R.I.P. Connie Hawkins -- and a look at Roger's labor theory of basketball value.

I'm annoyed at having missed the news of Cornelius (Connie) Hawkins' death earlier in October.

The story of this Hall of Famer's life recalls an earlier time of college basketball corruption, one that had nothing to do with Hawkins, but nonetheless resulted in his blackballing. Then it was gambling, now it's pretend amateurism. The two eras cannot be compared in terms of money.

First a remembrance, followed by the repeat of an old column explaining why an inherent hypocrisy prevents me from enjoying college basketball, though in truth I seldom watch any games of any sort these days, pro or otherwise.

Connie Hawkins, New York City playground legend and Hoops Hall of Famer, dead at 75, by Frank Isola (New York Daily News)

Connie Hawkins, the Brooklyn playground legend who rose from the streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant to become a four-time NBA All-Star and gain induction into the basketball Hall of Fame, died on Friday the Phoenix Suns announced.

Hawkins was 75.

Nicknamed “The Hawk”, Hawkins was an athletic, offensive force who made a name for himself with his graceful and acrobatic moves long before anyone had ever heard of Julius “Dr. J” Erving and Michael Jordan.

"Someone said if I didn't break them (the laws of gravity), I was slow to obey them," Hawkins once told the Philadelphia Inquirer.

In this household, Rick Pitino's fall from grace was greeted with yawns. In 2011, this column appeared in the chain newspaper, and in 2014 I liberated it from behind the Hanson-Fried Pay Wall.

In our fast-moving world of ephemeral meaninglessness, some of the topical references have aged better than others, but the gist remains precisely the same: When it comes to the artful fiction of student athlete amateurism amid rampant, monopolistic and profiteering hypocrisy, college basketball is tops.

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A labor theory of basketball value.

Numerous sources agree that on average, Americans spend at least four hours a day watching television, and although three decades of competitive beer drinking have atrophied my basic math skills, I’m fully capable of calculating this amount to a weekly total of 28 hours and a yearly tally of 1,456, give or take a TV evangelist’s sermon or three.

In truth, it’s probably a lot more than that, and speaking personally, I can’t fathom it. Wasting one’s life watching television makes less sense than squandering valuable agitation time asleep. Both are better done when dead.

Reading and writing, or staring passively at someone else’s creative output, assuming “reality” TV can be “creative”?

Walking and biking, or another numbing episode of Two and a Half Men?

I’d rather mow grass or even put up hay bales than subject myself to Glee, American Idol or any show about comic book criminal forensics, and if refraining from these vapid intrusions, and avoiding the even more disgusting commercials accompanying them, means I’m missing out on a shared “cultural” experience, that’s fine by me. I’ll listen to Duke Ellington instead.

However, exceptions prove the rule. While spending nowhere close to 28 hours a week staring at the tube, I enjoy selected sporting events – a few baseball games in summer, and National Basketball Association (NBA) contests.

‘Round here, the merest mention of my preference for the NBA usually is enough to incite anguished howls from those with rooting interests in universities that many rabid fans have never visited, and couldn’t locate on a map even if map reading were a widely shared skill in Christina Aguilera’s America.

In my admittedly obtuse and distended world, colleges and universities are places where students go for an education, the overall contempt for which severely punishes our American battered work force in a time of increased global competitiveness.

Conversely, America’s (and recently, the world’s) finest basketball players are paid to play in the NBA, which functions vaguely as a market economy, with laborers remunerated in a manner somewhat commensurate with the wealth they assist in creating.

In the NBA, it’s all about the money – and refreshingly, not a single person involved ever bothers denying it.

In American college basketball, it’s also all about the money – and alarmingly, almost every person involved constantly denies it.

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As products competing for the entertainment dollar, sporting voyeurism in both the NBA and college hoops is a paying proposition. Fans pay to watch athletes play, and make no mistake: At both levels, without the presence of athletes out there actually playing basketball, no one would ever pay to attend. Remember this whenever college or pro basketball’s “cult of the coach” rears its pompous, idiotic head, because there have been no recorded instances of fans tithing for the privilege of watching Bob Knight or Phil Jackson bark instructions to an empty court.

Given that basketball players are the means of generating profit from nothing, a significant proportion of the money generated by NBA players comes back to them in the form or salaries and endorsements, and that’s as it should be, even if it took until recent times to rightly end the sort of artificially maintained monopoly/cartel at the professional level that merrily and deleteriously persists in college basketball to this precise moment.

In short, while the NBA is far from perfect, at least it’s free of hypocrisy.

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Meanwhile, in college basketball, a strikingly small percentage of the money generated by the players comes back to the players, not as pay, but in the form of scholarships and grants. Before Cards or Cats fans begin waving this bogus “free ride” statistic in my face, recall that NCAA Division One basketball players generate billions of dollars of revenue.

Yes, the players are lightly “paid” with wholesale-priced scholarships, representing what amounts to sweatshop wages in proportionate terms, as well as being “rewarded” with the opportunity to work more often than study. All of it is hypocritical and exploitative, and the system as currently constituted is to the detriment of higher education, as Murray Sperber concludes in his classic study, “Beer and Circus."

In the book, Sperber (who the iconic Knight understandably detests) charges that Big Time Universities knowingly entice students not with bang-for-the-buck learning, but with the siren’s lure of party culture and upper echelon NCAA athletics, hence the term “Beer and Circus,” which consciously echoes ancient Rome. Distracted by parties and ballgames, students hopefully fail to notice that their educational institutions fail to provide them a quality undergraduate education … and tuition never decreases.

In a nutshell, that’s why I can no longer watch college basketball. The sham is too much for this hardened cynic, even if every once in a while a school like Butler comes along to encourage us to giddily swallow the bait and get all touchy-feely about the alleged triumphs of amateurism, but wishing doesn’t make it so.

To maintain the populace’s preference for the fiction of student athlete amateurism amid the rampant, monopolistic and profiteering hypocrisy, why not institute a program of delayed gratification?

Take a percentage of the revenue generated annually by NCAA basketball (just think of the advertising monies generated by March Madness alone) and use it to pay the players according to an agreed upon wage scale -- but deferred, not until they graduate, or failing graduation, when they reach a certain age.

Until then, how ‘bout them Heat?

UPDATE: NBA reaches agreement to end "the greatest sports deal of all time."

I suppose it had to end some day, but there is a measure of sadness with the passing of a genuine, living link to the American Basketball Association -- not a player, but the "greatest sports deal of all time."

The Silna deal is dead; long may it wave.

The NBA Finally Puts An End To The Greatest Sports Deal Of All Time, by Monte Burke (Forbes)

The New York Times is reporting that the National Basketball Association has finally reached an agreement with Ozzie and Daniel Silna, two brothers who owned the Spirits of St. Louis, a former American Basketball Association franchise through which they had negotiated what became known as “the greatest sports deal of all time.”

My last reference to it here was on September 9, 2012. Here's the complete text:

I first became aware of this story many years ago, as relayed in "Loose Balls", Terry Pluto's wonderful oral history of the American Basketball association (see below).

No Team, No Ticket Sales, but Plenty of Cash; Former A.B.A. Owners Ozzie and Daniel Silna Earn Millions From N.B.A., Richard Sandomir (New York Times)

For years, it was an underappreciated wrinkle in the historic deal that merged the established National Basketball Association and the upstart American Basketball Association in 1976. The owners of the Spirits of St. Louis agreed to be paid a small fraction of the N.B.A.’s television money to comfort them for being cut out of joining the older league.

Their piece amounted to a sliver of the modest amount that CBS was paying the N.B.A. in those days. But if the share was small then, one particular term of the arrangement was attractive: the owners, Ozzie and Daniel Silna, would be paid the money every year in perpetuity, or as long as the N.B.A. existed.

The Spirits became a distant memory, even for people in St. Louis. But the N.B.A. has continued to exist quite nicely, meaning the Silnas’ haul has been substantial: $255 million and counting. But as sweet as the deal has been, the Silnas want more, and they have gone to court to get it.

"Loose Balls" remains essential reading.

Loose Balls: The Short Wild Life of the American Basketball Association is a sports book originally published in 1990 by Simon and Schuster. The book, a history of the original American Basketball Association, was written by sportswriter Terry Pluto, although much of his writing is limited to introductions and summaries of each season. Most of the dialogue is from former players, league executives, and journalists, among others.

Slick Leonard is a Hall of Famer, and the ABA was the real thing.

It is noteworthy that in Kelly Dwyer's homage to Slick Leonard, he establishes American Basketball Association context with a reference to Terry Pluto's Loose Balls, one of my favorite sports books ever.

For those of us who grew up with the rivalry between Leonard's Indiana Pacers and the nearby Kentucky Colonels, no introduction is necessary.

The Indy Star covers Leonard's Hall of Fame induction.

Slick Leonard is a Hall of Famer, by Kelly Dwyer (Ball Don't Lie)

It shouldn’t have to take a purchase of a book, or a move to his home state, to make you aware of the existence of one Bobby “Slick” Leonard, but sometimes you’re lucky enough to have the introduction forced upon you.

If you’ve read Terry Pluto’s “Loose Balls ,” there’s no doubt that the aside about the former Indiana Pacers coach captured your fascination. The images of the former NBA coaching washout that used to dribble the ball up and down the train tracks as an Indianan youth in years prior to downing “a few dozen beers” with players before putting them through the literal paces in practice the next day, screaming and yelling and eventually winning them over. Tilting at big man Mel Daniels while drawing a chalk line some three feet from the goal and telling him never to shoot outside of it. Railing at his players for calling each other racial slurs while still allowing them to (literally) bring western-style guns and holsters into the locker room to play cowboys and Indians. Making it mandatory that his players get together for a drink after the game, whether the tipple was “apple juice” or something stronger.

Also, winning those three ABA championships, the most in league history.

Here is how the ABA's Kentucky Colonels lead to the NBA and Donald Sterling, and it isn't pretty.

Bear with me. I'll begin with an article that isn't about sports, but opens with a look back at the scene almost 40 years ago when the Kentucky Colonels, owned by fried chicken magnate John Y. Brown (and his wife at the time, Ellie), won the team's only American Basketball Association championship against its arch rival, the Indiana Pacers.

A tale of three cities: Is Louisville keeping up with its neighbors to the north and south?, by David A. Mann (Louisville Business First)

It was May 22, 1975.

Perhaps the best of times.

A crowd of 16,622 filed into Freedom Hall that evening to watch the Kentucky Colonels host the Indiana Pacers for the fifth game of the 1975 American Basketball Association championship finals.

The Colonels were ahead 3-1 in the best-of-seven series going into that Thursday night affair and were looking to close the deal. A few nights earlier the team had traveled to Indianapolis only to be dealt a 94-86 loss.

Denied again. But not for much longer ...

 ... That night fans in Freedom Hall celebrated feverishly after the Colonels won a 110-105 win to claim their first and only ABA championship.

Team owner Ellie Brown and then-Gov. Julian Carroll took to mid-court for a trophy presentation. And the crowd roared for players including Dan Issel, Artis Gilmore and Louie Dampier ...

The ABA's "merger" with the NBA came a year later, and the Colonels were not part of it, primarily because the wheeling, dealing sleazebag Brown had other machinations in mind. Bizarrely, there are fewer than six degrees of separation between the long-dead Kentucky Colonels and currently besieged Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling, via a man named Irv Levin ... as illustrated here.

Clippers for Sale, and the Owner Who Was Desperate, by John Branch (New York Times)

 ... So, between meetings, (Levin) worked out a deal with John Y. Brown, the owner of the (Buffalo) Braves.

Brown had made his fortune by buying Kentucky Fried Chicken from Harland Sanders in the 1960s, turning it into one of the country’s top fast-food chains, then selling it. He then owned the A.B.A.’s Kentucky Colonels. With Coach Hubie Brown and players like Dan Issel and Artis Gilmore, they won the 1975 A.B.A. championship.

But rather than spending several million dollars to join the N.B.A., Brown had accepted $3 million from the league to fold the Colonels. The money had helped him buy the Braves.

The Braves made the playoffs three years in a row, from 1974 to 1976, under Coach Jack Ramsay with a roster that included Bob McAdoo, Randy Smith and Ernie DiGregorio.

But by 1978, after two years of hands-on ownership by Brown, they were losing and looking to move. Dallas, Miami, Birmingham, Ala., and Minneapolis were reported as possible destinations.

Levin and Brown had a brazen plan: Swap franchises. Brown would get the Celtics. Levin would get the Braves and move them immediately to San Diego. No money would change hands. The deal was announced on June 29, 1978.

Later, Sterling bought the Clippers from Levin, promised to keep the team in San Diego, and promptly moved it to Los Angeles, where he enjoyed exactly one winning season in his first 23 years at the helm, while making money hand over fist ... not unlike a slumlord.

Brown's career as a soulless huckster, ranging from disgusting franchised fast food to inept sports management -- and not to forget a thoroughly dismal term as governor of Kentucky -- has always repelled me, but in the context of the preceding, deals engineered by Brown (Colonels to Braves to Celtics), Levin (he made money off the Clippers sale, after all) and Sterling (a $13 million investment now is worth close to a billion) pale in comparison with the all-time champions, Ozzie and Daniel Silna, who quite literally have made money from nothing.

255 million reasons why this is the shrewdest deal in American sports history.

Pro basketball: "Undefeated: The Roger Brown Story."

Basketball season almost is back, and until Louisville gets its act together on finding a professional tenant for the soon-to-be-bankrupt Tricon Center (read: probably never, because this IS Louisville, after all), our closest NBA team in geographical terms remains the Indiana Pacers.

As I've mentioned here many times in the past, those of a certain age cannot think about the Pacers without recalling the Kentucky Colonels and the American Basketball Association of old. Those were the days, my friends.

I follow the Indy Cornrows blog for coverage of the Pacers. There is a wonderful post there about the late, great Roger Brown, and a documentary being filmed about him.

Check out the trailer for "Undefeated: The Roger Brown Story" which will help explain why I'm so excited about this project.

I cannot embed the video here, so follow the link to view it. Anyone for a field trip to Indy for a Pacers game some time this winter?

255 million reasons why this is the shrewdest deal in American sports history.

I first became aware of this story many years ago, as relayed in "Loose Balls", Terry Pluto's wonderful oral history of the American Basketball association (see below).

No Team, No Ticket Sales, but Plenty of Cash; Former A.B.A. Owners Ozzie and Daniel Silna Earn Millions From N.B.A., Richard Sandomir (New York Times)

For years, it was an underappreciated wrinkle in the historic deal that merged the established National Basketball Association and the upstart American Basketball Association in 1976. The owners of the Spirits of St. Louis agreed to be paid a small fraction of the N.B.A.’s television money to comfort them for being cut out of joining the older league.

Their piece amounted to a sliver of the modest amount that CBS was paying the N.B.A. in those days. But if the share was small then, one particular term of the arrangement was attractive: the owners, Ozzie and Daniel Silna, would be paid the money every year in perpetuity, or as long as the N.B.A. existed.

The Spirits became a distant memory, even for people in St. Louis. But the N.B.A. has continued to exist quite nicely, meaning the Silnas’ haul has been substantial: $255 million and counting. But as sweet as the deal has been, the Silnas want more, and they have gone to court to get it.

"Loose Balls" remains essential reading.

Loose Balls: The Short Wild Life of the American Basketball Association is a sports book originally published in 1990 by Simon and Schuster. The book, a history of the original American Basketball Association, was written by sportswriter Terry Pluto, although much of his writing is limited to introductions and summaries of each season. Most of the dialogue is from former players, league executives, and journalists, among others.

Remembering Wendell Ladner as the NBA playoffs commence.

The NBA playoffs have started, and as always, I'll be rooting for the former ABA teams who made it this year: Denver, Indiana and San Antonio. It made me think of the late Wendell Ladner, former Kentucky Colonel and New York Net, and the subject of this clip.

Kentucky Colonels of the ABA, and Chinese billionaires in the NBA?

Mrs. Confidential purchased the book for me as a Christmas present, and I'm slated to start reading soon.

Kentucky Colonels Event!

On Saturday, January 21 at 4 PM, Carmichael's is thrilled to host Gary P. West and Lloyd "Pink" Gardner, authors of the book Kentucky Colonels of the American Basketball Association: The Real Story of a Team Left Behind. Come hear the inside story of the Kentucky Colonels basketball team as only these two authors can tell it. Lloyd Gardner was trainer for the Colonels and Gary West a sportswriter and color commentator. They tell a fascinating story featuring dozens of colorful characters including owners, agents, and players associated with this legendary championship team. This event is free and open to all.

Note also this interesting post: Woah, Is This A J. Bruce Miller NBA Meltdown?, at The 'Ville Voice blog.

Finally, some relief: Real basketball begins today.

See if you can guess what I'll be doing today. It's craft beer and the NBA, with the only question being which Chinese carry-out joint is open?

NBA Kicks Off Shortened Season On Christmas Day, by Linda Wertheimer and Tom Goldman (NPR; includes link to audio) 

Men's professional basketball was on a long break because of the lockout. But on Christmas Day, the NBA season begins with a five-game package featuring exciting teams and glittering superstars. There's a rematch between defending champion Dallas and everyone's favorite team to hate — the Miam Heat.

Photo credit and an excellent remembrance at The History Rat blog