A Quick Study in Success : After a Brilliant Academic Career, Watts’ Terdema Ussery Becomes Head of the CBA

Terdema L. Ussery II--they call him “T”--went hunting for the man who had shot his father. He had no idea what he would do if he found him. His law degree from UC Berkeley couldn’t help him now. Nor his undergraduate degree from Princeton. Nor his master’s degree from Harvard. No, this was strictly street stuff. This was one part of his Watts background that T couldn’t shake. Somebody gets you, you get them.

The cops had closed the case. Said there was nothing more they could do. Said bad things happened in bad neighborhoods. Suggested T pry his father out of there, move him someplace else.

But nothing doing. Neighbors and friends had depended on the little Country Farms grocery for so long. The store meant the world to T’s father. That’s why he saved up every penny he could until he could buy the place, go into business for himself, be the boss.

This was the store where young T got the news that he had been accepted by Princeton, hopped atop the liquor counter and screamed. This was the store where he would return from an exclusive Ojai boarding school with his lacrosse stick over his shoulder, bringing him a razzing from everybody on the block. This was the store caught amid the summer of ’65 Watts riots, when all a 6-year-old understood was that having fire and gunfire and National Guardsmen around sure did seem like a lot of fun, like something out of a Hollywood movie.

There were nothing but fond memories inside that corner market until the day some crumb strolled in and put one in T’s dad.

So he set out to find the guy, got people to point him out, although they couldn’t be positive he was the one. T searched everywhere. Couldn’t find him anywhere. Put aside the starched white dress shirt and power necktie and briefcase that had become standard equipment in the 39th-story office where he practiced L.A. law.

“What would I have done if I had found the guy?” he asks, four years later, formal executive attire back in place, lunching in Sherman Oaks, now the ranking black executive in professional sports. “I don’t know. I truly don’t know.

“Nothing good.”

A tornado was brewing in Texas, and hundreds of local basketball lovers were huddled outside the locked doors of D. L. Ligon Coliseum, looking off in the distance at darkening skies. It was the last week of April and they were waiting to be let inside for a game between their hometown Wichita Falls Texans and the visiting Quad City Thunder from faraway Rock Island, Ill., for the championship of the Continental Basketball Assn., the NBA’s minor league.

Terdema L. Ussery II took one look at the situation upon arriving and sought out a security guard.

“Unlock the doors,” he said. “There’s a tornado coming.”

“Who are you?” the guard asked.

“He’s the commissioner,” one of T’s aides said.

At 32, Ussery is a take-charge kind of guy who has taken charge. His future seems unlimited. Educated, eloquent, law-degreed, distinguished . . . no telling how far he might go. Yet the last thing he expected was to have a future in sports.

His specialty in the Los Angeles office of the San Francisco-based firm of Morrison & Foerster was corporate and entertainment law. The only reason he connected with the basketball league was that the CBA commissioner who preceded him was a fellow member of a constitutional rights foundation.

Sports? What did T Ussery know of sports? Oh, sure, guys he knew from the neighborhood--David Greenwood, Darrin Nelson, Roy Hamilton--had been great jocks. And his dad occasionally took him to UCLA to see Henry Bibby play basketball, or to USC to see the Juice run with the football, and even once to Anaheim because Reggie Smith was in town. When T was a kid, everybody on his block partied into the night on the day Reggie Smith was called up by the Boston Red Sox, and he can still recall Reggie bringing him an autographed bat.

But sports? As a career?

“I hate to admit this,” T says, laughing, “but if my brothers knew my time in the 40-meter dash, some of them wouldn’t speak to me.”

Ussery is being somewhat modest, which is another of his many assets. He did compete in athletics at the Thacher boarding school in Ojai--including, yes, lacrosse. At Princeton later, he was a walk-on on the football squad. But he was always more comfortable with a law book than a playbook.

At Berkeley, he became executive editor of the California Law Review, and also externed under Supreme Court Justice Allen E. Broussard. At Princeton, he earned an undergraduate degree from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs in 1981, graduating with departmental honors. At Harvard, he received his master’s from the John F. Kennedy School of Government in 1984. He was no jock.

One day, T was a precocious kid from a poor side of town, attending the Willowbrook school, fooling around with a trumpet and drums, hanging around after school at the corner store owned by a Jewish family where his father clerked, attending the First Church of God in Inglewood and wondering what high school would be like.

Next day, he heard about this private school in Ojai that sounded like paradise. He knew he had the brains to get in and get by. He just didn’t know if he had what else it would take.

“We checked it out, and tuition was $4,000,” Ussery recalls. “My father said, ‘Well, that’s that. I’m sorry, but that is no option.”’

T was not discouraged. He applied anyway.

Not long thereafter, he found his father, as always, at the store. T had heard back from the boarding school.

“Full . . . scholarship,” he said.

It was like Reggie being called up to the majors. That autumn, T packed his bag and took the two-hour ride to Ojai.

It would be six weeks before he would return home for a visit, at which time he told his mother, Jean, and his father all about the place. How there were 223 students--six of them black. How there were 223 students--none of them female. How the majority of students were wealthy. How some of them looked at him as though he had just dropped in from Mars. How part of every student’s day involved taking care of his or her horse.

“Sometimes, I had this fantasy. I would ride my horse into Watts with my lacrosse stick over my shoulder. Ask everybody over for a cup of tea. Say: ‘How do you do? I am Terdema L. Ussery, Esquire.’ Quite the country squire.”

Back home, meantime, the big news was that the family that owned the corner store had decided to sell out, and T’s father and a partner had put together a bid to become the owners. It was hardly a supermarket, hardly big business. But it was the business, the operation his dad knew like the back of his hand, the place where, when nearly anybody stepped up to the cash register, his father could call him or her by name.

Nearly anybody.

“Yakima?”

Bob Wilson had bought the Topeka Sizzlers and wanted to move them to Yakima.

“Yakima?” Terdema Ussery remembers thinking at the time. “I know Topeka isn’t exactly New York City, but why would anybody want to move anything to Yakima?”

He soon found out. Bob Wilson knew what he was doing. Wilson, too, wasn’t figuring on a career in minor league professional basketball back when he was practicing law in California, getting his degree in social sciences from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, teaching the educationally handicapped or being elected to the California State Assembly and State Senate. But Yakima, Wash., was a super place, he convinced the new deputy commissioner, for a CBA team to play ball.

“One of the most pleasant surprises since I became commissioner of this league has been discovering Yakima,” Ussery says. “They’ve got about 89,000 people up there, and about 79,000 of them support the Yakima Sun Kings.”

No, it is not the NBA, not by a long shot. Nobody has to remind Ussery of that. What the CBA is, or at least how the commissioner now thinks of it, is “the second-best basketball league in the world,” superior, in many minds, to the best of the European leagues, where some American collegiate stars choose to go.

Ussery wishes to remind them that it was the CBA that ushered Terry Teagle, Kevin Gamble, Tony Campbell, Michael Adams, Michael Williams, Craig Ehlo, Mario Elie, Rod Higgins and so many others into the NBA, that Phil Jackson went from five years of coaching the Albany Patroons to coaching the NBA champion Chicago Bulls.

OK, so no movie stars make advertisements saying: “CBA action! It’s fantastic!” There is still some excellent basketball being played there. And, there is definite opportunity for advancement.

After Irv Kaze, the commissioner, had encountered Terdema Ussery II at one of their meetings of the constitutional rights foundation, he asked him to explore the possibility of becoming the CBA’s deputy commissioner and general legal counsel.

Curiosity overwhelmed Ussery. T’s law partners were understanding about his decision, but he doubted they understood, since he barely did himself. The pay was less. The league’s headquarters were in Denver. His wife, Debra, and infant son, Terdema III, would have to move to Colorado, where they knew nobody. And for what? For a minor basketball league?

Every cell of Ussery’s brain and fiber of his body rejected the notion as frivolous, and fought to keep a racial element far removed from it. Yet by the time the commissioner’s job itself came his way, even T couldn’t help thinking how few of these opportunities were afforded minorities, how “it was always that they couldn’t find qualified people, or that those people didn’t have any experience.” The last thing Ussery had in mind was to become some kind of pioneer.

On April Fools’ Day of this year, however, Kaze stepped down as commissioner, and the league’s board of directors had an immediate need for a new one. Ussery was asked to serve as acting commissioner, and agreed. Ten days later, he presided over a specially convened owners’ meeting in Chicago. The subject of a commissioner was broached, and the owners wanted to discuss it privately. They asked Ussery to leave the room.

Ben Fernandez, one of the owners of the Albany franchise, brought him back.

“T, if you’ll take it, I’d be proud to introduce you as the new commissioner of the CBA,” Fernandez said.

Whereupon everyone in the room rose to give Ussery an ovation.

Accolades came his way immediately. Jet Magazine proclaimed Ussery “the highest-ranking Black in professional sports.” Acquaintances came by to tease T that this was just the first step, that someday he would succeed David Stern as NBA commissioner, that the sky was the limit. He simply laughed that off and wondered if within a year or two he would be back where he felt more at home, making multimillion-dollar real estate deals.

The workload wouldn’t be easy. There were squabbles with European leagues over contractual arrangements to settle. The CBA’s agreement with the NBA would need to be updated soon. San Jose’s franchise was moving to Bakersfield, and the team from Pensacola, Fla., was packing up for Birmingham, Ala. The league needed continuity. And TV networks had to be convinced that basketball teams representing Cedar Rapids or Omaha or Oklahoma City or Grand Rapids could provide entertainment.

“I’m not daunted by the prospect of hard work,” Ussery says. “Nothing I do from now on could be any harder than telling my father I was giving up my law practice to run a basketball league.”

At 60, his father was having a traumatic enough time dealing with the memory of a holdup man brandishing a weapon and firing, even though he had offered no resistance. There were months afterward in the hospital when his father’s whole personality changed, when T saw his enthusiasm wane, when he became so withdrawn that he scarcely paid attention when his son pleaded with him to sell the store.

He wouldn’t. Customers counted on that store for their daily bread.

“He decided to be John Wayne about it,” T said. “That store was his fort and nobody was going to force him out of there.”

Some people strive to get out of a neighborhood, some cling to familiar ground. You never know who is going to move up and out. There was this tall, skinny kid who used to sit in front of the Usserys at First Church of God. After leaving for school, T didn’t see him for a while. Later, one day at church, the kid was sitting in front of him, only T could no longer see over the kid’s head.

“Who is that?” he asked.

“You don’t know him?” his father said. “Elden Campbell. He plays for the Lakers.”

Now that basketball players of all ages and sizes are coming up to him to congratulate him on his recent promotion, Terdema L. Ussery II, a name to remember, must remember to remember their names.

“After all, I’m in basketball now,” he says, laughing again. “Which is probably still a big disappointment to my dad, who is still expecting me to become President of the United States.”