This Climb All Uphill for McGill

Some basketball team would do well to call Bill (the Hill) McGill and put him to work. As a scout, perhaps. Or as a coach. Or even in public relations. It has been 30 years this month since McGill played for the Lakers, and with his knowledge of the game, somebody should give him a job.

Because he needs one.

It can be painful being middle-aged and looking unemployment squarely in the face. McGill knows. An old friend from his NBA days, Satch Sanders, recently put him touch with a pro club that he thought might be needing someone. McGill called, eagerly. And, sure enough, that NBA team offered Billy a job in its arena.

Cleaning it.

“I’m not proud. A job’s a job,” McGill says, over lunch near his Ladera Heights home. “I’ll do clean-up if it comes to that. I just never thought it could come to that.”

Having spent the last 23 years in the aerospace industry, McGill recently learned that he is being let go. The economy, and all that. What makes the situation worse is that Billy’s wife, Gwendolyn, just got the same news, after 19 years of working at the corporate headquarters of the same firm.

If only he had qualified for an NBA pension.

But the fact that McGill played for five of the league’s teams--the Chicago Zephyrs, Baltimore Bullets, New York Knicks, St. Louis Hawks and the Lakers--is complicated by the fact that he didn’t play the requisite number of seasons. Billy broke in with Chicago as a rookie in 1962. He closed his NBA career with the Lakers in the playoffs of 1965. One more season and a pension would have been his.

“I keep looking into the record book, trying to find a fourth year,” he says, knowing it’s fruitless.

The trouble is, Billy’s pro basketball career didn’t end there. Only his NBA career did. He continued to play for teams in the American Basketball Assn., but that experience isn’t recognized by the NBA.

And so, suddenly, he finds himself in the same boat he was in when that ABA career ended. Out of work.

Cut loose for the last time in 1970, McGill came home to his birthplace, Los Angeles, and looked for work. He couldn’t find any.

Never expecting to go through such a nightmare again, McGill recalls those days vividly, saying, “One day I was in the NBA and the next day I was homeless. I slept in doorways. I slept in cars. It was the worst time of my life.”

Having been one of the city’s best players for Thomas Jefferson High, the lofty center they called the Hill took his soft touch to the University of Utah, where at one point he became the leading scorer in the nation.

Drafted in the first round by the Chicago franchise, McGill went to see the boss about a contract. He says the gentleman barely looked up, shoved a contract at him worth $17,000 and pretty much said take it or leave it.

“I knew damn well they had paid Terry Dischinger something like $40,000,” he recalls. “But I was young, not sure what to do. I just took it.”

He was the sixth-leading scorer for Chicago as a rookie. Then began his travels. The next season, McGill spent only six games with Baltimore, but for the Knicks he appeared in 74 games, averaged 15.1 points and led the club in shooting percentage.

Since both Chicago and New York were last-place teams, they kept making personnel moves. McGill went to St. Louis, where he was used sparingly. He later spent eight games with the Lakers, on the club led by Jerry West and Elgin Baylor that eventually lost to Boston in the 1965 NBA finals.

He never played in the NBA again.

After bouncing around the ABA with Julius Erving and others, playing for the Denver Rockets, Dallas Chaparrals and L.A. Stars, it finally became time to face the real world. And that world could be one mean place.

Salvation came when McGill landed a position in 1972 at a large aircraft company, where he has worked ever since as a senior buyer, in procurement of transistors, resistors and other electronic parts. Four years later, his wife joined the firm, where she became a top administrative aide.

Within the last couple of months, both were told they were being dismissed.

McGill recently ran into a wealthy young NBA player.

“I told him what I’d been earning and what my situation was,” McGill says. “He just walked away from me. He said, ‘Man, I can’t even relate to that.’ ”

Sanders, the old Boston Celtic, helps run an organization that looks after former pro athletes. But jobs are hard to come by, in any profession. McGill was excited when he got a tip that a pro basketball team might be able to use him.

“I just never imagined it would be to sweep up after the game,” he says.

Will he take the job? He will if he has to.

He shouldn’t have to.