The Rise of the National Basketball Association

Notes

Notes Materials from the Joseph M. O’Brien Historical Resource Center, Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame are denoted as (JMOHRC). Minutes from BAA meetings are denoted as BAA, “League Minutes.” Other abbreviations used are NYT (New York Times), TSN (The Sporting News), and SI (Sports Illustrated). introduction 1. Philadelphia Warriors Arena News, Nov. 9, 1955, 3, lists such games at Lincoln High School. 2. James Murray, “A Trip for Ten Tall Men,” SI, Jan. 30, 1961, 53. 3. Charles Salzberg, From Set Shot to Slam Dunk: The Glory Days of Basketball in the Words of Those Played It (1987; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 212. The league has, to paraphrase an old Virginia Slims cigarette ad, “come a long way, baby!” Perhaps we could get Dick Vitale to intone this, since he is adept at infusing phrases with enthusiasm. 4. Of course, Mikan had the fortune—or the foresight, perhaps—of retiring just as the twenty-four-second rule debuted. He retired before the 1954–55 season (when the rule took effect) and then “un-retired” (just like later-day superman Michael Jordan) briefly for the 1955–56 season. The Minneapolis Lakers considered launching a children’s television show that would feature Mikan (JMOHRC, “NBA Bulletin #183,” May 7, 1951, Sid Hartman to Maurice Podoloff). 5. Norman Katkov, “Mr. Basketball, George Mikan,” Sport, March 1959, 48–49, 76–79. When dressed in civilian clothes, he looked more like Clark Kent, as personified by George Reeves, than Superman. 6. The NBA’s formative years occurred during a period of social ferment. Viewing the NBA from fifty or sixty years ago requires a different prism. America in the postwar era differed greatly from today. Americans were concerned about the Soviet Union, atomic weapons, teenage delinquents, and buying a house in the suburbs. The problems of a fledgling band of basketball players and owners probably didn’t “amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world,” as Humphrey Bogart intoned in Casablanca . Cold War tension affected sports. The Amateur Athletic Union and its Russian counterpart, hoping to stage a home-and-home set of basketball contests, faced bureaucratic scrutiny and obstruction. Sometimes, though, basketball transcended politics, as when a Russian coach asked visiting Americans to send film of Bob Cousy in action. People around the world wanted to see the Cooz. Since basketball was not America’s “national pastime,” it avoided much of the hyperbole surrounding baseball during the Cold War (“Russians’ Tour Barred,” NYT, Oct. 22, 1955, 17; “Ferris Disclaims Bid,” NYT, Oct. 8, 1955, 17; Ed Linn, “The Wonderful Wizard of Boston,” Sport, Jan. 1960, 52–60). 7. In the America of 1949, a New York Knickerbockers program could show a cartoon Baltimore Bullets player, decked with bandoliers, simultaneously dribbling a basketball while firing a shot at a cowardly opponent (not identified as a member of the Knicks, however). In the wake of the 2009 Gilbert Arenas incident (in which it was found that Arenas had unloaded firearms in his locker), such a program cover would render NBA officials aghast. On another Knickerbockers program cover, the cartoon showed a scantily clad young woman on the court, under the heading, “Freeze!” The two players and referee shown on the cover are perspiring, but the young lass appears to be shivering. Aside from the cultural gulf presented by the two programs, the BAA’s relative lack of popularity is reflected by the fact that both games were part of a doubleheader, with high school games filling the twin bill (New York Knickerbockers programs, Dec. 3, 1949, and Nov. 11, 1950). If you chose to lend your innocence, the 1950s was a poor time to do so, as the decade appears to have been filled with several “loss of innocence” events: college basketball point shaving, rock ’n’ roll payola, game show rigging, and U-2 (the spy plane, not Bono as a gleam in his father’s eye). Chapter 1. economics of Sports leagues 1. U.S. House, Antitrust Subcommittee, Committee on the Judiciary, Organized Professional Team Sports: Hearings before the Antitrust Subcommittee of the Committee on the Judiciary, serial no. 8, 85th Congress (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1957), 2896. 2. David Surdam, “What Brings Fans to the Ball Parks: Evidence from New York Yankees’ and Philadelphia Phillies’ Financial Records,” Journal of Economics 35 (2009): 41. 3. The standard deviation is .5/√ ⎯ N, where N is the number of games. The standard deviation is greatest for the 16...