Big-Hair Days

Those were the days, my friend, but, unfortunately, they ended.

Making up in nostalgia for what it lacks in present-day entertainment value, the NBA Finals’ first meeting between two teams from the old American Basketball Assn. has everyone reminiscing about the defunct league, because you can’t go wrong with Afros the size of lawn shrubs, bikini-clad cheerleaders and a cast of zanies.

This contrasts to the modern NBA, in which the zanies are millionaires with entourages of agents, bodyguards, et al, to assure them that whatever they’ve just pulled is OK because they were being disrespected.

Nor has the charm been enhanced by the new arenas, which are excitement-swallowing barns designed for the maximum number of luxury suites, or by skyrocketing franchise prices, or the accompanying growth of the league bureaucracy, which is as much fun as any other bureaucracy, like, say, the post office.

The ABA, bless its wiggy self, lasted nine seasons before four of the surviving seven teams -- the Spurs, Nets, Indiana Pacers and Denver Nuggets -- joined the NBA in 1976.

Always seeking recognition, the ABA was all about the show, with its red-white-and-blue ball, which NBA people said belonged on a seal’s nose, and its three-point basket, which the NBA also considered beneath contempt, then later adopted.

The Nets’ Julius Erving had an Afro the size of Jimi Hendrix’s. The Kentucky Colonels’ Artis Gilmore was said to be 7 feet 6 counting his hair, 7-2 without. At that, neither matched the awesome corona of Indiana’s Darnell Hillman, who won the league’s coveted “Biggest Afro” award at its 1997 reunion.

Big hair was only the beginning for the upstarts, so many of whom didn’t seem to understand that their status as “outlaws” was supposed to be metaphorical.

There was Wendell Ladner, the good ol’ boy gone berserk from Necaise Crossing, Miss., who seemed to duke it out monthly with the Pittsburgh Condors’ rough, tough John Brisker.

Brisker wound up with the NBA SuperSonics, but as a cult figure, Ladner could hold his own. He is remembered for his maniacal playing style, which seemed to go hand-in-hand with his lifestyle, including the night when, as a Kentucky Colonel, he dived into the bench saving a loose ball, knocked over the glass water bottles and landed among the shards of glass.

“He jumped up quickly and tried to get back to the floor but the trainer stopped him because he was bleeding profusely from gashes in his arm,” wrote a fan, Dennis Oechsli, on the Web site, remembertheaba.com.

“Play was stopped and Wendell was led to the locker room soaked in blood.... Thirty minutes later, he came sprinting back to the bench with, as I remember, over 100 stitches in his arm. He begged to reenter the game but sanity prevailed and Wendell was placed at the end of the bench for his own protection.”

Ladner fought a lot more people than Brisker. As Jim O’Brien noted in his scouting report for the 1972-73 season: “His second wife turns a lot of eyes but you’re advised not to look.”

The Nets’ forerunners had a storied history, starting in 1967 as the New Jersey Americans in Teaneck, where they lasted one season, finishing in a tie for the last playoff slot, necessitating a one-game playoff with the Colonels.

Then, as now, the Nets were thinking of moving and moved the game to Commack Arena on Long Island, only to find upon arrival that the court was under water because a leak in the roof had melted the ice under the floor.

Commissioner George Mikan then forfeited the game, ending the Americans’ lone season.

They moved into the same water-logged arena, changed their name to the Nets, then went to the Island Arena and Nassau Coliseum. For the last 21 years, they’ve been in the Meadowlands, but, as usual, they’re just passing through as they try to get the state to spring for a new arena in Newark.

The Spurs, considered hicks among city slickers, were the least accomplished of the merger teams -- even the Nets won a title, with Erving. However, luck in the form of hitting the lottery twice when David Robinson and Tim Duncan were available, and adept management have made the San Antonio franchise a little jewel.

Not that it’s as much fun as the old days in the downtown HemisFair Arena, when two sections of premium seats, located strategically above the hallway visiting teams walked through, were turned over to the rowdy Baseline Bums.

“It was a looser atmosphere,” George Valle, 52-year-old manager of an auto-parts store and president emeritus of the group, said last week in San Antonio, his black Baseline Bums baseball jersey open to accommodate his stomach.

“We could do a lot of things that they won’t let us do here [in the SBC Center] because the NBA, they cleaned it up, it’s supposed to be family entertainment....

“But it was fun. We enjoyed the interaction with the other players, especially where we sat in the other arena [HemisFair]. We were over the opponent’s dressing room so we got to know some of the other guys, harass ‘em a little more.”

The dressing room door was manned by sheriff’s deputies so the interactions didn’t get too far out of hand, although Valle says Houston’s volatile Calvin Murphy, whom he used to call “you little cockroach,” did try to climb the cinder-block wall separating them one night before cooler heads prevailed and someone grabbed him.

Then there was Leon Gibson, a short-order fry cook at Denny’s (or Jim’s, Valle can’t remember exactly which), a Bums legend, always pushing the envelope and, at times, ripping it to shreds.

“We’re playing the Chicago Bulls,” Valle said. “This is when we were in the NBA already. Well, Leon Gibson goes down to a meat market and buys a cow’s tongue.... He’s sticking it up there, hollerin’ at Michael [Jordan]. Well, Bob Bass, GM at the time, went up there and says, ‘You can’t have that.’

“Leon again, he hated Magic Johnson, he called him Crybaby Johnson. Leon shows up at the game, had on nothing but a diaper with a sign saying ‘Crybaby Johnson,’ drinking beer out of a baby bottle....

“Back when Kareem [Abdul-Jabbar] had his house burn and lost all his jazz collection? Again, Leon and Ronnie Jackson got a bunch of LPs, strung ‘em together, melted ‘em, and hung ‘em over the dressing room door. ‘Here’s some more records for your collection.... ‘ “

It got worse, as when Gibson dressed up as a woman and had another Bum chase him around the floor, taunting the Bulls’ Quintin Dailey, who had pleaded guilty to aggravated assault against a woman.

Nonetheless, Valle says it was only personal during the games and the Bums were hospitable afterward (“Don Nelson, got him drunker than Cooter Brown over at the old Marriott one night, drinking B-52s with bulldog chasers.”).

Valle and Murphy are friends. When former Spur George Karl got his big contract in Milwaukee, he sent the Bums money for a party. Former Laker Norm Nixon looked up Valle in the Alamodome when he came back years later as Samaki Walker’s agent. NBA publicist Brian McIntyre gets Valle reservations in the press hotel at All-Star games.

But by the time the Spurs moved into the sterile Alamodome and then the new SBC Center, things were different. The Bums got seats, but they were a long, long way from any Baseline.

“We could have all the seats we wanted [in the HemisFair],” Valle said. “You didn’t have to buy season tickets. Tickets were $1 a game. Then, heaven forbid, they doubled our price. We thought that was outrageous. Now to sit here in these seats where I’m at, I paid $54.

“This is my last year. I’m gonna retire....

“People ask me, ‘Hey, George, can you get me some autographs?’ Now, if you want George Gervin’s autograph, I’ve got Ice’s cell phone. These new guys, very few even know me. Malik Rose knows me. David [Robinson] knows who I am. The rest of ‘em probably don’t even know who I am. I’ve been here 30 years and supporting ‘em all these years and they don’t know.”

In the old days, Gervin and James Silas and Mike Gale and Coby Dietrick, and especially coach Doug Moe and his assistant, Allan Bristow, hung out.

The modern Spurs just drive their fancy rides home. The visiting teams don’t stick around, flying right out by charter.

The Bums are 40 rows behind the baseline in the SBC Center. They’re spotlighted and introduced at every game but there aren’t many of them left.

Now the atmosphere runs according to an elaborate script in a new process known as game operations or game ops, with the PA system constantly cranked up to 11, Spinal Tap-style, as the teams play and the fans bat air-filled noise sticks together.

It’s not the same. It’s bigger and it makes more money and it’s way louder, but as for spontaneity ...

Well, you can’t have everything, nor can you keep what you had.