Moses Malone, page 10
Daniels had been trying to sell the team since January 1974 and was intent on finding buyers who would keep the Stars in Salt Lake City.8 They had a loyal fan base, but without a television deal or significant corporate backing, it was difficult to find a buyer. One deal fell through, then another with the Collier group. Daniels had an agreement to sell the team to Snell and Lyle Johnson, two local businessmen, in June 1975, but that deal crumbled as well.9
The Baltimore Claws folded after three exhibition games in 1975, and the San Diego Sails followed in November. By mid-November, there were rumors that the Stars might not be able to make payroll. Later that month, Daniels met with the owners of the Spirits of St. Louis, another struggling franchise, about the possibility of combining the two teams and playing out the season in Salt Lake City. The merger was contingent on Daniels raising $600,000 from local businesses, which he was unable to do.10
The Stars had a game scheduled for December 2. Daniels showed up at the morning shootaround and told athletic trainer Bill Bean to call the players into the locker room. His eyes were bloodshot. “Obviously he’d been throwing down some sauce,” recalled Bean.11 Daniels was heartbroken. He loved the team and had done everything he could to save it. With tears in his eyes and a bottle of whisky in hand, he got right to the point. “Fellas, this is the saddest day of my life. I can’t pay you,” he said. “We’re closing the doors.”12
The players started cleaning out their lockers. Steve Green, a rookie out of Indiana University, bolted for the bank to cash his last check.13 Bean opened the storage locker for the players to take what they wanted. Moses and Goo Kennedy grabbed a shopping cart and loaded it with whatever they could find—jerseys, T-shirts, towels, basketballs.14 Nissalke and Del Harris were driving away from the arena when they spotted Moses hobbling down the street with a cast on his right foot, pushing the cart full of merchandise toward his hotel.15
League officials, including Donald Schupak, part owner of the Spirits, arranged for Moses, Boone, Green, and Denton to be sold to the Spirits. The Stars were the third ABA team to fold that season, and the Spirits and Squires were in danger of going under as well. The long-discussed ABA-NBA merger appeared to be imminent, and league officials hoped to improve the Spirits’ attendance and likelihood of joining the NBA with the addition of the Stars’ four most desirable players. The remainder of the Utah Stars were placed on waivers and could be claimed by any team.16
Moses was indignant about being shipped to St. Louis. “I’m a Utah Star, man,” he told reporters.17 His agent, Lee Fentress, contested the sale on legal grounds, arguing that Moses’s contract was nontransferable.18 Moses went home to Petersburg. The cast was removed from his foot, and he began shooting around and using the whirlpool at his old high school.19
Meanwhile, Fentress explored Malone’s options. He met with Simon Gourdine, the deputy commissioner of the NBA, and informed him of his belief that Moses’s sale to the Spirits breached the terms of his contract and was therefore invalid. He inquired as to whether there was a mechanism in place for Moses to join the NBA.20 No team had drafted his rights. The Pistons had attempted to select him in the fourth round of the 1975 draft but were prohibited by the league because Moses had not applied for a hardship exception.21
Gourdine explained that a couple of weeks earlier the NBA informed teams that they were considering a special draft for specific ABA players. The ABA was in trouble. Three teams had folded and there was speculation that more, perhaps even the entire league, would follow. There were a handful of players like Malone who had left school before their college class graduated but never applied for a hardship exception to the NBA. The league wanted to ensure that those players could join immediately if they became available. Fentress encouraged Gourdine to schedule a draft, and the deputy commissioner obliged.22
The NBA held a special draft on December 30. The New Orleans Jazz chose Malone as the first pick and surrendered their next available first-round pick in the NBA draft, which was in 1977, for his rights. Moses was one of five players selected, along with Mark Olberding of the Spurs, Mel Bennett of the Squires, Charlie Jordan of the Pacers, and Skip Wise, who had been cut by San Antonio and was not part of a team at the time.23
The Jazz were excited about the possibility of pairing Moses with flashy guard Pete Maravich. However, their rights to Malone were contingent upon him not being contractually obligated to an ABA team. ABA commissioner Dave DeBusschere condemned the special draft, calling the NBA “vultures,” and Spirits management assured the Jazz that they had a valid contract with Moses.24 New Orleans took them at their word and vowed not to sign Malone unless the Spirits folded.25 Other ABA teams contacted Spirits general manager Harry Weltman to see if he was interested in trading Moses, which he was not.26
Fentress worked out the contractual issues with St. Louis, and Moses began practicing with the team on January 8, 1976. The Spirits were the third iteration of one of the original ABA teams, the Houston Mavericks, which moved to North Carolina in 1969 to become the Carolina Cougars. Ozzie and Daniel Silna purchased the team in 1974 and relocated it to St. Louis as the Spirits. The team was essentially an expansion franchise in 1974–75, carrying over just three players from the Cougars, but made the playoffs despite only 32 wins. Then the Spirits knocked off the defending champion Nets in a shocking first-round upset.27
With the addition of Moses and his three Stars teammates, the Spirits had as much talent as any team in either league. Malone joined a frontcourt that included Marvin Barnes, Caldwell Jones, and M. L. Carr. At guard, the Spirits featured Ron Boone, Freddie Lewis, Don Chaney, and Mike D’Antoni. Rod Thorn was the coach, and Bob Costas, a young broadcaster fresh out of Syracuse University, called the games on radio.
Barnes was the most talented player on the Spirits. “I’ve been around a long time,” said reserve guard Barry Parkhill, “and when Marvin Barnes wanted to play, he was one of the greatest players I’ve ever laid eyes on.”28 The 6-foot-8-inch forward was selected second overall in the 1974 NBA draft out of Providence College but opted to play in the ABA, where he averaged 24 points, 15.6 rebounds, and nearly 2 blocks per game on his way to being named Rookie of the Year. He even outplayed the great Julius Erving at times in the Spirits’ playoff upset of the Nets.
Marvin was kind-hearted with a colorful personality. There’s a famous story about the time he refused to board a team flight scheduled to leave Louisville at 8:00 a.m. eastern time and arrive in St. Louis at 7:56 a.m. central time. “I ain’t getting on no time machine,” he said, and rented a car.29 Unfortunately, Marvin loved the streets more than the game. He started using drugs and hanging out with drug dealers during his second season. He told teammates he wanted to be a gangster.30 Legal trouble followed, and he began arriving late or completely missing team flights, practices, and games. The press called him “Bad News Barnes.”
Thorn tried to hold the club together, but it’s difficult for a unit to function when its most important player is unreliable. Plus, for all their talent, the Spirits’ roster was poorly constructed. The team had a lot of players who needed the ball and not enough facilitators, role players, or minutes to go around. St. Louis was 19-21 when Moses suited up for the first time against the Colonels on January 15. He scored 19 points in twenty minutes off the bench, which was impressive considering he had only participated in a few practices after missing several months of action with a broken foot. He scored 24 points and grabbed 15 rebounds in a rematch with the Colonels five nights later.
Moses wasn’t the same player during his tenure in St. Louis. He was fifteen to twenty pounds overweight after the injury and rusty from months of inaction.31 He played alongside a back-to-the-basket center in Caldwell Jones, forcing him to face up and put the ball on the floor, which wasn’t his strength. He looked lost offensively and committed a ghastly number of turnovers, as many as 13 in one game.32
Malone was generally coachable but could be stubborn and had a unique way of making it known when he wasn’t pleased. Thorn had the Spirits run through their plays during practice one day early in Moses’s tenure. There were about five plays, with variations on each of them. Moses was working with the second unit and kept screwing up the plays. Thorn informed the team that they would continue practicing until they did them correctly. Moses continued to make mistakes. Thorn realized that he was messing up on purpose and wasn’t going to stop. This went on for about thirty minutes. The coach had to figure out a way to end the exercise while saving face. He looked at his watch and said he had to leave for a meeting with the general manager. “It wasn’t anything malicious at all,” recalled Thorn. “It was just that ‘I don’t want to do this. This guy’s stupid enough to keep making us do this. Okay, we’ll see where this goes.’”33
Thorn had difficulty understanding Malone when he spoke, but the coach discovered during his short time with Moses that a sharp mind was behind the youngster’s detached demeanor. During a team flight from St. Louis to Virginia, Moses muttered something to Thorn that the coach couldn’t make out. A few minutes later, it dawned on Thorn. “Did you say ‘Princeton?’” he asked Moses. Malone nodded and laughed. He had pointed out that the plane was flying over Thorn’s hometown of Princeton, West Virginia. Thorn had no idea how Malone knew where he was from.34
The Spirits fired Thorn on January 30. The team had underperformed at 20-27, and management disapproved of his handling of Barnes. He was replaced by Joe Mullaney. Before Mullaney’s first game, he discussed the game plan in the locker room. While he was addressing the team, Moses stood up and walked away. Mullaney said, “Hey, Moses, what the hell? Where you going?”
Moses provided a one-word response: “Pee.”
“I think Joe Mullaney was thinking, Oh my god, I’ve been coaching 150 years, and no one’s ever done anything close,” recalled Steve Green. Malone’s teammates laughed. They knew he wasn’t trying to show the coach up. He just had his own way of doing things and was a man of few words.35 Spirits guard Don Chaney remembered Malone as “a young guy, very naive. He was looked upon almost as a renegade—different, wild and strange.” On another occasion, Malone was sucking on a Coke bottle [making whistling sounds] during one of Mullaney’s pregame talks. Mullaney said, “I can’t take it anymore” and walked out.36
The coach moved Moses and Freddie Lewis to the bench. It was a difficult transition for both men. Lewis was a four-time All-Star who won three championships and a playoff MVP award with the Pacers. Yet it was the second-year player, Malone, who repeatedly told Lewis to keep his head up. “Things would work out,” he said.37 Two factions were on the dysfunctional Spirits, one led by Bad News Barnes and another consisting of those devoted to their craft, like Lewis and Caldwell Jones. Moses gravitated toward the latter, growing particularly close with Jones, which Thorn believed demonstrated a great deal about his instincts and character.38
Moses’s play was inconsistent for the remainder of the season. Mullaney began starting him against bigger lineups and going with M. L. Carr as the starting forward alongside Barnes versus smaller teams. Malone worked himself back into shape and posted some 20-point, double-digit-rebound games but never really found his groove. He averaged 14.3 points and 9.6 rebounds in twenty-seven minutes over forty-three games with the Spirits.
Despite their immense talent, the Spirits finished 35-49 and failed to make the playoffs. It was essentially a lost year for Moses and the franchise. “That three months felt like three years, you know,” said Boone.39 The city of St. Louis failed to support the team. At a game against San Antonio, the announced attendance was 808 people at St. Louis Arena, which had a capacity of eighteen thousand. Broadcasters Bob Costas and Terry Stembridge counted the crowd for themselves and came up with a little over five hundred people. The Spirits averaged about three thousand fans per game.40
The Silna brothers explored relocating the team to Memphis, Tennessee; Hollywood, Florida; and Hartford, Connecticut, before announcing in late March that they’d reached an agreement to move to Salt Lake City for the 1976–77 season. The team would be renamed the Utah Rockies.41 The Spirits’ owners believed they had a better chance of joining the NBA with the team in Utah. “If you move into a Salt Lake City and 3,000 or 5,000 season tickets are sold, I can’t imagine the NBA not wanting to bring in a team to play a team with Ron Boone or a Caldwell Jones or a Moses Malone or a Marvin Barnes,” reasoned Donald Schupak, a Spirits minority owner.42
Schupak was incorrect. The NBA agreed to absorb four ABA teams, but the Spirits were not one of them. Moses would play for a new team in a different league for the 1976–77 season. It was just the beginning of his peripatetic journey through professional basketball.
10
Wandering Moses
Oscar Robertson scored 30 points while leading Crispus Attucks High School to the first Indiana state championship by an all-Black team, in March 1956. He and his teammates cut down the nets at Butler Fieldhouse, attended a small awards ceremony, then climbed onto the top of a red fire truck. It was tradition in the Hoosier state for the champions to take a victory lap around the squares in downtown Indianapolis.
The fire truck followed Mayor Clark’s limousine and police motorcycles. Several buses and cars joined the caravan, honking their horns and cheering. The motorcade made a lap around the fountains and statues of Civil War veterans at Monument Circle, then headed up Indiana Avenue and north on West Street. Robertson noticed something was wrong. They had veered off the parade route that led downtown through the heart of the city. Instead, the buses and cars headed toward the Black neighborhoods where people poured into the streets to celebrate. Robertson later discovered that city officials were concerned the players would start riots downtown.
Oscar’s teammates were euphoric celebrating with their family and friends. They remember the night fondly. Not Oscar—dejected, he left the celebration to return to his father’s home. That night has gnawed at him to this day.1
Robertson went on to become one of the most outstanding basketball players to ever step on a court, though his greatest legacy played out in a courtroom. “The Big O” was born in segregated Tennessee and raised in Ku Klux Klan–infested Indianapolis. He was called the N-word and had things thrown at him when his University of Cincinnati team played in North Carolina, and he was forced to find separate accommodations when the team traveled to Houston for an exhibition game. Robertson objected to a system in which NBA teams drafted kids out of college and owned their rights for the duration of their careers through the option clause.2
The NBA and ABA initially agreed to a merger in May 1970. The ABA had an antitrust lawsuit pending against the NBA, and the senior league, which was struggling financially, saw a merger as a way of avoiding the cost of litigation while raking in $1.25 million per year for ten years from each ABA team to join the league. The merger was ratified in 1971.3
The ABA gave players bargaining power and freedom of movement. If the leagues merged with the current draft and option clause in place, there would not be a free market for their services. The players association, with its president, Oscar Robertson, as the lead plaintiff, filed an antitrust lawsuit against the NBA to block the merger, abolish the draft, and eliminate the option clause, in a case known as Robertson v. National Basketball Association.4
The New York Times announced Robertson’s retirement on August 28, 1974, the day Moses signed with the Stars, though the case bearing his name continued.5 The NBA believed it had a losing position. It was a violation of the country’s antitrust laws to bind a player for life through a draft system with essentially no collective bargaining.6 The federal judge overseeing the case, Robert L. Carter of the Southern District of New York, strongly urged the two sides to reach a settlement in early 1976.7 The NBA coveted ABA stars like Julius Erving, David Thompson, and Artis Gilmore, as well as the end to the bidding wars and lawsuits with the ABA. The ABA owners, who had been hoping to merge since the league’s inception, were now desperate for a deal, with three teams folding and more on the verge.
Dave DeBusschere, who’d been hired in May 1975 as the seventh ABA commissioner, began intensive negotiations with NBA commissioner Larry O’Brien. The two men and their attorneys ironed out an agreement during NBA All-Star weekend in 1976, which was signed and filed with Judge Carter on April 12, 1976.8 The terms included a to-be-determined number of ABA teams joining the NBA and a plan for free agency. The free-agency process would be rolled out gradually. For the first five years, any team that signed a free agent would have to compensate the player’s old team with assets determined by the league. After five years, players could enter restricted free agency, with teams maintaining a right to match any contract offered to their player by another team. Finally, after ten years, there would be a pathway for players to become unrestricted free agents.9
The ABA folded the Virginia Squires in May 1976 after the team missed a league-mandated deadline to produce back salaries for their players and payments to the league.10 Just six ABA teams remained. In late April, DeBusschere presented the NBA with three alternative plans for a merger: One plan had the San Antonio Spurs, Denver Nuggets, Indiana Pacers, and New York Nets joining the NBA. Another plan included those four teams plus the Spirits of St. Louis, and a third option involved all six teams, the last of which being the Kentucky Colonels.11
Many NBA executives felt animosity toward the ABA. “I was an NBA loyalist and wanted to bury them,” said Milwaukee Bucks general manager Wayne Embry. “I hated the ball, everything. We thought they were making a mockery of the game.”12 The NBA knew the ABA was desperate and was able to dictate the terms of the deal.
