It Was Rocky Road Getting to Showtime

It was not too many years ago, I went down to the L.A. Sports Arena for a professional basketball game between the Lakers and the then-St. Louis Hawks. The year was 1961, I believe. Now, this was a playoff game, a semifinal, in fact. The winner would go on to play the Boston Celtics for the championship.

The “crowd” in the Sports Arena that afternoon was 2,800.

There were hardly any newspapermen there. I was the only columnist covering the game.

I bring this up because today, if you want to go to a Laker playoff semifinal, you have to go to a scalper, pay outrageous prices, and the venue would be aswarm with print journalists--so many they’d fill overflow seats up in the stands--cameras, cables, sound systems, dancing girls. An Event. A sellout.

Basketball was hardly the in sport that not-so-long-ago year. I remember Bob Cousy lamenting to me that basketball didn’t get the day-to-day coverage older sports did, notably baseball.

“We’re bucking a 75-year-old bin of anecdotal lore,” Cousy complained. “Every time a writer hits an off-day, he writes a nostalgic piece about Babe Ruth. We’re lucky if we get the score in.”

But what players they were in that dawning of the pro game!

St. Louis had the magnificent Bob Pettit, who averaged 27.9 points a game; Cliff Hagan, the deadliest corner shooter in history; the brooding Clyde Lovellette, 6 feet 9 inches of malice; Sihugo Green and the graceful Lenny Wilkens. The Lakers had Elgin (no last name necessary), Jerry West, Rudy LaRusso, Ray Felix. There were high-caliber players all over the league who were colorful, gifted, the stuff of anecdotal lore in their own right.

They made basketball the $100-million operation it is today. Perhaps you noticed where the new franchises kicked in $32 million to buy into this gaudy private club. Perhaps you noticed where each existing franchise gets $6 million to let the new kids on the block in on the game.

When I first started to cover pro basketball, Jerry West--and Wilt Chamberlain--were the highest-paid players in the league. I think they got $17,000 a year.

Star players get that per game now.

Hey, you’d think they’d be grateful to their honored old-timers, the pioneers who brought the game to the consciousness of the sporting public--Jungle Jim Loscutoff, Bob Cousy, Walter Dukes, Paul Arizin, Dolph Schayes, Bill Sharman, Pops Selvy, Slater Martin, Gene Conley, Rod Hundley.

These were guys who played the game wherever a crowd could be collected--Sheboygan, Ft. Wayne, Logansport, Aliquippa, Hershey, Pa. They played doubleheaders. They played on the same bill with the Globetrotters where the Globies came away with the lion’s share of the gate because the lion’s share of the crowd came to see them.

They did this for an average of $4,000 a year in the ‘50s. They played because they loved the game. They got summer jobs to make ends meet. In the case of Gene Conley, this was with the Boston Red Sox, but others poured cement, joined the police, fried hamburgers.

They sold basketball. You didn’t need an appointment to have an interview with them. You just went out and had a beer with them after the game.

They didn’t have agents, secretaries, hangers-on. They carried their own luggage. They flew in wheezy old restructured war planes that crashed in Iowa cornfields or rode in overheating buses that frequently broke down outside Allentown, Pa.

They got the game on the sports pages with a little help from those of us who felt basketball was owed a place in the American pantheon of sports. They sold their game to television on the sheer ballet-ing on the court.

The game owes them a lot, right?

Well, if it does, it has never paid them. There are 108 players who played the game before 1965 who don’t get a nickel from its overflowing coffers.

Some of them don’t need the money. A lot of them do.

We’re not talking about rinky-dink players here. We’re talking about Hall of Famers. We’re talking about Harry Gallatin, George Mikan, Vern Mikkelsen, the incomparable George Yardley. Ken Sears. Al Cervi. Alex Hannum. Felix, Pettit, Hooks Houbregs, who invented the sky hook; Earl Lloyd, Woody Sauldsberry, Conley, Cousy, Lovellette, Frank Ramsey, Arizin.

“Theirs was the last era of innocence in sports,” writes Katie Conley, wife of Gene and eloquent spokeswoman for this lost battalion. “I kind of wax melancholy when I think of the injustice which has been perpetrated.

“These men of the ‘50s and early ‘60s, who played a different, more personal type of ball in an ambiance of dirty locker rooms, one shower-head showers, drying wet, soggy, smelly uniforms over radiators in crummy hotel rooms but did it gladly for the pure enjoyment of the sport.

“There are times, throughout the year, that they are brought out of moth balls, these great legends, and they are paraded around the floors as great monuments of mankind’s dedication to the pure pleasure of sport. They gamely wave and smile while being wildly applauded. Their role has been played out and then, they are gently but firmly put back again out of sight for another time.”

Next Tuesday, at its birthplace, Springfield, Mass., basketball will convene to honor and congratulate itself and to induct Wes Unseld and Clyde Lovellette into its Hall of Fame.

A delegation from the National Basketball Old-Timers’ Assn. will be there to see if they can’t cut themselves a piece of the pie they helped to bake.

Give it to them, guys! How many Mercedes do you need? Just have the butler bring it to them. You’ll probably be busy renegotiating your $25-million contracts.