Pioneer Spirit of NBA Lives

Jim Seminoff is 76 and lives in San Clemente. He has had three hip operations, quadruple bypass surgery and colon cancer. Seminoff also has played professional basketball at Madison Square Garden and Chicago Stadium. He has played basketball for the Chicago Stags and Boston Celtics. Seminoff never made more than $8,000 in a season and because he didn’t play in the pro leagues long enough, Seminoff doesn’t get a basketball pension.

But that doesn’t make him bitter at all. He’s still in love with the game, still in touch with the game and an absolutely avid Laker fan who, by the way, can’t understand why the Lakers haven’t figured out how to defense the pick and roll.

Nelson Bobb lives in Irvine and owns a Newport Beach insurance agency, where he still works nearly every day though he, too, is well into his 70s. Bobb played pro basketball too, for the Philadelphia Warriors. Bobb never made more than $3,500 a season during his four-year pro career, but he got to play with people like Paul Arizin and he thought he was the luckiest guy around.

Bobb still loves the NBA, still watches as many games as he can and begrudges no NBA star his millions of dollars or his fame.

Seminoff and Bobb, though, would like it if some present-day NBA stars would stop and listen for a minute. They’d like it if Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant could sit down and hear how guys like Seminoff and Bobb, guys who were the NBA pioneers, guys who traveled by car and played in high school gyms, laid the foundation for the NBA, which now provides extravagant lifestyles for 20-year-olds who never set foot in college.

It has been more than two years since Bill Tosheff, who is president of the Pre-1965 NBA Players Assn., began a fight to get pensions for men like Seminoff and Bobb. Players in the league from 1965 on have only needed three years of league service to be eligible for a pension.

Before that, players needed five years of service to receive an NBA pension. Tosheff has been arguing, to no avail so far, that there should not be a two-tiered system. It is wrong, Tosheff has argued, and since there are fewer than 70 such players still alive, it would not be terribly expensive. How hard would it be, Tosheff argues, for some of these NBA millionaires to swallow a deduction from their gigantic paychecks to help fund pensions for this 70-something generation?

Bobb, had he played another year in the league, would be receiving a pension of about $800 a month. It’s not money he would need to live on, but, as Bobb says, “It is money I could find a use for.” More importantly, Bobb says, “there are guys out there who could really use the money. One guy is driving a taxicab in San Francisco to make money to live on. Some are living in true poverty.”

Says Seminoff: “I know Bill has strong feelings that guys like me were pioneers. I never felt like a pioneer, but I guess I was one. We never expected the league to take off like it did. Only thing is, the league did take off. I know there are guys who are in dire need of a pension now, ballplayers of my age who are physically not doing too well. They need all the help they can get. There is so much money out there and it wouldn’t take much to help some of those fellows.”

Seminoff is thrilled, he says, that the league, which didn’t have black players during Seminoff’s time in the late 1940s, has, as Seminoff says “given such a great opportunity to black athletes to go to college and to make a living as pros.”

Having grown up in a Los Angeles family “where we couldn’t afford a car, where I couldn’t afford a bike,” Seminoff says, he appreciates that basketball gave him a way into college and out of poverty. “All I could do when I was growing up was walk to the playground down the street and play basketball. Without a basketball scholarship, I surely couldn’t have gone to USC. I probably couldn’t have gone to college. I think it’s great that basketball still is doing that today.”

If you think Seminoff or Bobb are eager to criticize today’s players for being selfish or for not playing a pleasing brand of basketball, then you’d be wrong.

“I like the Lakers,” Seminoff says. “They have three guys [O’Neal, Bryant and Glen Rice] who are great athletes. They seem to be starting to mesh a little bit. Whether they’ll turn into a great team, only time will tell. Kobe is a great player. The only thing is, being so young, he commits to plays too early sometimes, at a point of no return. And, I just don’t know how the Lakers can’t figure out how to defend the pick and roll.

“If they play the Jazz in the next round, I’d be worried. The Jazz seem to have a lot of confidence against the Lakers. When they shoot, they believe every shot will go in.”

And maybe the Jazz believes that because the Lakers can’t defend the pick and roll. Seminoff would love to talk pick and roll defense with O’Neal and Bryant and any other Laker who’d be interested. He’d love to talk about the early NBA too, about playing in high school gyms and holding down a full-time job during the off-season. He’d like to make a gentle plea to get a pension for the pioneers who don’t have one. Most of all, Seminoff would love to tell these players how much he admires their talent and the game they play.

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Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: diane.pucin@latimes.com