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CHAPTER 1
Godfathers of the Modern Game
As N.B.A. Godfathers go, Danny Biasone was by reputation, compared to Red Auerbach, more of the whacky uncle. Auerbach, the Celtics' imperious smoker of victory cigars, was indisputably the dominant coach and team architect of the league's early decades. But Biasone was its most inventive visionary.
Biasone ran the old Syracuse Nationals out of a bowling alley in that frosty upstate New York outpost and inspired the adoption of a 24-second shot clock that became — according to Maurice Podoloff — the "salvation of professional basketball."
A Russian-born and Yale-educated lawyer, Podoloff was the league's first president (now commissioner). In a New York Times story by Louis Effrat on Dec. 11, 1955, he claimed no credit for the rule change that, when implemented for the 1954–55 season, increased scoring by 13.6 points per game. Biasone, Podoloff said, had passionately advocated for the shot clock during owners' meetings.
Auerbach had actually been one of the more aggressive manipulators of the pre–shot clock game, as Bob Cousy dribbled figure eights around dazed opponents, putting games to bed and fans to sleep. In one 1953 playoff snoozer against Syracuse, an incensed Biasone watched as 106 fouls were called, 128 free throws were taken, and Cousy alone scored 30 points from the line.
"There was danger that the fans, disgusted by the continual stalling and intentional fouling throughout the final four minutes of a game, were losing interest," Podoloff told Effrat.
Life, unfortunately, doesn't always reward the most deserving. Nobody benefited more from the shot clock than Auerbach, whose Bill Russell–led Celtics would soon embark on a run of 11 titles in 13 years.
Brilliant a tactician as he was, Auerbach was certainly no prophet. Much later, sizing up the shift in leverage between owners and players following pro-labor decisions in federal courts, he forecast difficult times for the sport in a 1977 story that he wrote for TheTimes. Then Larry Bird happened. So much for Auerbach's career as a columnist.
MAY 28, 1992 Biasone as Visionary Is N.B.A. Loss by Harvey Araton
The last call Dolph Schayes would make to the old man was not unlike countless others over four decades. The subject, as always, was basketball, a game invented by James Naismith and reinvented into its current popular form by an irascible fellow named Daniel Biasone.
"They won't give me a television," Biasone complained to Schayes last Sunday from the intensive care unit of University Hospital in Syracuse.
His 83-year-old body having surrendered to cancer, his life into its final 24 hours, Biasone wanted only to watch the Portland Trail Blazers play the Utah Jazz and the Cleveland Cavaliers play the Chicago Bulls.
"Oh, Danny never stopped following the game," said Schayes, the longtime star of Biasone's great love, the Syracuse Nationals, whom Biasone outlived by 29 years.
Just a couple of weeks before Biasone's death on Memorial Day, in fact, Schayes and Paul Seymour, another former Nat, visited Biasone at his bowling alley, the Eastwood Sports Center. This was the very building in which Biasone's players would drink and be merry, or melancholy, long into the night after their games at the State Fair Coliseum and later the Syracuse War Memorial.
It was there, in 1951, that Biasone began to complain, to anyone who would listen, that professional basketball needed a clock to limit time of possession. It took three years before the rest of the National Basketball Association's owners acknowledged Biasone, saving their sport until Magic Johnson and Larry Bird could carry it prime time two and a half decades later.
Time stood still inside the Eastwood Sports Center, especially on the picture-filled walls and trophy-laden shelves of Biasone's tiny office. History reached a dead end there in 1963, when Biasone sold the Nationals and they were moved to Philadelphia. Over lunch, three basketball guys who never left Syracuse — Biasone, Schayes and Seymour — talked of the league that left them and their central New York city far behind.
"We were talking about how big and successful the league has gotten," said Schayes. "Danny had these favorite expressions, and one of them was: 'The bubble's going to burst.' He always felt that the league shouldn't grow on the back of the average fan, but that's exactly what happened. Danny was saying that the average guy can't even afford to go to a game anymore. That really bothered him. Danny was always for the little guy."
That is understandable, as Biasone, an Italian immigrant to the United States at the age of 10, stood about 5 feet 6 inches, although perhaps more important to the shaping of his conviction was the manner in which he and his Nationals were treated by the rest of the N.B.A.
Nobody liked going to Syracuse, a cold winter outpost, the last of the league's small markets, like Fort Wayne, Ind., and Rochester. When the Lakers moved from Minneapolis to Los Angeles in 1961, teams like Boston and New York pushed Biasone to move west, to San Francisco, the way baseball's Giants followed its Dodgers. Biasone burned when Ned Irish of the Knicks would say: "What does Syracuse versus New York look like on the Madison Square Garden marquee?"
From his office in the bowling alley, Biasone turned a deaf ear on all pleas to surrender Syracuse. He held on as long as he could. He continued to sit on the bench at home games, appointing himself assistant coach when the league ruled it off limits to owners, while suffering the sport's nightly highs and lows.
Johnny Kerr, the onetime Nationals center and now a broadcaster for the Bulls, remembers returning to Syracuse in the wee hours by plane in a snowstorm from a losing road game. As the players descended the stairs, they came upon Biasone, his face frosted, his hat and coat covered with snow.
"Can't we beat anybody?" the owner mumbled as the players trudged past.
Inadvertently, Biasone may have defeated himself in his crusade for the little guy and the little market. The formula used to create the 24-second clock — the 2,880 seconds of a 48-minute game divided by the average number of shots a game over the previous three seasons (120) — was actually devised by Biasone's general manager, Leo Ferris. But the man with the vision, the member of the rules committee who badgered his contemporaries at almost every meeting between 1951 and 1954, was unquestionably Biasone.
Will he be proved right about the modern N.B.A., the league of sky boxes and $300 front-row seats, and the direction in which it is going?
"Danny knew basketball and he loved basketball," said Schayes, who named his son, the Milwaukee Bucks' center, after Biasone.
Today, Schayes, Seymour and other former Nationals like Larry Costello and Earl Lloyd will be pallbearers. Biasone's wife, Rachel, told Schayes that's what he wanted.
"They never had children," said Schayes. "I guess we were like his kids."
APRIL 3, 1977 Pride and Integrity: Pro Basketball Has Changed by Red Auerbach
Toward the end of my new book, "Red Auerbach: An Autobiography," I'm asked hypothetically whether I could return to the bench and coach the way I did during my 20-year career.
I replied yes, even though conditions have changed so much since I retired in 1966. No, the game hasn't changed that much. The people in it have changed — the players, the owners, the agents.
I'm not making a blanket indictment. But by and large, we're seeing an erosion of basic values — things like pride and integrity and dedication — and this upsets me tremendously. You can talk all you want about new breeds and changing lifestyles and the rest of it, but, damn it, some things should never change. They should not be allowed to change.
A Talk With Rizzuto
Fans booed me when I coached. They threw things at me — snowballs, eggs, you name it. I was controversial. But anyone who ever dealt with me will tell you — and this means more to me than all of the honors and accolades — that my word was good.
I'm not saying I was a saint. Anyone who saw me on the sidelines knows better. But I ran my Celtics organization with two constant guidelines — pride and integrity.
Let me explain what I mean.
In the early 1940s, when I was in the Navy, I met Phil Rizzuto, and we talked about the way Joe McCarthy ran those great Yankee clubs. Phil told me how Joe would take rookies from the farms and teach them little things like tipping properly in restaurants and acting properly in hotel lobbies. Joe was vitally concerned with the image of the Yankees. He believed the way you acted off the field had a great deal to do with the way you performed on it.
I decided that any club I ever coached would be imbued with this philosophy: Dress like a champion, act like a champion and you'll play like champion. Did you ever see a Celtic player looking sloppy or bawling out a teammate or throwing a tantrum when he was taken out of a game? No, you didn't, because it never happened.
We carried ourselves like champions, and we were doing that long before we began winning titles in 1957. Before you laugh at that, let me assure you that any man who ever wore our famous green jersey — Bob Cousy, Bill Russell, John Havlicek, any of them — will tell you Celtics Pride was no myth, no fairy tale.
But pride was only a part of what made us what we were. For a player to feel good about his team and teammates, he must also feel good about his role in the team's success.
Nothing can kill a great club any quicker than egos, jealousies and dissension, so I dealt with these threats head on every time I sat down with a player to sign a contract. I had a standard opening statement:
"Don't bring me your statistics, because I'm not interested in them. I don't want to see them. Just tell me what you've done to make us a better club."
Winning Matters Most
The only statistic that mattered to me was winning, so I paid every player on the basis of what he did to help us win. That meant the man who set the pick was as important as the man who scored from behind it; the man whose tough defense got us the ball was as important as the man who ended up with the easy bucket a few seconds later.
Some of my greatest stars — Satch Sanders, K. C. Jones, Jim Loscutoff — never had to score a point to be valuable players in my eyes. Everybody on the team understood and accepted this, so there was no reason to envy another's man's statistics if you were doing your job well because you knew your contributions were fully appreciated, too. Our payroll reflected that appreciation.
I had another policy regarding contracts, and I think this is important today. A contract, I'd tell my players, is a two-way deal. If a player got hurt, I'd continue to pay him. But if he had a super season, that was a plus for me. I never wanted to hear talk about renegotiating upward after a good season, then why shouldn't he be willing to renegotiate downward after a bad one. But suggest that to a ballplayer or an agent and you'll get horrified looks.
So just before signing any contract, I'd look across the desk and say: "Are you sure you're satisfied? Be certain, because I intend to honor my end of this agreement and I expect you to honor your end, too."
Now, some kids are guaranteed lifetime security before they do anything to help their clubs. That's ridiculous. We've created a system that works against motivation, desire and discipline.
But I still think a smart coach can stress these values today if he presents them properly. Every athlete loves to win, even the ones with millions of dollars in the bank. There's no substitute for the joy and fulfillment that come with winning.
But wanting to win isn't sufficient. You must know how to win.
And the answer is the same as always. It lies in the old-fashioned values like pride and integrity. And teamwork.
They still work, and they're the surest route to success in basketball or any other business.
CHAPTER 2
Darkness Before Dawn
Over the course of his storied 40-year run as commissioner, David Stern liked to take measure of his league's ascendant prosperity by recalling a more troubled time when, as he said on many occasions, much of America viewed the N.B.A. as "too black and drug-infested."
That loaded assessment peaked in 1980 when the Los Angeles Times reported estimates of "40 to 75 percent" of the league's players were cocaine users or abusers. No doubt drug-use was fairly common around the league, but as several astute players of the day confided to me, then a young reporter for the New York Post: What was so different about them from other young professionals with disposable income?
Simon Gourdine, then the league's outgoing deputy commissioner and its highest-ranking black official, laid bare the underlying bias.
"Seventy-five percent happens to be the proportion of blacks in the N.B.A.," he told The Times's Jane Gross in a 1981 interview. "If someone chose to, they could have concluded that 100 percent of the black players were involved with drugs. Any time there are social problems like drugs and alcohol, the perception is that it's black players involved."
White stars were already increasingly rare. In a couple of markets, there were no white players at all. In October 1979, the Knicks broke training camp with their first all-black roster, prompting a request from my Post editor to write about it in depth. Sonny Werblin, the president of Madison Square Garden, contributed a quote that would, within a few years, sound quite prescient.
"Are there people who are upset by that?" he said. "Why, certainly. There are bigots in every walk of life. Even so, I haven't received one phone call or letter — not one — about the team being all-black. Perhaps in some other cities it might be a factor. I would think in a city like Boston it would be."
But not to worry, Mr. Auerbach, suddenly forced to fill Boston Garden for the first time in order to compete for talent in the nascent era of free agency. A hick from French Lick was on his way.
OCT. 25, 1979 About the All-Black Knicks by Dave Anderson
To anyone aware of the racial mix of the National Basketball Association in recent years, it was inevitable that the Knicks would be an all-black team sooner or later. Now that it's happened, some white basketball aficionados in New York appear surprised or offended, or both. That's only natural. Race, like sex and religion, inspires an awareness in virtually everybody whenever there is change. For the Knicks to comprise all black players indeed is change. Not a drastic change, however. During recent seasons the Knicks' white players were benchwarmers. Even so, some white Knick followers suddenly are annoyed, some black Knick loyalists suddenly are proud. But those are strictly short-term reactions. For the long-term, the game is bigger than the genes. Pro basketball at Madison Square Garden will depend on the success of the Knicks as a team, not on the racial makeup of the roster.
Some of those offended by the all-black roster have been quick to use that as the reason for the Knicks' small crowds in three of their four Garden games this season. But that's a false argument.
True, the crowd of 7,911 that the Knicks announced Tuesday night during their 136–112 victory over the Indiana Pacers was their lowest in the 111/2-year history of the new Garden; the previous low had been 8,373 for the previous Tuesday night game with the Houston Rockets. And the Knicks had attracted only 10,798 for their season opener against the Washington Bullets on a Saturday night.
But last Saturday night they drew 16,900 against the Philadelphia 76ers with Julius Erving.
The Season-Ticket Situation
True, the Knicks' sale of season tickets has dwindled to about 6,500, a drop of about 1,600 from last season, after the team failed to qualify for the playoffs for the third time in the last four years. But the primary reason for the drop was the Knicks' fourth-place finish in the Atlantic Division last season. Those 1,600 season tickets had been abandoned long before the all-black roster developed.
In their glory years, the Knicks once sold a high of about 13,000 season tickets. Those teams had two white forwards whom white followers could identify with, Bill Bradley and Dave DeBusschere, but those 1973 and 1970 teams also had more blacks than whites.
Three of those blacks — Willis Reed, Walt Frazier and Earl Monroe — were folk heroes along with Bradley and DeBusschere, the five symbols of success and style that all Knick followers still cling to. But in those years, none of those five were thought of as black or white. They were thought of simply as a winning team, as basketball players should be. If the current Knicks eventually are thought of as a winning team, virtually no one will be concerned that they're all black. They'll simply be folk heroes. But now Coach Red Holzman is the only link to those glory years. None of the new young Knicks has accomplished enough to be acclaimed yet. Except for an unusual rookie, such as Larry Bird of the Boston Celtics and Earvin (Magic) Johnson of the Los Angeles Lakers, new young names never sell tickets. That is the Knicks' problem now — new names and new hope for success without a superstar.
(Continues…)
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