This League Brings Game Down to Size

All right, class, the subject for today is pro basketball--is it a sport or a circus?

Are the Detroit Pistons the best team in the game--or just the biggest?

Well, is Mike Tyson the best fighter in the world--or is Sugar Ray Leonard?

Tired of slam dunks? Two-foot baskets? High posts? Low posts? Set-piece basketball?

Ever ask yourself how you can have a sport that cannot be played successfully by 99.999% of the world population? That cannot be played at all except by about 122 people out of a billion in China?

Getting sick of seeing Goliath vs. Goliath? Time for a few Davids?

Well, the World Basketball League has just the ticket for you. Basketball as it was meant to be played. Basketball as Dr. Naismith envisioned it.

Nobody hung on the rim in those days. Nobody shattered backboards. Nobody sank baskets like putts. Chances are whole teams would have fit into a Volkswagen. Now, some players can’t.

In those days, the only place you saw anybody 7 1/2 feet tall was in a sideshow tearing up telephone books or bending crow bars. Now you see them in the pivot, in the post, or on the foul line, where they can almost reach up and drop the ball in.

Where you don’t see them is in the World Basketball League. The WBL is discriminatory. It discriminates against the world’s smallest minority--that part of the population 6-6 and over. They get barred from play. They are not even read their rights.

Actually, you have to be no more than 6-4 7/8 to suit up in this league. To forestall cheating, you have to be measured lying down with your knees locked. No slouching. General managers who cheat are heavily fined.

The WBL likes to think it is turning the game back to what it was meant to be, what it was in the 1920s, before George Mikan, Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell and Bob Lanier came along to change the game forever.

Imagine a game played by 10 Bob Cousys and you have a fix on WBL basketball. Nobody posts up. Nobody fouls out. There are no illegal defenses. You can play all the zones you want.

You only get eight seconds, instead of 10, to bring the ball up to the midcourt line. There’s a jump ball before every period.

The three-point line is at 20 feet 6 inches, slightly farther out than the college line, slightly in from the NBA line. If you get fouled in the act of shooting a three-pointer, you get three free throws.

Some purists wanted the game to raise the baskets. These guys have lowered the players.

They play 10-minute quarters so that the game will coincide with international duration--40 minutes. But the league likes to boast that its scoring average matches the NBA’s 48-minute totals.

For instance, Calgary beat the national team of the Netherlands this year, 167-107. Illinois beat Worcester two weeks ago, 142-120. The basket swishes. Overtime is sudden death. It lasts until one team scores seven points.

There is less pushing and shoving. The fact that a player can’t foul out doesn’t make him more aggressive, the league insists. There are no loose-ball fouls. You foul a man, he goes to the line. Too many fouls and your coach will take you out--the referee won’t have to.

It is a league that, fittingly, plays in the undersized cities of the continent. These are not the megalopolises of the NBA. You need the ZIP code, if not a dog sled, to contact these guys.

There are five franchises: the Worcester (Mass.) Counts, ZIP code 01613; the Youngstown (Ohio) Pride, ZIP 44501; the Springfield (Ill.) Express, ZIP 62701; the Calgary (Canada) 88s, ZIP T2G 0R3 and Las Vegas Silver Streaks, ZIP 89127.

The achievement of the WBL is that it has made the game international. It played 43 games with teams from Italy, Greece, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway and the Soviet Union this year. And those games count in the standings. Which is a good thing because the WBL teams won all but one of them. And this even though the foreign teams had no height restrictions.

A WBL all-star team even swept an international tournament at Ostend, Belgium, even though opponents had players 6-10 and over.

“The truth of the matter is that these big, slow guys, unless they’re NBA caliber, cannot keep up with our quicker, faster gunners,” says WBL Commissioner Steve Ehrhart. “We run rings around them.”

It is Ehrhart’s notion the U.S. could do worse--and, as a matter of fact, has--than send the WBL champion as its representative to the Olympics.

Will it supplant the NBA? Or even rival it? Probably not. Size awes the public. Shorter comes out inferior, even though the upstart league has lost 10 players to the NBA to date. A player who excels in the WBL always hopes to catch on in the higher-paying NBA and make a backcourt there.

The WBL is all backcourt. It’s exciting. But it translates out to the public as minor league. That bridles Ehrhart.

“I don’t know why,” he complains. “Nobody considers Sugar Ray Leonard-Roberto Duran minor league. We like to think we’re the middleweight champions of the world and (the NBA) the heavyweight.”

The 1989 league playoffs start today in Youngstown. Inch for inch, these may be the best basketball teams on the planet because no one is ever sure how good a point guard is when all he has to do is bring the ball upcourt to give it to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, or play defense only well enough to steer his man back to where Bill Russell is waiting like a malevolent spider.

This is a game that offers David against David while the NBA offers Goliath against Goliath. It’s a playground game.

It’s also an international game. Singapore is on the line, negotiating for an exhibition series. So is Beijing. Ehrhart goes to Moscow soon where the comrades, fretting over losing key players to American and other European teams, hope to establish a pro league.

It’s an audacious idea. It could lead to 200-pound football, fat man’s tennis and blindfold golf.

On the other hand, when you consider that this is a league Jerry West, Walt Frazier, Isiah Thomas, and, as a matter of fact, John Havlicek and Bill Bradley could have fitted into comfortably, you can see you’re talking a major league game.

As Ehrhart points out, no one ever got cobwebs standing around the key in his league. The only time these guys aren’t running, they’re flying.