He Brought Suns From a Total Eclipse

Jerry Colangelo was by far the best pitcher on his high school baseball team, a team on which Jim Bouton could not even make third-string. He also excelled at basketball, played guard for the University of Illinois and definitely had a little Jerry West in him, although perhaps less in dribble and jumper than in name and haircut.

Colangelo attended America’s greatest high school, Bloom Township in Chicago Heights, Ill., cradle of sportswriters. Later on, Jerry came back to town and worked for a while selling prom tuxedos, but basketball was his first love, and somehow he finagled a job with the public-relations staff of the Chicago Bulls.

Little did he know that he would end up president and part-owner of a National Basketball Assn. franchise, the Phoenix Suns, or that under his aegis, the ballclub would recover from the indignities of a drug scandal and from an unseemly record to--almost overnight--find itself one of four clubs with a shot at winning the NBA championship. Talk about rising from the ashes; Phoenix did.

“It’s a long way from where we were,” Colangelo said as the Suns opened the Western Conference finals against the Lakers. “If you just go back to April 1987, when the drug investigation took place, to the death of Nick Vanos (a promising Sun player killed in a plane crash) a couple of months later, things were about as bad as they could be.

“I have to believe now that, remembering how things were, there had to have been an excellent possibility that the franchise could have been moved somewhere else or gone entirely. Things were that bleak. That’s one of the reasons I put a group together to buy the franchise, and hired somebody like Cotton Fitzsimmons to come in as coach, because it was clear to us that we had no choice but to absolutely start over.”

Colangelo and his colleagues were daring, you have to give them that. They took a ballclub in tatters and turned it into something special, so quickly you can hardly believe it. This team had a record of 28-54 last season , for heaven’s sake, and here they are in this postseason, going against the Lakers for the right to play in the NBA Finals.

You want to talk turnarounds? Before Saturday’s 127-119 defeat at the Forum, Phoenix had won 25 of its previous 30 games, counting the playoffs. Remember, this team won 28 times all of last season.

Nowadays, things are so peachy back in Phoenix that the blueprints already have been drawn up for a new house of the rising Suns. By November 1991, Phoenix expects to be playing in a $17-million, 18,000-seat, state-of-the-art arena, with 100 luxury suites. The Suns are picking up half the tab, the city the other half.

Say this for Sun lovers, they never did abandon their boys. Even after all the negative publicity, after the drug-use admissions that forever tarnished the good names of local hero Walter Davis and others, Phoenix’s fans stood by faithfully. The season-ticket base of around 7,000, Colangelo says, never eroded.

The public even swallowed hard and accepted it when the Suns negotiated a brave, brave trade. Management had made up its mind that to be successful, it had to start completely from scratch. Not just back up the truck. Burn the truck.

“We took our best asset, and made one of those monumental trades you sometimes talk about but never pull off,” Colangelo said. “This is no business for the timid, let me tell you. You’ve got to be a risk-taker. Especially when you’re in the position we were in, coming back from the depths.”

The swap was the one that sent Phoenix’s finest and arguably most popular player, Larry Nance, to the Cleveland Cavaliers. In return, the Suns got three starters, including their very able point guard, Kevin Johnson, plus the right to draft Olympic star Dan Majerle, plus a couple of second-round picks. It was the start of something big.

Then, all they needed was some body big, a big talent, somebody to build the team around. Their timing was superb. Unrestricted free agency gave them carte blanche to go after Tom Chambers, who had worn out his welcome in Seattle.

“At the stroke of midnight, we targeted Tom Chambers, went after Tom Chambers and, within 48 hours, had Tom Chambers,” Colangelo said. “We knew he had had a reputation problem in the past, and wondered if there was something we didn’t know. But it’s amazing how it all turned out. Tom’s had a career season for us.

“When we met with him, the first thing we told him is that he didn’t have to shop the marketplace, that we intended to build our team around him. That’s really all he had to hear. All he needed was to be loved.”

The Suns themselves are loved again in Arizona, by those who never stopped loving them, and by those who might have temporarily abandoned them. Colangelo, once rumored as a candidate someday to be NBA commissioner, has settled comfortably into the club’s chief-executive suite after many up-and-down years as general manager. Long gone and nearly forgotten is the worst break he ever got, that coin flip for Lew Alcindor that came up Neal Walk.

“Here we are playing the Lakers, the dominant team of the era,” Colangelo said. “You know, when I lost that coin toss, I thought I was facing 10 years of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar reminding me of my bad luck. I was wrong by a decade. He hasn’t gone away.”

No, he hasn’t. The Phoenix Suns, meantime, did go away for a while. But they are back, all the way back, with their entire community behind them. In the 1990s, if he needs to do any more flipping, Jerry Colangelo is not going to be hurting for coins.