring Baker along slowly until he became equipped to handle Division I competition. But the Mountaineers were in such dire straights that Baker was inserted into the starting lineup after just the third game of the year.

He responded by scoring 15 points and grabbing a WVU freshman-record 19 rebounds against Air Force on Dec. 8, 1972 in the first game of the Mountaineer Classic. Baker reached double figure scoring in 17 straight games after that and finished the season as the team’s leading point producer with an average of 16.6 points per game.

“Being from a small town and being a country guy, I just wanted to come here and play my best. I was certainly intimidated by those guys when I first came in here to a certain extent, but after a while I felt like I could play with them,” Baker said.

He scored 29 points twice against Lehigh and Virginia to establish a freshman mark that still exists today. His 29 points at Virginia came against UVA’s touted freshman Wonderful Wally Walker, who went on to lead the Cavs to a miraculous ACC tournament title in 1976 by defeating No. 4 North Carolina, and later spent eight years in the NBA with Portland, Seattle and Houston.

Baker actually got the better of the other Wonderful by averaging 19.5 points per as the two players split their four career games against each other.

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West Virginia could manage just a 10-15 record during Baker’s freshman season. The Mountaineers had the nation’s second-youngest lineup to Arizona, starting three sophomores and two freshmen.

Baker did amazingly well despite being undersized playing center. He compensated for his lack of height with terrific quickness and an outstanding set of legs.

“Warren was a great leaper with an excellent mid-range jump shot,” McPherson said. “He was a great team player.”

“Because I had always played center, I never really developed anything more than a mid-range jump shot,” Baker said. “I do know that there were times when my size, believe it or not, actually helped me. I would have much rather played against a guy that was 6-foot-11 or 7-0 rather than a 6-foot-9, 260-pound guy.”

Even though Baker was giving up as much as six inches to other centers, he preferred banging against the brutes inside as opposed to standing 15 feet from the basket.

“Lord knows you wouldn’t have wanted me out on the wing handling the basketball,” he joked.

Baker had his most productive season as a sophomore in 1974, averaging 17.7 points and 13.1 rebounds per game. However, West Virginia had its second straight 10-15 campaign and Moran resigned under pressure shortly after the season.

An incident at the WVU Coliseum early in the ‘74 season probably sealed Moran’s fate in the eyes of WVU administrators. After West Virginia defeated California to win the 1974 Mountaineer Classic, Moran was booed by the home crowd upon receiving his wrist watch as the tournament’s winning coach. Hurt and embarrassed, Moran refused to go back out when his team was awarded the championship trophy.

“It was a very discouraging type of thing,” Baker remembered.

Although fans never got on Baker the way they did Moran and star guard Wil Robinson, he recalled one amusing moment during a tough stretch of games as a sophomore.

“I came into the Coliseum one night and a little kid was standing there waiting for me to sign his program. It was almost like the Joe Greene commercial. Well the very next game I really stunk the joint up and as I was leaving the Coliseum, the same little kid was standing there looking at me. I thought to myself, ‘Well at least here’s one friendly face’. No sooner did I think that then the little kid walked up to me and tore that autograph up, threw it down on the ground and walked away,” Baker laughed.

During the time West Virginia athletic director Leland Byrd considered candidates to replace Moran, Pittsburgh Press reporter Bob Smizik wrote that Baker was unhappy at WVU and was about to leave school.

Baker said that was never the case.

“Had I left the team I wouldn’t have gone anywhere else, I’d have just stayed in school,” said Baker. “Believe me, I wasn’t that close to leaving.”

Byrd settled on young and inexperienced Joedy Gardner to take over the West Virginia program. Gardner was a former WVU player who coached in the junior college ranks at Arizona Western Junior College. His background also included a 10-year stint flying A-4 jets for the Marine Corps during the Vietnam War.

Gardner, who had just two years of head coaching experience, took a West Virginia job that one cryptic Mountain State reporter called "the electric chair." Gardner instituted a get-tough, no nonsense approach. He also brought in several junior college players in an effort to bolster West Virginia’s lineup.

The 1974-75 roster included Yavapai Junior College forward Stan Boskovich and Compton Community College guard Ernie Hall. A year later, Gardner added junior college standouts Tony Robertson and Russell Chapman.

Baker’s junior season saw him average 16.4 points and 10.4 rebounds per game as the Mountaineers produced their first winning record (14-13) since 1972. Baker scored a career-high 39 points against Boston University in the President’s Classic and added 31 points against Pitt in Morgantown. Although he didn’t lead the team in scoring, for the first time in his career he managed to convert better than 50 percent of his field goal attempts.

However, as Gardner began to bring in better players Baker’s numbers continued to dwindle.

“I really didn’t have a problem with that,” he said, “as long as our team was improving.

“Before my junior season, all of my stats dealt with the fact that we were just low on numbers and low on experience,” Baker added. “I can remember my freshman and sophomore seasons playing five or six entire ballgames.”

Baker averaged just 9.2 points and 6.6 rebounds per game as a senior in 1975-76. He scored a season-high 23 points against Virginia Tech in January but wound up his senior season with just 10 points in his final five games. By the end of the year Robertson and Boskovich had replaced Baker as the team’s primary scoring threats. Robertson averaged 17.9 points and Boskovich 17.8 points per game.

“As I look back on it now, some of that was probably my own fault as well,” Baker conceded. “You can buckle up your bootstraps sometimes and go to work or you can feel sorry for yourself. I’m not so sure from time to time that I wasn’t feeling sorry for myself.”

Baker also noted that he never really got used to Gardner’s vocal style.

“The personalities between Sonny and Joedy were so much different. I wasn’t the only guy from the previous coaching staff that struggled with that,” Baker said.

West Virginia managed a 15-13 record during Baker’s senior season, giving him two-straight winning campaigns to finish out his Mountaineer career.

Since his last game in 1976, Baker still ranks high on the WVU all-time list in career rebounding and scoring lists. Baker joins All-American Jerry West as the only two West Virginia players to score more than 1,500 points and pull down more than 1,000 rebounds during their careers.

After completing his degree in 1977, Baker played a year of semiprofessional basketball with the Wheeling Wheels before the franchise disbanded.

He came back to school to get his master’s degree in counseling and guidance in 1981 before spending seven years at Westover Junior High.

Since then the personable and friendly Baker has become well-known locally, first as an assistant coach at West Virginia Wesleyan and Fairmont State, and later coaching at North Marion High School. He has also served as a basketball analyst for the Metro News Radio Network. Baker no longer coaches, but he still works at Fairmont State where he’s been since 1990.

“You miss the kids but I don’t miss the long, cold bus rides and the college recruiters,” he says.

Baker got married for the first time a few years ago and lives in Cannonsburg, Pa., with his wife Ann.

“She works at Bayer Corporation and drives 20 minutes to work. I drive and hour and a half and she says it’s halfway,” Baker laughed. “I enjoy it though. I figured if I went further north I’d never get back to Morgantown.”

Baker remains close to his alma mater and is a frequent spectator at WVU basketball games.

In his spare time Baker has also become involved in the WVU Varsity Club in an effort to help track down former athletes that played at West Virginia University in the late 1960s and early-to-mid 1970s.

“When you go to games you just don’t see as many of the guys coming back,” he said.

Baker summed up his four years at WVU this way: “Even today I would not trade the experience I got at West Virginia University for anything.”

Wonderful Warren Baker has proved that his catchy nickname has more than just one meaning.

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