Miller's "Air Ball" rims out, but entertaining nonetheless

Louisville attorney J. Bruce Miller has written and published a book entitled Air Ball, which purports to provide an “unvarnished” account of Louisville’s failure to acquire a National Basketball Association franchise and join the ranks of big league sports towns.

Miller believes that his efforts during 1999, 2001 and 2002 came to naught at the hands of Louisville’s ingrained, business-as-usual mentality, and he fears that the experience confirms a fear-laden preference for the lowest common denominator that dooms the city to a “grey twilight” of mediocrity.

Stripped of hyperbole and Miller’s unfortunate tendency to bracket the majority of his assertions with inspirational quotes lifted from the lives of famous, dead white men, his oft-repeated thesis is relatively simple: The presence of an NBA franchise in Louisville would be indicative of the city’s economic power, as well as a precursor to rapidly expanding economic influence, an enhanced quality of life, and a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage (H. Hoover, 1928).

Along the way, some of Miller’s observations curiously echo those of Richard Florida in his Rise of the Creative Class, but not at all because Florida shares Miller’s belief in the transformational economic power of professional basketball.

For instance, explaining why the presence of the University of Louisville’s high-powered NCAA basketball program does not provide a truly big-league option for the city’s new youthful professionals, Miller notes that the sports loyalties of these productive young business people, who are accustomed to moving from city to city, tend more towards the cosmopolitan NBA than to the regionally embedded rooting interests of university teams.

Certainly Florida would respond that the members of his “creative class” aren’t interested in being spectators and would prefer the availability of Louisville’s Extreme Sports park (itself brought about by one of Miller’s villains, former mayor Dave Armstrong).

While differences in perspective are a given coming from two figures who are poles apart in methodology and intent, it should be noted that both Miller and Florida are attempting to analyze the behavioral interests of a certain socio-economic demographic, with a goal of understanding what appeals to it, and further predicating that a city providing a quantifiable piece of that appeal stands to advance economically.

It's the money, stupid.

Apart from a handful of brief forays into such matters, Miller remains focused on money throughout Air Ball. He is especially fond of reminding the reader that the combined economic weight of the NBA’s member cities comprises the world’s second-largest economy.

Of course, the same might be said of cities hosting pro baseball or football teams, but Miller is forced to sidestep such comparisons by conceding the fatally close territorial proximity of the Cincinnati Reds (in baseball) and an analogous regional concentration of football teams in Cincinnati, Nashville and Indianapolis.

The fundamental reason for Miller’s exclusive focus on basketball as Louisville’s potential economic meta-generator is that it’s his longtime favorite sport, and the venerated, quasi-religious, obsessive gaming choice of Kentuckiana.

Therein lies the mythic applicability of basketball, but to Miller, the pre-basketball history of Kentucky sets the table for the subsequent role of basketball in the Commonwealth. Accordingly, he begins his story by delving into this history.

Enter the Baron.

We must recall that in Dino, Nick Tosches’s brilliant biography of Dean Martin, Tosches proposes to explain the whole of the 20th-century American experience through the tale of the fabled entertainer – and succeeds.

Likewise, but somewhat less successfully, Miller purports to discover all there is to know about Kentucky through the life and career of Adolph Rupp, the Baron, high priest of the basketball religion, who for better and worse defined the University of Kentucky’s basketball program for generations, and was lionized for his efforts by generations of rural squirrel brain eaters who lacked any better bet for a rooting interest in desperate, impoverished lives.

In Miller’s view, this adoration of Ruppian basketball prowess came to serve as the attainable substitute for mundane matters – better education, economic development and cultural advancement – that throughout Kentucky’s history have been neglected to the detriment of the state as a whole.

Significantly, the city of Louisville traditionally stood somewhat outside such futile trends by virtue of its position as a river port, as home to immigrants, and its subsequent industrialization patterns. Louisville became Kentucky’s economic, social and cultural engine – and, predictably, a favorite target for the state’s impoverished, disaffected rural cadres.

According to Miller, Adolph Rupp’s symbiotic identification with Kentucky’s anti-intellectual rural ethos forged a symbolic importance that came to extend far beyond basketball, manifesting the characteristics of an evangelical religion, with Rupp as avatar of a philosophy and worldview identified as Kentuckyism – one viewed by the born and bred Louisvillian Miller as a dangerous and detrimental malady.

It is an envious illness that espouses a spiteful predisposition to detest the city and all things urban, opting instead for a mystical appreciation of the “us against them” virtues of Ruppian struggle – contempt for the outside world, skepticism of education, reliance on one’s own Sisyphusian hard work, and the ceaseless repetition of the virtuous but largely meaningless mantras of sports.

Rupp and the yokels ruled for decades, but with the Baron growing older and the flood of the 1960’s-era social upheaval lapping against the boundaries of the Commonwealth, cracks in the façade of anti-urban sentiment begin to appear, not least among them the racial integration of college sports in the Old South … and then, with Rupp’s carefully structured Old World Order springing leaks throughout, the unthinkable occurred.

Integrated pro basketball came to Louisville, not as member of the NBA, but in the form of the Kentucky Colonels of the insurgent American Basketball Association, formed to break the NBA’s monopoly on the professional game.

The arrival of the Colonels was made possible largely through the enthusiasm and hard work of an inaugural generation of young, wealthy, forward-thinking Louisvillians, including Miller himself, future governor John Y. Brown and the founders of what became the Humana health care empire.

Forcibly retired by the university, even Rupp briefly accepted employment with the Colonels as a front man of sorts (and, if we are to believe Miller, mellowing considerably prior to his death). By the attendance and fan support standards of the day, the ABA’s brand of pro basketball succeeded in Louisville, supposedly marking the city as ready for the NBA’s prime time, but when the league unraveled in 1976, a series of unfortunate circumstances conspired to deprive the Colonels of a rightful spot in the professional ranks.

Louisville’s exclusion from the “expansion” settlement set the stage for an inaugural, failed attempt in the late 1970’s to lure Buffalo’s team to Louisville, after which Miller bowed out of the NBA chase and concentrated on building his law firm, remarrying, and enjoying the obvious attributes of life in Louisville.

But he still felt the itch, and by virtue of his clients and friendships in the sporting world, closely followed events and trends.

A stopped clock again strikes.

By the late 1990’s, pro basketball was two decades dormant in Louisville, but the game in general and the NBA in particular had enjoyed transcendent success since the forgotten 1970’s milieu of the Colonels. Dr. Naismith’s game experienced an unprecedented growth spurt, gaining popularity second only to soccer throughout the world.

As the millennium approached, Kentucky-style basketball fervor gripped the planet, and having surveyed the local market and found it ready, Miller determined to act upon opportunities to transfer an existing NBA team to Louisville.

The contemporary odyssey thus began.

Miller located strategic allies in the political realm (the Governor and selected Aldermen) and the corridors of corporate Louisville – the natural habitat of a successful lawyer.

Tricon (now the atrociously re-named Yum! Brands) signed on for arena naming rights. Miller targeted a new, rising generation of progressive Louisvillians involved with mid-sized businesses (typified by Todd Blue), enlisted the editorial support of the Courier-Journal, and cast himself in the leadership role of elder statesman.

Over a three-year period, successive bids for the Houston Rockets, Vancouver Grizzlies and Charlotte Hornets were mounted by Miller’s “Pursuit Team.”

It seemed that momentum was gained with each effort, but in the end, all three failed. In Miller’s eyes, his quest was defeated by a coalition of anti-progressive Ruppians, the bizarrely apathetic and detached Mayor Dave, grandstanding small-pond politicos, the egotistical self-absorption of Tom Jurich, Rick Pitino and the University of Louisville, and unexpected poison-pen vitriol by the former Miller family confidant, sportswriter Billy Reed.

For Miller, the result was a colossal missed opportunity to elevate Louisville by providing a state-of-the-art downtown arena suitable not just for the NBA but also for concerts and conventions, and at favorable economic terms for the city; to implement the tax-base-expansive ripple effect of the NBA; and to reward the young business professionals who stood the most to benefit from Louisville’s place on a bigger stage.

Worst of all to Miller, the debacle brought unmitigated embarrassment to the city of Louisville, which yet again had flaunted its regressive dirty laundry for all the world to see and refused, kicking and screaming, to be dragged into the 21st century.

Making sense of Miller?

What are we to say about a book that chronicles the pursuit of an NBA franchise, yet is dedicated …

" … to the many who dared mighty things with no fear of the unknown, and were willing to embrace life’s inexorable change, all the while refusing to take rank with those timid souls who daily exist in the grey twilight, never experiencing either victory or defeat and who thrive in the warmth of mediocrity’s comfort zone that’s found in the middle of the herd. They are the Champions."

Alas, it is a limited sampling of champions, indeed.

Implicit in Air Ball is Miller’s assumption that his quest to bag an NBA franchise is gratefully supported by Louisville’s rank and file, and yet he fails to document any groundswell of support by the timid souls in the zone of mediocrity who quite frankly would be the ones expected to buy the majority of the seats to the tune of 15,000 paid attendance per home game.

The admittedly gripping tale of Miller’s “Pursuit Team” with its deadlines and sleepless nights seems tantamount to V. I. Lenin’s small, dedicated group of Bolshevik revolutionaries; neither Lenin nor Miller provides evidence of a mass movement, instead expressing confidence that they’re doing the right thing according to ineffable laws of economic determinism and a fast-paced running game.

The people will catch up later ... or else.

The reader is left with no doubt whatsoever that Miller knows everyone there is to know and dozens of others not worth the effort to meet, but his paeans to the otherworldly skills of fellow lawyers again point to a degree of detachment from real life on the ground.

Numerous times Miller remarks that an attorney or business chieftain would be as comfortable in a corner bar as a corporate boardroom, but none of them ever risk a trip back to Schnitzelburg for the working man’s beer. However, several corks are popped on bottles of Opus One wine, which is a brand you'll not find at Flabby's.

Is this leadership?

Miller thinks so, and it probably is in the limited sense that he works tirelessly within his socio-economic peer group to convince a sufficient number of fellow economic elites that they should spend a great deal of money to help another businessman come to town and seek major profits – and, to corral politicians to float bonds for an arena as part of the ride.

Certainly there would be a positive economic ripple effect from the presence of an NBA team, but the extent of this benefit has by no means been established by any study of which I’m aware. If it had, these opportunities would be as easy to diagram as a clean pick and roll. It hasn’t, so Miller sticks with the only play he has bothered to put on the chalkboard: Cities with NBA teams have strong economies, therefore, strong economies must have NBA teams.

Does Louisville need a state-of-the-art downtown arena? Absolutely. Perhaps the single most compelling statistic quoted by Miller in Air Ball is his reference to the outdated Freedom Hall’s abysmal ranking on the chart of top moneymaking arenas nationwide, which reflects the fact that major musical production (to name just one) do not come to Louisville. A downtown arena would boost convention traffic, host big-time shows, and serve as the lure for the NBA.

I commend Miller for his diagnosis of the Louisville area’s congenital backwardness, but in the end, his prescription of professional basketball as an economic cure-all simply doesn’t hold Gatorade.

I forgive Miller for erring because I appreciate his nobility of eccentricity, and because I understand that passion for things like basketball can do that to a man.

The Louisville metropolitan area needs many improvements, but as much as it hurts me to say it, NBA basketball isn’t one of them, at least not at this time, and I say this as a fervent fan of the league. The package of social, economic and cultural pre-conditions that interest us are bottom-up instigators of change, not top-down renderings of the Roman bread and circus.

Remember: J. Bruce Miller will be appearing at Destinations Booksellers on January 20.

Read Rick Bozich's story on Miller's book ...
http://www.courier-journal.com/cjsports/news2004/09/30/C1-boz0930-5413.html