archived as

(also …SI_006.pdf) =>doc pdf URL-doc URL-pdf

more sports-related articles are on the /Sports.htm page at doc pdf URL

note: because important websites are frequently "here today but gone tomorrow", the following was archived from on 08/06/2013. This is NOT an attempt to divert readers from the aforementioned website. Indeed, the reader should only read this back-up copy if the updated original cannot be found at the original author's site.

When The NBA Was Young

by Frank Deford

Sports Illustrated, April 23, 2012

So was SI writer Frank Deford who cut his teeth on a league then so inconsequential that reporters got floor seats. In this exclusive excerpt from Deford's memoirs, the author recalls encounters with Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain, Elgin Baylor and others who starred on his expense account as well as in the league's arenas.

It's almost impossible to explain how little the NBA amounted to when I started covering it in 1963. It wasn't fair to call it "bush" although everybody did. It was simply small (only9 teams) and insignificant.

The league offices (such as they were) were located in the Empire State Building. There may have been some symbolism in this -- the sport for tall guys chose for its headquarters the World's tallest building -- but I don't think it was intended. The NBA's planning was much more seat-of-the-pants.

Like this: Wilt Chamberlain was the biggest name in the league. After the 1965 All-Star Game in St. Louis, there was a reception at Stan Musial's restaurant and the executives and writers were upstairs drinking when a referee named Joe Gushue casually pointed down to the bottom of the stairs and said, "You know, they're trading Wilt down there." So we all peered down the stairs and sure enough! there were the San Francisco Warriors' owners and the Philadelphia 76ers' owners working out the deal. They traded Wilt in a restaurant stairwell.

Walter Kennedy was the new commissioner, having replaced Maurice Podoloff who had presided over the league since its founding in 1946. Kennedy was a very nice man but invariably defensive, despairing that people called the NBA "bush". Kennedy had resigned as mayor of Stamford, Conn. to take his dream job. Unfortunately my first encounter with him was unpleasant although I was a blameless accomplice to another's alleged villainy.

In the summer of 1963 (my second with Sports Illustrated), Jerry Tax (the basketball editor) got the Celtics' Frank Ramsey (the NBA's first famous sixth man) to do a piece for the magazine revealing some of the devious little tricks of his trade. Things like surreptitiously holding an opponent's shorts, nickel-and-dime stuff. Since you couldn't easily photograph such shenanigans during a game, an artist(Bob Handville) was assigned to illustrate Ramsey's devilment. I was sent along to Ramsey's house in Madisonville, Ky. to take notes. But when Handville and I got down there, we realized that for the photographs on which he would base his illustrations, we needed someone to play the dupe to Ramsey's magician. Since I was tall, I was dressed in one of Ramsey's old uniforms and cast as his foil.

What Ramsey revealed was "Inside Basketball" for its time and it made SI's cover ("Smart Moves That Score Points") with Handville's illustration of Ramsey outwitting Deford. Commissioner Kennedy was appalled that a player would go public about how to (my goodness gracious!) cheat in an NBA game and he called Ramsey in and upbraided him. Ramsey, a smart cookie, acted properly chastened and then went about committing the same smooth high jinks as before. Luckily I, a mere patsy, was not officially chastised.

Kennedy had once been the public relations man for the Harlem Globetrotters and he had the grandiose dream that the NBA would someday have the Globies' worldwide appeal. Of course, his dream would eventually come true but not until long after he retired in 1975. College basketball was more popular in those days.

Several NBA teams got their best gates every season when they scheduled a doubleheader and booked the Globetrotters and their stooges for the opening game. The Knicks scheduled regular NBA doubleheaders, meaning that often half the league was in Manhattan at the same time. In fact, some nights as much as 25% of NBA personnel could be found drinking together at one New York bar they favored.

The camaraderie was real. Most teams carried only 10 players and only a few rookies entered the league each year, so there wasn't much turnover and most everyone knew everyone else. The NBA was more like a theater ensemble than a league.

Partly as a result of that, race was less of a problem in pro basketball than in the rest of the country. History was made when Texas Western won the 1966 NCAA championship with five African-American starters. But Celtics coach Red Auerbach had sent out an all-black starting lineup long before that when he put Willie Naulls in with Bill Russell, Satch Sanders, Sam Jones, and K.C. Jones for the opening tap on Dec. 26, 1964. Around the league it was already unremarkable to see 9 or even 10 black guys on the court. It was in 1964, in fact, that I first heard an inability to jump described as "White Man's Disease".

The NBA schedule was made up by one man, Eddie Gottlieb, who had owned the Philadelphia Warriors. Eddie had a Buddha-like body and a crinkly smile. And because he had also been an owner in baseball's old Negro leagues, he was known as "the Mogul". It was amazing that he could figure out the schedule at all because the teams were at the mercy of arenas that also scheduled hockey games, ice shows, wrestling matches, Roller Derby, rodeos, and all other manner of indoor divertissements during the long dark winter months in the Northeast.

The Mogul was officially a member of the league's Schedule Committee. But in fact, he explained to me, "I am the Schedule Committee." Sometimes he would wake up in the middle of the night with an inspiration having realized he could get the Syracuse Nationals to play in St. Louis after a game in Cincinnati. It was a feat of pre-computer 20th-century human genius.

In the league's early days if the Knicks made the playoffs, they would invariably be kicked out of Madison Square Garden because the circus would be in town and it drew much larger crowds. The Knicks would then have to play their most important games of the season at the ratty old National Guard armory on Lexington Avenue.

Luckily the Knicks were so bad that this didn't happen very often. When they played regular-season games at the Garden, the crowd seemed to be made up predominantly of gamblers. The largest cheers were not for the home-team stiffs but for whichever way the point spread played out. Smoking was allowed in arenas then. So by the time the nightcap was finishing in a Garden doubleheader, the haze had drifted down and it was hard enough to shoot baskets let alone see across the court. I'd be in the front row courting my wife-to-be with the best seats in the house because the Knicks desperate for any press ink gave writers seats that now go to celebrities for 4 figures.

Actually the Mogul had been the coach and G.M. of the Warriors when they became the first NBA champions (although the league was then called the Basketball Association of America) in 1946--47. A country boy from the Appalachians named Joe Fulks was the team's star. But he's been completely forgotten. Fulks was known as "Jumpin' Joe" not because he could jump high (he was, after all, white) but because he was a jump-shot pioneer. He held the one-game scoring record of 63 points for a decade. Fulks died young at 54, killed in the Kentucky hills over a dispute about a firearm that was (alas) loaded.

In 1962 the Mogul sold the Warriors to a group of San Francisco businessmen for $850,000. It astounded us NBA insiders that California guys could get suckered so by the Mogul. 850 G's for an NBA franchise that Eddie had bought for $25,000! Can you believe it? Part of the deal, too, was that Eddie got to go out to San Francisco for a couple of years as some kind of transition consultant. Then he returned to Philly, still dined at the Automat, and continued making up the league schedule at his kitchen table.

Nobody in the NBA made much money. I could easily get players to go out with me after a game. They knew I had an expense account and they could cadge free beers off me. The players doubled up in rooms and 6'10" or not flew coach. In 1966 when I was doing a cover story on the Celtics' John Havlicek, we were on a coast-to-coast flight and I was in first-class according to Time Inc. policy. He came up to see me and then I went back to interview him in steerage where the NBA champions were sitting.

Havlicek was delighted with the publicity. Are you kidding? Like the Knicks, the Celtics (and the rest of the league) would cooperate in almost any way to get ink. Freddy Schaus, the coach of the Lakers, invited me into their locker room at halftime. Elgin Baylor, the star forward, bummed a cigarette off me and then went for another set of double figures in the second half. (A lot of athletes still smoked. Hell, athletes made cigarette commercials just as doctors did.)

By the time I came along, the NBA was using airplanes. But only a few years earlier, trains had still been in vogue. Tommy Heinsohn, the Celtics All-Star forward, told me about traveling to play the Pistons when they were still located in Fort Wayne, Ind. before 1957. The main line didn't go into Fort Wayne so trains would stop a few miles outside of town at a mail pickup point to allow the players to disembark like thieves on the lam. I can just visualize LeBron James and Dwyane Wade standing by a railroad siding at three in the morning when it's 8 degrees below and their coach is on the pay phone ringing up Fort Wayne's only all-night cab company.

In 1960 on one of the rare occasions a team used a charter flight, the Lakers took a DC-3 home to Minneapolis after a game in St. Louis. Unfortunately the plane's electrical system failed and the only thing that continued to work was the propellers. As the DC-3 began to run out of fuel, the pilots who had no idea where they were gingerly began to take the plane down until at last they spotted the lights of a little town that turned out to be Carroll, Iowa. The plane windows were coated with ice. So when the pilots made out a snowy cornfield they thought they could land in, the copilot had to stick out his face to gauge their altitude.

In the backthe players huddled in the cold praying while Elgin Baylor simply lay down flat in the aisle. Hot Rod Hundley remembered hearing the copilot call out the descending altitude: "60 ... 50 ... 40...." Then all of a sudden: "Take the son of a bitch up! Take it up!" They were coming in too steep.

The plane soared back up, circled, then began to glide down again."Well Rod," Slick Leonard said to Hundley, "at least we had some time to smell the roses." But on this try, the descent was smooth and the plane landed so cleanly in the cornfield that the next day after it was juiced up, a pilot was able simply to turn the DC-3 around and fly it safely off.

Baylor has been largely forgotten, I suppose. But in his prime he was just fabulous. A Michael Jordan before there was a Michael Jordan. Elgin had a nervous twitch that made him even more disconcerting to guard. One time he went for 63 against the Philadelphia Warriors prompting Hundley (who got more free drinks on my expense account than anybody else) to make the famous remark, "Elg and me went for 65 tonight."

My first assignment in the NBA was with the Lakers. Bill Leggett, a writer on the magazine, was going to do a story about the Lakers-Celtics rivalry and since he would travel with the Celtics, I was designated to go along with the Lakers embedded as Leggett's reporter. I caught up with the team in Cincinnatiwhere it was playing the Royals with Oscar Robertson (the "Big O"). I was supposed to meet the Lakers the next morning in the hotel lobby where we would jam into cabs our long legs all entangled and go to the airport.

I was scared to death. This was my debut as a traveling sportswriter. I was 24 years old. I remember picking out my best shirt and tie. I slicked down my hair with both Vitalis and Brylcreem. I put on my fancy new checked sports jacket and a pair of horn-rim glasses in a vain effort to make myself look older. In the lobby I tried to appear as unobtrusive as possible but Elgin spied me right away. He was not only the star of the team but also the leader. And a very good straight-faced comedian. Loudly in his deep voice staring straight at stylish me, he said, "I didn't know Ralston-Purina was making sports jackets these days."

All the Lakers roared. Welcome to the big time, Deford.

Hundley did make me feel a little better later when over a couple of Cutty Sarks on me, he said that Baylor had tagged the beat writer for the Los Angeles Times who had bad teeth"Low Tide at Santa Monica".

Hot Rod revealed this to me at our destination (Detroit) where the Lakers were going to play the Celtics in the lid lifter of a doubleheader. That's right. Because the Pistons were struggling at the gate, the NBA had awarded them the league's best attraction, Lakers-Celtics, as the undercard. I guess the Globies were otherwise occupied.

The Lakers and the Celtics (along with Wilt Chamberlain and the Warriors who were playing the Pistons) were staying at a hotel that was also holding a hairdressers' convention. Now try to envision this. 30 young guys, most of them extremely tall and randy, and plenty of beautiful models stuck together in one hotel. It is something like 10º outside so nobody is going out. And I'm buying drinks on my expense account, picking up the hoop skinny and providentially (because of said expense account) being very popular with both genders.

This, I believe, was when I decided that maybe I really did want to be a sportswriter for a while.

As ordinary as some of the NBA hotels were, none was as homely as the Hotel Madison, the dump that many teams used in Boston. Not only was the Madison dirt cheap but it also saved the teams on cab fare because it was an extension of the North Station railroad depot like Boston Garden itself.

It was taken as gospel that Red Auerbach bugged the visitors' locker room at the Garden which was kept either boiling or freezing. So the Celtics' opponents preferred to put on their uniforms in their dingy cubbyhole accommodations at the Madison and then dash through the station to the Garden proper. Outside a saloon named the Iron Horse, I would hear patrons scream "Hey you f---ing co--ers!" and other friendly greetings as the players scurried toward their engagement with the Celtics on the distinctive parquet floor.

Press row at the Garden would be filled because there were still a great many Knights of the Keyboard at the plethora of dailies in the Hub: the Globe and the Evening Globe and the Herald and the Traveler and the Record-American and the Quincy Patriot-Ledger, not to mention The Christian Science Monitor. Across the NBA, though, few newspapers staffed the home team when it was on the road.

Once the playoffs started, however, the multitude of Boston papers would take to the road with the Celtics. Howie McHugh, the team P-R man, would even splurge and take a hotel suite in every town so we could all drink there after the game. Sometimes a Celtic-or-two would drop by just to grab a free beer and shoot the breeze with his newspaper buddies. It was the closest I ever came to the legendary press box days of yore when newspapers were legion.

The playoffs were also pretty much the only time Boston fans would also appear in abundance. The Celtics might have been perennial champions. But even though the game was created in Springfield, Mass., New England barely knew what basketball was. No, in wintertime Boston hearts belonged to the Bruins who invariably sold out the Garden even though they finished dead last most years.

On the road, the Boston writers were led by Clif ("Poison Pen") Keane. He had been so christened on a bumpy airplane ride with the old Boston Braves baseball team. As the plane pitched and yawed, one of the Braves, first baseman Earl Torgeson, began to imitate a radio broadcast announcing loudly that the plane had crashed all hands lost. The players groaned. Then Torgeson said, "The first person identified at the crash site was Clif Keane of The Boston Globe. Keane was immediately recognized by the poison pen clasped tightly in his hand."