The long, slow vindication of the ABA

The American Basketball Association waged a war against the NBA throughout its nine-year history. From the beginning, it was an unfair fight. The NBA had better players, better arenas, and most importantly, a network television contract that gave it more visibility and way better funding.

But the ABA had one thing going for it. The league simply refused to play by the NBA’s rules. It cared little for the sanctity of contracts and broke the unwritten prohibition against signing college underclassmen.

The ABA opened its doors to players who had been blackballed from the NBA like Connie Hawkins, Doug Moe, and Roger Brown, and found a home for players deemed too small or just plain too weird. You can’t understand the history of pro basketball without the ABA, and you can’t be any kind of a basketball person if you don’t know Willie Wise and Bob Netolicky.

The ABA survived in spite of itself, largely because it had a keener eye for talent. That manifested itself in players like Julius Erving, George Gervin, and Mel Daniels who went on to become Hall of Famers, along with scores of players like Mack Calvin, Billy Keller, and Steve Jones who thrived in its open-ended game.

But the ABA never intended to defeat the NBA. Its goal all along was to force a merger. After nine years of players, coaches, and even refs jumping leagues, lawsuits and countersuits, the NBA finally absorbed four teams: Indiana, Denver, San Antonio, and New Jersey into the league in 1976. The war was over, even if the NBA could never bring itself to call the terms a merger. More like a conditional surrender.

That bruising battle served as the backdrop for Loose Balls, Terry Pluto’s oral history of the ABA. Published in 1990 at the dawn of the NBA’s most prosperous era, it felt like a time capsule of a mythological era filled with sex, drugs, and all the craziness that the 70s had to offer.

Reading it again now, I’m drawn to another conclusion. The ABA not only won, it’s been vindicated. As former Kentucky Colonels coach Hubie Brown put it, “We were ahead of the NBA in so many ways. The only thing they didn’t take was the red, white, and blue ball.”

Lacking franchise-caliber big men, ABA coaches like Brown innovated with forwards playing center, guards playing forward. Those non-traditional lineups served as a precursor to the modern-day game where positions are fungible and skill beats size. Then and now, the 3-point shot is the great equalizer.

The ABA prioritized the dunk to such a degree that it introduced the slam dunk contest, later adopted by the NBA and turned into the marquee event at All-Star Weekend. Desperate to get people to come to the arenas, ABA games became sideshows of giveaways and promotions. It’s impossible to walk into an arena today and not feel the ABA’s insistence on providing fans with something more than just the game.

The ABA also gave us unfettered player movement and backroom deals. When in doubt, have a draft, and the ABA had a ton of “secret” drafts with far more intrigue than any lottery drawing could ever hope to have. By going after college underclassmen, the ABA exposed the sham of amateur athletics, even going so far as to sign the first player directly out of high school in Moses Malone.

Only four ABA franchises survived, but the league afforded an opportunity for pro basketball to take root in non-traditional markets like Memphis, Utah, and New Orleans. In all, a dozen ABA cities eventually hosted NBA teams.

Most of all, the ABA gave us style and it gave us stories. Pluto collected them all in Loose Balls, crafting the definitive document of a rebel league that has stood the test of time.

One of my favorites concerns the sale of Gervin from Virginia to San Antonio. Even by ABA standards where teams were constantly in danger of going under, the Squires were notoriously short on cash. At one point the sheriff’s department was coming to repossess the team’s uniforms before a game because they owed $2,000 to the manufacturer.

Spurs owner Angelo Drossos called up his Virgina counterpart Earl Foreman with an offer: Sell us Gervin for $225,000. There was a catch. The All-Star game was scheduled to be held in Norfolk in a few months and Foreman, having already sold Julius Erving, Rick Barry, and Swen Nater, didn’t want to surrender his last remaining star.

Drossos suggested a “delayed-delivery deal.” Cash up front for Gervin’s services after the All-Star game. Eventually the press caught on and Foreman had second thoughts. The commissioner Mike Storen got involved and suggested Drossos could have his pick of any player on the Squires’ roster except for Gervin.

Drossos said no way, he had the contract and he had Gervin already stashed in San Antonio after agreeing to indemnify Gervin and his agent. Storen then said he would forfeit every Spurs game until Gervin was back in Virginia. Drossos sent the league a telegram that read, “Fuck you. A stronger letter will follow.”

The league sued, but it went to Federal Court in San Antonio where a judge who happened to be a season-ticket holder ruled in favor of Drossos and the Spurs. The Squires were out of business just before the merger with the NBA. Gervin, meanwhile, blossomed into the Ice Man in San Antonio, cementing a love affair between the city and the sport that exists to this day.

Could you imagine any of that happening today? Take DeAndre Jordan being held hostage by the Clippers to prevent him from signing with the Mavericks and multiply it by David Stern’s Chris Paul trade-vetoing, “Basketball Reasons” and maybe it would rival the particulars of that insane story.

There would be Woj Bombs left and right, NBA Twitter would implode, a hundred think pieces would angle for clicks. In the ABA, it was merely another hilarious sidenote. The thing about the ABA was, you really had to be there. It was barely on television and it wasn’t like there were highlight shows running down Memphis Tams scores.

All that remained were the stories, and the oral history structure of Loose Balls offered Pluto the perfect vehicle. There’s no need for a narrative arc when a former coach casually recounts the time he offered a $500 bounty to any of his players who would take on legendary tough guy John Brisker.

A bench player named Lenny Chappel said he’d do it and decked Brisker on the opening tip when no one was looking. Brisker, it’s been said, disappeared after running off to Uganda to become a mercenary for Idi Amin.

Or the time Marvin Barnes missed a series of flights and wound up chartering a plane from LaGuardia. He arrived 10 minutes before the game wearing a wide-brimmed hat and a floor-length mink coat with his uniform underneath. After proclaiming, “Game Time is on time,” he went out and scored 43 points.

During the game, the pilot showed up in the team huddle demanding to be paid. Barnes sent the trainer to the locker room to fetch his checkbook and cut the pilot a check during a timeout. (Accounts varied on how much it actually cost.)

All of that would have been lost without Loose Balls. It’s served as the foundational source material for dozens of documentaries and features. Pluto, ever the gracious caretaker of the league’s history is prominent in many.

Yet, Loose Balls is more than a historical document of a bygone era. It’s a blueprint for how pro basketball finally began to find its way as a major sports entity. It would take years to fully grasp the ABA’s importance, but it’s all right there every night on League Pass and in arenas across the country. The ABA won, all hail the ABA.