The World Basketball League Is Standing Tall

Some facts about the World Basketball League: It’s played in the summer, no one 6-foot-5 or over is allowed, international teams participate, and after two seasons, it’s still around.

Not bad considering the leagues already crammed into the sports section: the NBA, CBA, NFL, CFL, MISL, MLFS, AHL, IHL, NHL, WVL and more starting all the time.

That’s what Steven Ehrhart was up against when he became the World Basketball League’s commissioner two years ago. You could hear the groans: “Not another league!” “Who wants to watch basketball in the summer?” “The game can’t be played without 7-footers!”

Ehrhart had served as legal counsel and a front office executive in the failed United States Football League and turned down an offer to run the ARENA football league. Did he really think WBL would change his luck?

“Basketball has now passed up soccer as the world’s No. 1 sport,” Ehrhart said. “It’s the sport everybody’s watching. I believe that this framework of international professional basketball comes at the right time, what with the Olympics opening to professional basketball.”

A good enough sales pitch, but creating a viable league takes more, much more. Personnel, stadiums, promotion, television -- a name.

“We figured we had to get world involved,” Ehrhart said, “but there are so many worlds in boxing, that’s why we stayed away from WBA. There had been a women’s basketball league which was WBL, but that was far enough back.

“I remember sitting at the desk, drawing the logo. We started out with the idea of a globe and I don’t know how many drafts we did for a couple of weeks. I can remember we almost went with a globe that just had North America and we worried that the South Americans would be upset if we didn’t have South America and how were we going to show Europe?”

A league constitution was drawn, based largely on the NBA’s, and franchises were set up in Chicago, Calgary, Youngstown, Ohio, Las Vegas and Worcester, Mass. A sixth slot was opened for international teams. Diplomacy was necessary, especially with the Soviet Union.

“It was frustrating at first,” Ehrhart said. “We had to drink about four straight nights of Vodka Saluts. It turned out one of their guys liked American gin better than Vodka so once we switched to gin it was fine. I traveled with them to two or three sites. They had brought one of their top ministers. They were pretty good to deal with.”

Now what about the players? Who wants to take a chance on a new league?

“It’s difficult the first year. We had to go out and sell the concept and sell ourselves. It was getting the right people hired at each franchise. Las Vegas, they knew they wanted to get some local UNLV guys and found Freddie Banks.

“By the second year, players were banging on our door. They don’t get a lot of money but it’s a chance for them to show what they can do. Last year out of 60 players, 10 of them made the NBA. That’s why now they’re knocking on our doors. Yesterday, a guy from the CBA said, ‘Give me a chance, I’ll play for nothing.”’

So players, desperate to crack the WBL, were trying to bend, ever so slightly, the rules imposing a 6-foot-5 ceiling.

“We have guys show up in sweat pants so they can give you the scrunched knees,” said Ehrhart, who easily slides under league height limit. “We’ve had the hip tuck, scrunched necks. All of a sudden a lot of the afros are gone.

“We had a guy last year who was called the ‘Shrinking Giant.’ One team had rejected him but another team signed him. We’ve had guys lifting weights to compress their spines.”

Some dues had to be paid the first year: a failed franchise in Chicago, memories of 10 men crashing the boards at once, swarms of point guards racing up and down the court, the fastest fast breaks in professional sports.

“We’ve had a couple of injuries to officials,” Ehrhart said. “In our All-Star Game, there was a period in the fourth quarter where there were seven straight fast breaks going both ways and the guy is almost on the floor signaling time out.

“Everybody fast breaks. The center fast breaks. With the Lakers, at most it’s a three-man break, with our guys it’s five. It puts more pressure on everybody. Steve Albert, who does our play-to-play, was frenetic, ‘End-to-end action!”’

This season, attendance is up slightly, from the high 2,000s last year to nearly 3,000 now; a three-year television contract has been signed with SportsChannel America; rivalries have set in, notably between Alfredrick Hughes of Illinois (formerly Chicago) and Barry Mitchell of Youngstown; and fan mail has started to appear at the league’s offices in Memphis, Tenn.

Ehrhart: “I get a lot of handwritten notes. I got some letter from a kid in Holland because he had seen us play in Europe.We started out just trying to make people aware of us. To some degree that’s by signing players and letting the public know there’s a product. We knew there was a voracious appetite for basketball and also the kind of players we have.”