The Book of Basketball (19 page)

1972–73: THE DOUBLE CROSS

During the final year of its latest four-year contract with ABC—the network that helped nurture professional basketball into a mainstream force—the NBA negotiated a deal with CBS mandating that the winning network
had
to show NBA games starting between 1:00 and 2:00 p.m. on Saturday afternoons. Since ABC couldn’t dump crucial college football games in October and November, a bitter Roone Arledge dropped his
right of first refusal and decided to destroy the NBA on CBS. Which he did. Easily. Arledge promoted the living hell out of his Saturday college football games and crushed the Association in the ratings, quickly turning it back into a Sundays-only TV entity. Then he expanded
Wide World of Sports
to Sundays, where it did an eye-opening 12.0 rating and thrashed the NBA every week like a redheaded stepchild. If that weren’t enough, he rolled the dice with trash sports like
Superstars
and
World’s Strongest Man
, and even those programs beat the NBA. Within a year, the NBA’s ratings had dropped 25 percent, from 10.0 to 8.1, and when college hoops took off on NBC, suddenly the NBA was cranking out third-place finishes every Sunday. As Halberstam wrote in
Breaks of the Game
, “Along Madison Avenue it became known as Roone’s Revenge.”

Why would the owners screw over a network that saved its league? Apparently the newer owners were jealous of the NFL’s lucrative contract with ABC, as well as the attention lavished on
Monday Night Football
, feeling they’d never be better than number three on ABC’s depth chart behind pro football and college football. I’d throw in this theory: for thirty solid years, this was the dumbest league going. These guys couldn’t figure out how to align divisions or eliminate jump balls at the beginning of every quarter, so
of course
they’d be dumb enough to sabotage their ABC alliance and start a feud with the most powerful TV executive alive. According to Halberstam, only one relevant NBA voice argued against the double cross: Auerbach, who appreciated ABC’s efforts and asked the salient question, “You don’t really think a man like Roone Arledge is going to take this lying down, do you?” Everyone ignored Red and pushed for the switcheroo to CBS, paving the way for everything that would happen over the next ten years: free-falling ratings, nontelevised Game 7’s, tape-delayed Finals games and sweeping public apathy
⁴⁷

1973–74: THE WAR THAT COULDN’T BE WON

When two sides battle, normally there’s a winner and a loser. When the ABA and NBA battled, everyone lost. The ABA was hemorraghing money
and going through commissioners like they were Starbucks baristas,
⁴⁸
while the NBA was suffering in five distinct ways. In order:

1. Bidding wars and swollen contracts damaged the new generation of NBA up-and-comers. Sidney Wicks, Haywood, Hayes, Jimmy Walker, Sam Lacey and Austin Carr suffered right away; McAdoo, McGinnis (after crossing over in ’75), Maravich and Archibald suffered eventually. When those players should have been enjoying their primes in the late-’70s, only Hayes was contributing to a contender. We also had sketchy players making significantly more money than their coaches, creating its own legion of problems that Tommy Heinsohn explained beautifully in his award-winning autobiography,
   Give ’Em the Hook:
   

   Darryl Dawkins is the perfect example. The guy could have been a monster, should have been a monster, but nobody had the controls. Armed with a long-term contract, Darryl had the security of dollars coming in. I’ve seen this happen so many times …. It’s not just the length of the contract that hurts, it’s the length of the guaranteed lifestyle. Unless you’re talking about athletes who are truly dedicated to the game, the only time these guys bear down is when their security is threatened. I used to talk about this with Cousy, who began coaching the Kings in Cincinnati the same year I took the job in Boston. One night he started telling me about Sam Lacey, his rookie center—how he was pessimistic about him because Sam wouldn’t do this, Sam wouldn’t do that, and just didn’t take very well to coaching. “Cooz,” I said. “I don’t know what you expected. You guys just signed Sam for some serious dough, didn’t you? So obviously he must assume management thinks quite highly of him. And his wife certainly thinks he’s great. His mother thinks he’s great. His agent thinks he’s great. You’re the only guy telling him he’s not great. So, Cooz, who do you think he’s going to listen to?” Cooz agreed, then he watched me polish off seven glasses of Scotch and a pack of Marlboro Reds in less than two hours before letting me drive home. I vaguely remember driving into a stop sign and hitting a homeless guy. The cops let me go because I was Tommy Heinsohn. Those guys got a round of Tommy Points that night! Bing, bang, boom!
   ⁴⁹
   

2. The ABA kept bowling over the NBA’s top referees with Godfather offers, stealing four of the top six (John Vanak, Joe Gushue, Earl Strom and Norm Drucker), improving the quality of ABA games and leaving the NBA in a legitimate bind.
   ⁵⁰
   By the
   ’76
   season, as Hubie Brown told Terry Pluto, “The officiating at the end of the ABA was like the players—it was just an incredible amount of talent, just staggering. And nobody knew it. The officials were a bigger secret than the players.” Only Hubie could lapse into hyperbole while discussing ABA officials.
   

3. 3. NBA scoring dropped from 116.7 in 1970 to 102.6 in 1974. You could attribute some of the decline to better defense and better coaching; older guards like Frazier, Jo Jo, Bing, Goodrich and Norm Van Lier setting a deliberately slower pace; a famine of overall offensive talent; and waaaaaaaay too many guys named Don and Dick. The ’70 teams averaged 116.7 points on 99.9 attempts and shot 46.0 percent from the field. The ’75 teams averaged 102.6 points on 91.2 attempts and shot 45.7 percent from the field. Free throw attempts were roughly the same (24.5 per team in ’70, 25.0 in ’75), so every ’75 game had about seventeen fewer total possessions than a ’70 game. Why, you ask?
   

   (You really want me to say it?)
   

   (Fine, I’ll say it.)
   

   Too many white guys! Okay? All right? I said it! The league needed more black guys! The ABA stole too many of them! It was a freaking problem! Okay?
   

   To be fair, it wasn’t “blacks” as much as “young athletes.” Here’s how the clash played out for relevant rookies from ’71 through ’75:
   

   1971: Austin Carr, Sidney Wicks, Elmore Smith, Fred Brown, Curtis Rowe, Clifford Ray, Mike Newlin, Randy Smith (NBA); Julius Erving, Artis Gilmore, George McGinnis, Ralph Simpson, Tom Owens, Johnny Neumann, Jim McDaniels, John Roche (ABA)
   

   1972: Bob McAdoo, Paul Westphal, Jim Price, Kevin Porter, Lloyd Neal (NBA);
   ⁵¹
   George Gervin, James Silas, Jim Chones, Brian Taylor, Don Buse, Dave Twardzik (ABA)
   

   1973: Doug Collins, Ernie DeGregorio, Mike Bantom, Kermit Washington, Kevin Kunnert (NBA); Larry Kenon, Swen Nater, John Williamson, Caldwell Jones (ABA)
   

   1974: Bill Walton, Jamaal Wilkes, Tom Burleson, Scott Wedman, Tom Henderson, Campy Russell, Brian Winters, Truck Robinson, John Drew, Phil Smith, Mickey Johnson (NBA); Moses Malone, Marvin Barnes, Maurice Lucas, Billy Knight, Bobby Jones, Len Elmore (ABA)
   

   1975: Gus Williams, Alvin Adams, Darryl Dawkins, Lionel Hollins, Junior Bridgeman, Bill Robinzine, Joe Bryant, Ricky Sobers, Kevin Grevey, Lloyd Free, Bobby Gross (NBA); David Thompson, Marvin Webster, M. L. Carr, Dan Roundfield, Mark Olberding (ABA)
   

   Scoring those five years like rounds in a prizefight: 10–8, ABA; 10–9, ABA; 10–9, ABA; 10–9, NBA; 10–10, even. From a quality-of-play standpoint, the ABA grabbed nearly every athletic rebounder and exciting perimeter scorer, forcing the NBA to keep trotting out the likes of Dick Gibbs and Don Ford every night.
   ⁵²
   If HBO’s Harold Lederman was judging, he’d probably say, “
   OHHHHHH-kay
   , Jim—I have to give this one to the ABA. Maybe the NBA landed more role players and fringe starters, but Jim, out of the twenty best incoming rookies from 1971 to 1975 (Erving, Gervin, Wicks, McAdoo, Kenon, Westphal, Moses, Nater, Barnes, Gilmore, McGinnis, Walton, Silas, Wilkes, Lucas, Thompson, Collins, Knight, Buse and Bobby Jones) the ABA landed
   fourteen
   of them, including five guys who could potentially put asses in seats: Erving, Gervin, Thompson, Gilmore and Moses! They landed the biggest punches, pushed the envelope with high schoolers and robbed the NBA of nearly every exciting athlete! I have the ABA winning, 49–46!”
   

   Considering the NBA had eighteen teams at the time, that was a pretty significant shortage of incoming talent, no? That’s why I have trouble taking the numbers from ’72 to ’76 seriously—particularly some of the gaudy scoring/rebounding numbers that don’t jibe with the drop in scoring—because such a relatively small talent pool spread was stretched over twenty-eight teams and two leagues. Imagine if you removed all the European players from the 2009 NBA, forbade the Eastern and Western Conferences from playing each other, then directed 75 percent of the most talented rookies to one conference for five solid years. Wouldn’t the stats be skewed? Wouldn’t you take the respective conference championships a little less seriously?
   

4. Julius Erving blossomed as basketball’s most exciting player and a legitimate box office draw, winning 1974 MVP and Playoffs MVP awards, getting an endorsement deal with Dr. Pepper and gracing the cover of
   Sports Illustrated
   ’s March 15 issue: a picture of Julius dunking as his head broke up the comically unsophisticated headline “What’s Up? Doc J.” Even if fans couldn’t see him on TV, the buzz surrounding Doc had made him
   cooler
   than any NBA player. With the Lakers and Knicks fading and the NBA’s younger stars failing to resonate with the public, for the first time the ABA finally had something the NBA needed, and a merger seemed more likely than ever. Alas, the Oscar Robertson suit was still holding it up. The NBA was like a separated rich guy who falls for a mistress from the wrong side of the tracks (the ABA), develops a relationship with her kid (Doc) and wants to marry her even though it’s probably the wrong idea … only he has to wait another five years for the divorce to clear and keeps wondering if he’s doing the right thing getting married again. I think that analogy made sense. I’m almost positive.
   

5. In the spring of ’74, Utah drafted high schooler Moses Malone and stole him away from the University of Maryland with a four-year, $565,000 deal. That’s right, the ban on high schoolers had been lifted for professional basketball. Poor Moses ended up making an unprecedented life adjustment, moving from Virginia to Utah at the tender age of nineteen and living on his own without the ability to put a decent sentence together. Like Josh Baskin in
   Big
   , only with more Mormons and more mumbling.
   ⁵³
   For the NBA, it was one more body blow: instead of Moses becoming a household name at Maryland and progressing at his own pace, the best center prospect since Kareem would be learning bad habits in a floundering league. Within a year, Utah went under and Moses was stuck playing with Marvin Barnes on the Spirits of St. Louis. Not exactly the ideal mentor.
   ⁵⁴
   

(Only one bright spot this season: San Diego lured Wilt to the ABA, but the NBA blocked the deal and Wilt was stuck coaching the Q’s all season.
Wilt took it seriously for about a month, then less seriously, and by the midway point of the season, he was no-showing games. S.D. finished last in league attendance with less than 1,900 per game. In Wilt’s defense, they didn’t keep coaching stats at the time so he couldn’t come up with any individual goals.)

1974–75: RACIAL PROGRESS … OR NOT

The 1975 Finals made sports history: for the first time, a championship game featured two black coaches—Al Attles for Golden State, KC Jones for Washington—and if that weren’t enough, they were wearing superhip seventies leisure suits! (Somebody needs to start a website called My Favorite 100 Al Attles Disco Suits. Every time they cut to him on the bench, it looks like he’s waiting on line for Luis Guzman’s club in
Boogie Nights.)
Jones took heat because CBS’ inside-the-huddle cameras kept catching him crouching submissively during timeouts as assistant Bernie Bickerstaff furiously diagrammed plays and seemed to be the one coaching the team. So what if Bickerstaff happened to be black as well? This just proved that blacks shouldn’t be coaching NBA teams. Or something. Poor KC got fired a year later and didn’t get another crack at a head coaching job until 1983.
⁵⁵

You know what? We can do better for 1974–75. My favorite subplot was Oscar shattering the Great Player Turned Incomprehensibly Bad TV Analyst barrier. It’s unclear why CBS believed Oscar would have clicked with TV audiences when he had a (deserved) reputation for being humorless and cantankerous. Maybe they just wanted a big name. But Oscar tanked so badly that they dumped him for former referee Mendy Rudolph. Mendy Rudolph? Now
that’s
insulting. Here’s what fascinates me after the fact: a whopping eight of the twenty-five all-time greatest players were legitimately horrendous on television, but that didn’t stop the networks from
repeatedly hiring the latest available legend under the whole “Hey, he’s a huge name, he’ll be fine!” theory before eventually weaning themselves off the hare-brained idea (although we still see it with the NFL). Here’s the official NBA Legends Turned Horrible TV Personalities chronology.

Elgin Baylor (’74).
CBS teamed him with Brent Musburger and Hot Rod Hundley for its inaugural NBA season, only Elgin struggled so famously that the network replaced him
during
the ’74 playoffs. As soon as the Warriors were eliminated, they dumped him for Rick Barry for the Conference Finals.
⁵⁶
Can we get Elgin’s CBS work on YouTube? Can someone make that happen for me?