I only had to cool my heels for a minute in Niles Lauritzen’s anteroom before Connie gave me the nod, but it was a minute richly spent contemplating the nape of Connie’s neck and assembling my thoughts for the meeting with her boss, the commissioner of the American Basketball Association.
Interestingly, I knew Connie’s neck a lot more intimately than I knew her boss. It’s an unwritten policy of mine to make friends with the secretaries of VIP’s because secretaries hold the keys to such vital information as whether the boss is really down the hall taking a leak or actually avoiding speaking to you, or who he has in the conference room and how long they’ve been in there, or what’s in the letter she just put in the mail to you. I don’t always take them to bed, of course, even when they want to be taken, but in Connie’s case it had been the natural outcome of a rather steamy party thrown for Howard Cosell at the Playboy Club. Short and compact, redheaded and introverted, Connie could never have passed for a Playboy bunny; but in bed she was every keyholder’s fantasy come true, and we carried on like goats for a couple of weeks before a long business trip put a natural punctuation to the affair. We had remained flirting friends, and now she was going with my best friend, Roy Lescade, a sportswriter for the New York Post.
The meeting with Lauritzen was not as pleasurable to think about, filled as it was with vast uncertainties, but it promised, ultimately, far greater rewards. I had met the commissioner on several social occasions and we’d hobnobbed amicably, but we’d had no real dealings, and why should we have had? My business, essentially, was with the owners, not the league. And even at that moment, in the case of Richie Sadler, the logical thing would have been to approach not the commissioner but Stanley Vreel, owner of the ABA’s Boston Bombers. But the stakes were not of the variety that dictated a logical approach; indeed, I was about to venture into a terra incognita whose topography defied logic. The only thing I had to guide me was the history of insanity in the negotiations over basketball stars’ salaries in the last ten years.
I was determined to be perfectly insane.
With an ironically courteous nod to Connie, I shouldered open the door to Lauritzen’s office and stepped into his intimidatingly spacious inner sanctum. It was decorated entirely in golds and reds, with ochre carpeting and tooled crimson leather seats, plush window hangings embroidered with fleurs-de-lis, and scrolled ormolu on everything but his Stenorette. Even the specially commissioned paintings of basketball scenes by Morton Kalish were done in reds and golds to fit in with the appointments. I felt like a clashing intrusion in my blue blazer, and I ruminated that such discomfort might be deliberately planned by the commissioner to keep visitors off-balance. Lending credence to this notion, the commissioner himself was attired in a suit and tie so perfectly coordinated with the decor that it was hard to believe he hadn’t brought a swatch of his carpet to his tailor.
I always felt a little odd in the presence of the commissioner anyway, simply because he was not the man you’d expect to find standing at the helm of a basketball federation. For one thing, he didn’t give the impression he’d ever played the game. He couldn’t have been more than 6-feet tall, was rather portly, and had the kind of doughy face you’d expect on a bank manager or shoe salesman. He also liked the distillate of corn mash more than a man in his position should, though he held his liquor well—and where I come from that’s considered a higher virtue than patriotism. Nonetheless, despite appearances he’d been an All-American at St. John’s and put in a couple of high-scoring years in the 1930s with the New York Celtics before drifting into college coaching, front-office work, a public relations position with the NBA, and, ultimately, “czar” of the ABA. And also despite appearances, he was a damn good czar, too. In the four years of his administration he’d managed to accomplish many things his predecessors had been unable to do, such as the imposition of the tightest clamp on pill-popping of any professional sport going. For that alone you had to take your hat off to him.
“Hello Dave,” he said, shaking my hand warmly and escorting me over to a gold-inlaid mahogany liquor cart.
“I think I’ll pass if it’s all right with you, sir.”
He looked offended for a moment, then clapped a hand to his forehead. “Oh hell, I forgot,” he said, looking embarrassed.
This was a reference to a segment of my life I’d just as soon forget, a two-year bat after my injury-forced retirement from football that is still, when I close my eyes and try to recall it, just a funky alcoholic haze filled with the blurry images of a wife and daughter and home and career all swept away in a river of bourbon.
“That’s all right,” I said. “It’s just that at 10 in the morning, coffee has infinitely more appeal to me.”
He buzzed Connie and ordered coffee for both of us. While we waited, Lauritzen asked, “Do you still like to be called ‘Lightning’?”
I shrugged. “I lost the nickname when I got out of football, but it seems to pop up now and then. I’m content with ‘Dave.’”
“I also remember when they called you ‘Sleeper.’”
I grinned. “That goes back some, to Fort Worth High. They dubbed me that because I was always surprising the opposition. I was just a shrimp then, but I could burn ‘em. I’d have kept the name too, but after graduation I started growing again, mostly in the arms and legs department. By the time I got to college there wasn’t any way I could pass for a sleeper.”
Connie brought in a silver coffee service. It flashed so brightly I had difficulty making out the rosy swells of her breasts as she stooped over in her low-cut blouse and placed the tray on the coffee table.
“Of course,” I said, stirring a spoonful of sugar into my cup and looking meaningfully at Lauritzen, “I’m still something of a sleeper in a few ways.”
“So I’ve been told.”
That got my curiosity up. “People think I’m worth talking about, do they?”
“Don’t sell yourself short. You’re considered one of the better agents in the field, Dave. The only person you don’t promote aggressively enough is yourself.”
“I come from plains settlers, Mr. Lauritzen. High visibility was considered bad form. Folks that stuck their heads up too high usually caught a Comanche arrow in the eye. My daddy told me to keep my head down and my pecker up—and that seems to have carried me through life pretty well.”
The commissioner brushed a silver sideburn with his index finger. “How does that apply to Richie Sadler’s career?”
“Ah, you know what I’m here for, then?”
“It wasn’t hard to guess. You were seen at Maxwell’s Plum with Richie on Friday night—or don’t you read Earl Wilson’s column? —and you call me first thing Monday morning to make an appointment with me second thing Monday morning. My only question is, what do you want with me? Your business is with Stanley Vreel up in Boston. He drafted Richie and it’s his money, if he wants to spend it.”
“No, you’re my main man, sir. It’s all going to come back to you anyway, because the price I’m asking can’t possibly be met by one club. In fact, I’m not sure it can be met by one nation.”
He smiled nervously. “But Richie does want to go with the ABA?”
“Naturally, I’m going to have to sound the NBA out too, and if they offer a billion dollars I suppose I’ll have to consider it. But Richie really does want to go with the ABA if you can meet his terms.”
His nervous smile became a nervous laugh. “Well at least I know you’re asking less than a billion dollars.”
He sipped his coffee silently and appeared to have sent his mind down the road a mile or two to guess what I was going to ask and how he was going to react. Then he dabbed at his mouth with a delicate linen napkin and said, “It would be silly for me to deny that the ABA wants Richie Sadler and wants him very badly. I think he could open the door to big television money, and beyond that, to merger. It would also be foolish for me to tell you we’re not prepared to subsidize his purchase by the Boston Bombers. But you have to understand that the league is not fundamentally a bank, and certainly not a gold mine. To subsidize any deal with Richie Sadler, I have to assess the other ABA owners, and they’ve been squeezed hard already by some other player acquisitions. So ...”
Lauritzen picked up a bronze paperweight that looked like, and probably was, an Olympic medal. “So, what kind of figure are we talking about?”
And now a strange thing happened. I’d rehearsed it in my mind all weekend. In my imagination I tossed the figure on the table as effortlessly as if it were petty cash. But now that it was time to say the damn thing out loud, I choked. I don’t think I’ve been so uptight since my first regular season game as a Dallas Cowboy, when on my first pattern I forgot to look in on a look-in and the pass hit me spang on the left buttock.
“Well,” I drawled, “there are a number of rather complicated devices aimed at amortizing the principal and reducing net taxable income, and I’m omitting for the sake of simplicity some fringe items such as a car and a home, which we can take up later. Then in addition there are such considerations as subsidiary rights... “
Lauritzen cleared his throat and my voice trailed off. “Dave, you’re a plain-talking man from Texas and I’m a plain-talking man from Queens, right?”
“Yes sir.”
“Well then, suppose you drop all this bullshit and just tell me what the bottom line is.”
I felt my cheeks redden. “You’re right, commissioner, I’ve been beating around the bush. But then, I’ve never been involved in a bush anywhere near this big.”
“I promise you I won’t have a coronary.”
I took a deep breath and exhaled it slowly. “Three million.”
If he flinched, I didn’t see it. He simply looked out the window, then turned and said, “For how long, thirty years?”
But to assure me that this was just a joke, he allowed something resembling a smile to trickle out of the corners of his mouth. A big contract did not look quite so imposing if it covered a long period. Julius Erving, a few years back, had signed a contract for over four million bucks, but some of that was an indemnity to a team he’d previously played for, and the rest covered an eight-year contract.
“No,” I said. “Two.” My heart was pounding furiously and my fingernails biting into the impeccable upholstery of my chair. Despite four spoonfuls of sugar in my coffee, my mouth was so dry I couldn’t manufacture enough spit to make a postage stamp stick.
“Three million dollars for a two-year contract,” Lauritzen repeated tonelessly. “How do you want that—in fives and tens?”
“A million-dollar bonus and the rest in salary, payable in convenient installments.”
“Can you think of a convenient way to pay out three million dollars?” Lauritzen asked. I think he had to keep joking to keep the enormity of the demand from crushing him.
“Look at it this way, commissioner. The box-office appeal of a million-dollar bonus baby will be irresistible. People who don’t know a hoop from a brass ring are going to swarm to the arenas out of sheer curiosity. Look at what happened when the Jets paid Joe Namath a $400,000 bonus. It was the biggest hype the American Football League ever pulled off. It led demonstrably to merger with the NFL. Now, I can’t swear Richie will do the same thing for basketball, but you know how close we are now. The television networks are leaning against the door, commissioner; all it’s gonna take is Richie Sadler to open it and they’ll come tumbling in around your feet.”
Lauritzen started to argue but I poured it on. “Another thing. With the merger of the two major basketball leagues, the salary war will come to a halt. You’ll easily make up the money paid for Richie with savings on all those other salaries and reductions of bonuses when things stabilize. You’ll be putting millions back in the pockets of the owners. Not that I think that’s such a terrific notion, mind you...”
“You’re very glib, Dave, but you’re not facing the owners and telling them they’re going to be assessed several hundred thousand dollars apiece to pay for this Wunderkind. I’ll be lucky if I escape with my scalp intact. Is there at least a little ‘give’ in your price? Something negotiable I can hold out to the owners?”
“Uh-uh,” I said. “The only ‘give’ is Richie’s ‘take’—three million skins. The negotiable area is how the money will be paid out.”
Lauritzen leaned heavily against the wall and shook his head like a bear. “There’s only one way the money can be paid out, Dave.”
“How’s that?”
“Painfully.”